Crazy For You (17 page)

Quinn glared at him. “What’s
that
supposed to mean? A long time ago you had thoughts? I can’t believe you’re going to just leave me like this.”

“Good night,” Nick said and slammed the door behind him.

“The hell it was,”
she yelled at him through the window in the door. When he didn’t yell anything back and just kept walking to his truck, she looked down at Katie who’d come to see what the commotion was about. “My hair,” she said to the dog. “He turned me down because of my hair.”

Katie cocked her head, a little nervous and clearly doubtful.

“I know, I’m not buying it, either,” Quinn said, but when Nick’s truck pulled away, she went to stare at herself in the hall mirror. So she still wore her hair the same as in high school. Big deal. Dumb excuse.

In the living room, Fleetwood Mac sang, “Go Your Own Way.”

“What are you, the fucking sound track?” Quinn said, and stomped in to punch off the stereo. So much for Nick’s taste in music.

“Quinn?” Joe called down from upstairs. “Do you have an extra toothbrush?”

“In the cabinet,” she snarled up at him and then went out to the kitchen and dialed Zoe’s number.

When her sister answered, Quinn said, “I think Mom’s gay.”

“What?”

“Our mother is a lesbian. Just a guess, but she and Edie have not been swapping recipes, they’ve been swapping tongues.”

“I’ll be damned.” In the background, Quinn could hear the rumble of Ben’s voice, and then Zoe’s voice, slightly muffled as she turned away to say, “No, nothing’s wrong.” When her voice came back clear, she sounded bemused. “How’s Dad?”

“I don’t think he’s caught on yet,” Quinn said. “He has, however, moved in with me.”

“Oh, God, Quinn, I’m sorry.” Ben’s voice rumbled again, and Zoe said, “I told you, there’s nothing wrong. Your mother-in-law’s a dyke, that’s all. Go away.”

Quinn heard Ben’s laugh over the phone, and then Zoe saying, “I’m not kidding, but I’ll never get the details if you don’t let me talk.” Then Zoe’s voice came back clear. “You know, you have to hand it to Mom, she’s not real focused, but she does tend to get what she wants.”

“Yes, and wouldn’t it have been an excellent idea for her to bring us up the same way?” Quinn started to pace, stretching the phone cord.

“You sound a little annoyed,” Zoe said. “I’m still not sure how I feel about this except that it’s a little weird to find out Mom has a sex life besides Dad, but then I imagine it was a little weird for her, too, after all these years. So when did she finally figure this out?”

“You don’t get it.” Quinn sat down on one of the counter stools, and Katie curled up at her feet, convinced Quinn wasn’t going to do anything rash for a while. “She says she’s wanted this for years.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, feeling vindicated by Zoe’s outrage. “Yeah, all that time she was shoving us down the straight and narrow and fetching and carrying for Dad, she had Aunt Edie on the side.”

“Do you know how many times she told me sex wasn’t necessary and I should stop chasing boys?” Zoe’s voice went edgy with betrayal. “And all this time I thought she was practicing what she preached, poor boring Mom.”

“Probably as many times as she told me I was smart for not having sex,” Quinn said. “I told her losing my virginity had been awful, and all she said was, ‘Well, that’s sex for you.’ She told me it was boring and you told me it was overrated, and between the two of you I’ve been settling because I thought that was all there was, and now I’m mad.”

“Shut up,” she heard Zoe‘ say, and then she said, “Not you, my husband, the comic. He says she was probably hoping we’d chase girls. I told you sex was overrated?”

“Several times. I couldn’t figure out why you kept going back for more, and I finally decided it was to drive Mom crazy.”

“It probably was,” Zoe said. “I didn’t really get the hang of it until I was almost thirty.” Ben said something in the background, and she said, “No, not you, but you’re good, too. Will you go away so I can have this conversation?”

“It was bad with Nick?” Quinn felt guilty for asking but she had to know.

“Not bad, just not that good,” Zoe said. “I was nineteen, what did I know? And God knows,
Mom
was no help.”

“Well, didn’t he know? I always had these huge fantasies about what great sex you were having on the couch.”

