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Show Motherlunge a novel 68 I was skeptical, but the truth is, I had always trusted Pavia. And I didn't want to stop. "How's that?" I projected my voice over the sound of the horn. "There you go," she said as the Buick changed lanes ahead of us. "Well, everyone wants the same thing ultimately, right? A kid that's loved and well cared for, whatever happens? Wouldn't you want that?" I blinked, sighed, turned on the radio. I didn't need to say anything. She pointed a pointy-gloved index finger at her purse, which was resting on the car floor by my feet. "Check it out," she said. I reached down and pulled the purse onto my lap and unclasped the middle part. I put my hand in; I lifted up a dry mesh scalp. The white hair growing out of it fell down in flattened half-curls around my wrist. "It's a wig," Pavia said, looking at it out of the comer of her eye as she bit down on the candy cane. "I'm wearing it at the airport." I shook the thing as if to wake it up. "Okay," I said. I felt my jaw tightening up. I tried to imagine the good reason for a disguise. "But we're getting coffee first." It was a Saturday and at that early hour the traveling public was in sparse attendance at the airport. Pilots and flight attendants, color coordinated in crisp uniforms, strode three and four abreast down the wide concourses, their wheeled luggage thrumming behind them on the linoleum. I was tailing my sister, trying to see Pavia as the flight crews might: tall, dark haired, wearing a long coat and walking fast in high-heeled |