Page 48 of Brenna, Brat

“Your real name is Ann Stanke,” I pointed out, because I had seen her tax documents.

“Will you go over there or not?” she asked loudly.

“Why?”

There was a long silence. “Remember how you wanted her to help you with designing stuff? Well, she will.”

This made no sense. “If I go over to your mom’s house as a favor to you, she’ll get involved in starting my label? What are you talking about?”

“I’ll send you her address. You need to give her a message,” she stated. “It’s to help her.”

“What? Why does she need help?” I asked, very confused. They didn’t get along, as far as I knew, and when had Alecta ever cared about anyone else? That question reminded me, suddenly, of when my sister Sophie had recently asked something vaguely similar about me…anyway, I’d never even heard Alecta talk much about her mother, except sometimes to brag about local celebrities who had been in their orbit due to Chic designing for them.

“I ran out of time to say something before I left, something important,” she told me.

“So text her.”

“I don’t know if she has a phone,” my former boss said, which could have seemed unbelievable except that I knew how Alecta operated. “If you stop by, you can talk to her about how to start your business and I’m sure that she’ll have a lot to say about her amazing experiences. She’s Chic Cathay, after all.” The words sounded a little bitter. “It’s, like, vital that she hears this from me.”

“You need me to relay a message that’s so important it has to be delivered in person,” I stated. “Alecta, that doesn’t make any—”

“Oh, they’re boarding my flight,” she interrupted, and I did hear some garbled noises that could have come from a loudspeaker. “You have to tell her.”

“Tell her what?” I snapped, exasperated. “You haven’t said what your important message is.”

“It’s, uh, that everything’s fine.”

“I’m not going over there to say—”

She cut me off again, and so help me, it was for the last time. “Tell her that everything’s fine, that I’ll behave myself, and I’m going to stay in Laos. It’s going to take so many hours to get there and you know how I don’t like sitting down, but at least it gives me more time to memorize the language. I’m so glad I was taking those lessons. I knew they’d come in handy!”

“You were learning to speak Lao?” The more she told me, the less I seemed to understand. “How long have you been planning this trip?”

She still didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. “See ya! Or, probably not, since I’m not coming back. Let her know, ok? Let her know that I said goodbye, and everything’s fine. I’m, uh, staying the course. I guess you should also say that I love her or something.”

“What does it mean that ‘everything’s fine?’ What course are you staying? And why are you moving to—”

She had hung up, and I seethed at my phone for a moment. As I did, she sent the address of her mom’s house. “What in the heck is going on?” I quickly typed back, but the message didn’t go through.

I stared at the screen and her last text. I recognized the street as part of the Palmer Woods neighborhood near the northern edge of the city, closer to where Campbell lived in the suburbs. If I wanted, I could go to Chic Cathay’s house and then continue right on to his, to drop off these dresses, trade cars, and maybemake dinner. We hadn’t really talked about how much time I could spend at his place, but he’d made references in the past to how he’d put in long hours at the Ghregg Bates Financial Group. I remembered him saying that it wasn’t just when he was at the office, that he kept working when he went home and also spent time on the weekends doing his job.

He would understand why I needed to be in his lower level so often. And the fact that he was there with me, well, that was a nice bonus because he was so nice. We were eating lunch together almost every day, and a lot of times we had dinner, too.

But about Alecta’s request…yes, I had plenty of other things that I needed to accomplish, but I had to admit that I was very curious to see how Chic Cathay lived. I also wanted to know the real reason that Alecta wanted me to go and see her, because it couldn’t have been only about that dumb message. Would Chic actually help me to become a fashion designer if I randomly arrived at her house and said that her daughter loved her?

That was hard to believe, and it was much more likely that Alecta had lied about it, just like she’d lied to me about making the lease payments on her car after it had been repossessed.At first, she’d said she had been great about keeping up with those and the problem was that the dealership was crooked.But then she’d finally admitted the truth: she hadn’t realized that she was on was a long-term schedule of remittances.She had sent in money a few times and then stopped, figuring that she’d done enough.

I very much doubted that she was moving to Laos for good, because she wouldn’t have been able to handle that in the long-term, either. It sounded a lot like the time last summer thatshe’d told Dion and me that she was joining a “group” that lived collectively and in harmony with nature in Montana. It had turned out to be a cult in a few dirty tents, and when the temperature had dropped below fifty at night, she’d come home to Detroit to sleep indoors. Shortly after that, she’d left for Oman where it was a lot warmer, and that hadn’t lasted either.

I must have come to a decision about where I was going without realizing it, because I had headed north on I-75 and then I exited on Seven Mile Road and went west. Chic Cathay lived on a beautiful street, as many were in this part of Detroit. I imagined what her house would look like: classic, because this was a fancy, old neighborhood, but I thought that she’d have some interesting touches of modernity or other quirks to make it a Chic creation. Like, maybe the landscaping would…

I slowed the car. Had Alecta had given me the right information? That was, of course, not a given, since she was the one who’d been paying taxes under her real name but also with the wrong social security number. But I had to believe that she’d know her mother’s address. This was the place? I stared at it. No, there were no interesting touches of modernity and there was no quirky landscaping; there was none of that, like, there were no plants except for one tree that looked dead to me. Yes, it was still early for things to have budded out, but it appeared to have been an evergreen, and now it wasn’t green at all. Neither was the grass that remained in what should have been a sweeping front yard. Besides a few patches of scraggly groundcover, it was mostly dirt.

And the house itself? You could see that once, it had been a showpiece of neo-Georgian architecture, but now it seemed neglected and more than a little sad. The window in the gable on the left side had apparently been broken, and it was boarded over. A keystone had fallen off above another window on the first floor and one of the pillars that supported the portico above the front door was cracked and listing at a noticeable angle. Really, there were a lot of noticeable, serious problems, and I bet there were even more you couldn’t see—like there might have been holes in the roof that you wouldn’t have known about unless someone sweet and helpful walked around up there for you.

And this was Chic’s house? Chic Cathay? I’d looked at so many pictures of her designs and the famous people wearing them. I’d studied shots of her at parties and events, always looking perfectly styled. This was how she lived?

Yes, it was entirely possible that Alecta had gotten it wrong, but I went to the front door and rang the bell. When I didn’t hear a noise coming from inside, I knocked, too, and then I did catch something.

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