“Nick was nineteen, too,” Zoe said. “Most of what he knew, he’d figured out with me. The Quick and the Clueless, that was us. And all that time,
Mom
—”

“So great,” Quinn said. “So just great. You end up divorced, and I end up with one boring guy after another, and Mom gets a lifelong relationship with Dad
and
with Edie. I’m
annoyed
with her.”

“Imagine how Dad feels.”

“Right now, he’s chalking it up to menopause.”

“Oh, hell. Do you want me to come home?”

“And do what? Show Dad the closet Mom just peeked out of? He’d only look for a cable hookup.”

“You don’t sound so good.”

“I’m having a rough night.”
Your ex-husband just said no to me again.
“People are thwarting me.”

“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” Zoe said. “Go get whatever you want, Q. I did, finally, with Ben, and evidently Mom has, too. So can you.”

“I’ll remember that,” Quinn said. “Now tell everybody else to give it to me.”

“Hey, honey,” she called, looking weirdly like the late Princess Diana under her new blonde haircut. “Heard about your new house.”

Two of the women turned to see who had a new house while the third went on describing her argument with somebody. “And then
she
said—”

“Darla here?” Quinn asked as she made her way back to Darla’s station.

“Any minute.” Debbie sprayed the confection of champagne blonde hair she’d just raised to new heights in front of her. “How’s that, Come?”

Corrie Gerber’s wizened little face peered out from under a pile of frozen curls, looking like a mouse caught under a Baked Alaska. “Perfect, Debbie, just like always.”

“We try to please.” Debbie whipped the plastic apron off Corrie, brushing little bits of hair from her shoulders. “There you go, honey. You be careful on the way out. The floor gets slippery here.”

Corrie eased herself out of the chair and stood, not even five foot tall, checking the top of her head in the mirror. Over her shoulder, she caught sight of Quinn, who’d been trying hard not to stare at her, and said, “Heard about you. Went and dumped the coach and now you’re living in that old house out on Apple. What’s wrong with you, girl?”

“I’m a feminist,” Quinn said. “We get irrational urges.”

Darla blew in behind her, in such a tense hurry she was almost on top of Quinn before she said, “Whoa, what are you doing here? Hey, Corrie, looking good. Is my eleven-thirty here, Deb?”

“No,” Debbie said. “But then it’s Nella, so no big surprise. What’s with you? You’re wound today.”

“Work me in,” Quinn said to Darla. “I want a haircut.”

“Sure, what the hell. You could use a trim.” Darla waved her toward the chair, brittle as hell, and Quinn said, “You okay?”

“Later,” Darla said. “Trim, coming right up.”

“No,” Quinn said. “A cut. Cut it all off.”

All three of them turned to her.

“Honey, no, not that beautiful
hair,”
Debbie said.

“You turning into one of them lesbos?” Corrie said.

“Are you sure about this?” Darla asked.

“Yes,” Quinn said to all of them. “Lop it off.” She sat in Darla’s chair and skinned her hair back from her face. She looked like hell but she looked different.

“Well, not like that.” Darla smacked Quinn’s hand until she let go, and then fluffed her hair a little around her temples.

“Shave it off,” Quinn said.

“Something I should know about here?” Darla said.

Quinn looked in the mirror at Debbie and Corrie, listening avidly. “Later.”

Darla turned to them. “Anything else we can do for you, ladies?”

“Just lost her mind,” Corrie said and went tottering off to pay for her hair.

“I’ll just clean up my station,” Debbie said. “Won’t be in your way at all.”

“Yes, you will,” Darla said. “Give us ten minutes. Go get a Coke.”

Debbie got the same look on her face she used to get when Darla wouldn’t let her play with the big girls, and Quinn would have bet she was going to whine, “That’s not fair,” just as she had a thousand times while they were growing up. Instead, she sniffed and flounced off to the break room.

Darla pulled open her drawer and got out her scissors case. “Now give or I don’t cut.”

“Nick kissed me last night. A lot,” Quinn said and saw Darla smile behind her in the mirror, relaxing a little for the first time since she’d hit the shop.

