Page 49 of Brenna, Brat

“What in the hell do you want? I’m not converting or buying it,” a voice told me, a querulous, weak voice that I didn’t recognize.

“Are you Chic Cathay?” I asked back. No one answered, so I continued. “I’m Brenna Curran and I used to work for Alecta. She asked me to come by here and give you a message.”

The door swung open, revealing a dark interior hallway and a woman who might have been Chic. I wasn’t sure, though. I hadmet her only once, and while she’d obviously looked older than her pictures at those nineteen-eighties parties, she had also been dressed to the nines in an electric purple suit and matching coat that I’d recognized as her own creation. She’d had an amazing wig, too, a towering pile on her head that, along with her high heels, made her seem taller and regal.

She didn’t look that way now. She was tiny! She was so much smaller than I was, and I wasn’t the tallest Curran sister or even the second-tallest (that was Juliet and Grace, the two who deserved it the least). She was currently tying a scarf around her head but I could see white wisps of hair under it, and she wore a ratty, terrycloth robe and house slippers like my grandmother had sported when she’d been alive.

“I remember you,” she said. “You thought you were going to have a career in fashion. How’d that work out?” She cackled. “Not quite the cakewalk you expected, I bet.”

“I didn’t expect a cakewalk and it’s none of your business how it’s going.” I gave her the same stare that I’d employed with the rude woman at the grocery store who’d bothered Campbell, but it didn’t have any effect on Chic Cathay. She stared back and coughed without covering her mouth. “I was supposed to tell you that Alecta loves you. Goodbye.”

“She loves me? Horseshit,” Chic said. “Why are you really here? Why’d she give you this address?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “She said that she wanted me to give you a message and that if I did, you’d help me with my fashionlabel. Which I also knew was bull, because if you’re anything like her, you only care about yourself.”

Chic didn’t dispute that.

“Alecta is on her way to Laos,” I added. “She said she’s not coming back. She said that everything’s fine, and goodbye. Oh, she also said that she’ll behave herself and stay the course, but I don’t know what that means. Maybe she’s trying to tell you that she won’t be a drug dealer there, which is a good idea.”

Her mother looked at me for a moment. “I guess you should come in,” she told me, and I did. She was a rude little troll of a woman, but I was so interested to see her house that I couldn’t stop myself. And maybe, in the back of my mind, I was still hoping that she could at least give me some advice.

“All she did was tell me what an awful kid Alecta had been and how she’d caused so many problems for everyone, especially for her mother,” I told Campbell that night, a few hours after I’d left Chic Cathay. “It didn’t sound like she likes either of her daughters, not Alecta and not Dion’s mom, either. It sounds like she doesn’t like anyone and she’s living in that dark house and never going out. It smelled just like my former atelier in there.”

“I have some news about the atelier, but continue,” he said. He scooped the green peppers off my salad and ate them so I didn’t have to, and he gave me his cucumbers.

“Thank you. What’s the news?” I asked, but he told me that first he wanted to hear more about…he stopped.

“You know, I can’t say that name without smiling,” he said, and he did. He was more relaxed today, which made me very happy to see. “Go ahead and tell me all about the famous Chic Cathay.”

“Well, her house is a mess. You can see that it might have been nice at one point, but now it reminds me of my own mom’s house. You know, blank spaces where there used to be pictures, open areas where furniture should have been placed. My dad was the one who cleaned that out, but where did Chic’s stuff go? It’s nearly empty and it’s so dirty in there.” I considered. “Maybe she doesn’t have any money left.”

“Didn’t you tell me that Alecta had no business sense?”

“Alecta has no sense, full stop,” I corrected.

“Maybe the apple didn’t fall far. Why in the hell did she want you to go over there?”

I shook my head. “I still don’t really know. They’re not close at all, as far as I can tell, so why did she want me to say goodbye for her? And shock of all shocks, Chic didn’t suggest helping me with my business and she didn’t give me any advice except when she said my lack of progress is my own fault, that it ‘sucks to suck,’ and that she could tell from my shoes how unoriginal I am. These are a classic design! At least I’m not trying to cook in my fireplace.”

“She’s cooking food in her fireplace?”

“I think so, because there was a big pot sitting on the hearth. She said that she wasn’t, and maybe it was for laundry. There was clothing and sheets hung to dry all around the rooms.” I sighed. “I had really looked up to her. In the old pictures, she’sso glamorous, and you should read what people said about her designs. They thought she would go to New York or Paris and become internationally famous, not just big in Detroit. Instead, she got kind of stuck in her aesthetic and then she quit. She walked away from her atelier in the old gallery building and she never went back to it.”

“And speaking again of ateliers,” Campbell said, “you don’t have to worry about yours anymore.”

“What? You mean they fixed the roof?”

“That was never going to happen. I checked to see about any building permits pulled for repairs at that address, but it seems like nothing has been really worked on for thirty years. Beckett wrote to the landlord about the condition of your unit.”

“Beckett, my brother-in-law?”

“Same guy,” he confirmed. “We talked about it when we went to lunch, when I found out that he wants a blue tie for the wedding.”

“Blue is Juliet’s favorite color,” I said automatically. “What did he say in the letter?”

“He knows other magic words besides ‘money is no object,’ I guess. The landlord got back to him today, and if you want out of your lease, Beckett thinks it will be no problem now.”

“Really?”

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