“You look an awful lot like a woman I was falling in love with named Mary Lambert.”
“I know that broad. Pretty gal, but a liar. I promise you I can be everything she was and lots of things she wasn’t.”
“Nice to know. Why’d you come?”
She winked. “To save your ass.”
“Thanks for that, but-”
“To tell you how sorry Mary Lambert was for lying to you, that it killed her inside to do it because she felt the same things you did, but that she had a job to do.”
“And you?”
“To ask that even if you can’t forgive Mary, to give me a chance.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
She smiled that smile of hers. “Well, then, you won’t mind if I stick around while you decide.”
“Where will you stay?”
“As close to you as you’ll let me.”
“That might be pretty close.”
“I’ll risk it.”
That summer, about a week before the grand opening party for Sunrise and Vine, I got one of those postcard invitations in the mail. It was for a showing of Sashi Bluntstone’s new work to be held at some gallery in Chelsea. The name of the show was “Art In Captivity” and I wanted to throw up. I had hoped that Max and Candy would have learned something from getting the shit scared out of them. That they might have grown up, but people don’t change. It was one of the harsh paradoxes in life that everybody dies, but not everybody grows up. Sashi was back to being the family ATM.
On the front of the invitation was a color reproduction of one of the paintings to be displayed, and on the back, above the invitation copy, was a small photo of Sashi. She looked utterly miserable. She always looked utterly miserable unless there was a beagle licking her face. I wondered if she wasn’t destined to die young. I wondered if a cold and random universe was any crueler than a God who had chosen this one time to say yes.