“Excellent. Now explain the cut.”

“Then my father came in, and he used it as an excuse to just stop.” She clenched her teeth just thinking about it. “He just
stopped.”
Quinn met Darla’s eyes in the mirror. “I said, ‘Listen, I’ve changed,’ and he said, ‘You look the same,’ and when he was gone I looked in the mirror and I do. I wore my hair like this in high school. It was a little longer but just like this, parted in the middle. I want to be new and this will be one way to show
everybody
that I’ve changed, and I’m not going back. Cut it off.”

“Come on back,” Darla said. “I’ll hose you down and then we’ll do it.”

“Wait a minute,” Quinn said. “I forgot to ask. Did the earth move last night?”

Darla’s face was like stone in the mirror.

“Oh, just hell,” Quinn said. “What is
wrong
with them?”

“What’s wrong with us?” Darla said.

Their eyes met again in the mirror, and Quinn said, “Cut my hair. Cut it all off. Make it as different as possible. Make it so different I can’t ever go back to where I was before.”

Darla nodded. “You got it.”

“Not yet,” Quinn said. “But I’m going to.”

“Nick!” she said, smiling like a bank president. “It’s too early for the deposit.”

“Max’ll bring the deposit in later,” he said and watched her face light up. Jesus, Max had troubles. No wonder he’d been so cranky all morning. “I need some help here.”

“Of course.” Barbara switched off the light in her face and became Bank Barbie again. “What can I help you with?”

Nick cast a quick look around the bank but nobody seemed to be listening. He leaned forward, and Barbara leaned, too, evidently caught by his aura of conspiracy. “Quinn’s bank loan got turned down.”

She straightened. “It couldn’t have.”

“Shhhh,” he said, and she leaned forward again.

“It couldn’t have,” she whispered. “Her credit is good. Who told you that?”

“Quinn,” Nick said. “Could you look—”

“Wait here,” Barbara said and marched off.

His approval rating of Barbara shot up. Of course, what she was doing was entirely unethical, but it was in a good cause, Quinn’s cause. Not that he was involved with Quinn.

Nick leaned against the counter and solidified his noninvolvement while he waited. Quinn could be responsible for herself, but the refused loan thing seemed fishy, the kind of thing a friend would look into for another friend, and therefore not real involvement at all. He wasn’t anywhere near her, no touching, no thinking about her underwear—he thought about how soft the flannel of her shirt had been last night, how much softer she must have been under it, how she’d turned under him and tilted her hips and how he’d almost lost his mind—he was definitely not going near her again until this heat streak he was going through had passed.

Barbara came back, bright red spots high on her cheeks from what turned out to be outrage. “They changed her loan status,” she said. “They didn’t turn her down, they just asked for a twenty percent down payment. And she doesn’t have it.”

“Why’d they change it?”

Barbara leaned closer, her lips pressed together. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but they shouldn’t have done it, either. Her boss wrote a letter that said she was acting crazy, ‘unstable,’ he said.”

“Bill,” Nick said.

“No, her boss Robert Gloam,” Barbara said. “I saw the letter.”

“Yeah, but Bill put him up to it.” Nick’s last vestige of sympathy for Bill vanished. “How much is the down payment?”

“Fourteen,” Barbara said. “But she’d already put down seven.”

“I’d like to transfer some funds,” Nick said.

“To Quinn’s loan?” Barbara shook her head regretfully. “I can’t do it. It’s in her name and—”

“You want them to win?” Nick said.

Barbara bit her lip.

“She doesn’t deserve this,” Nick said.

Barbara thought for ten long seconds, and then she nodded. “You’re right, she doesn’t. Where do you want it transferred from?”

“I have some CDs in the safe deposit,” Nick said. “Nobody needs to know about this, okay?”

“This is really nice of you.” Barbara smiled at him approvingly, a bank teller’s smile, remote and uninvolved.

It was a relief after Quinn.

“You’re supposed to take care of your friends,” Nick said, and Barbara stopped.

“Yes, you are.” She looked at him with real warmth for the first time. “You certainly are.” “Right,” Nick said uneasily. Barbara beamed at him.