Read The Instant When Everything is Perfect for Free Online Page B

nose, wide blue eyes. Katherine is of that model, too, but her face is slightly wider than Dahlia’s, her skin not as smooth, her eyes smaller. But pretty. Pretty enough to be married, which she is not. Not even once.
     
    And there’s more to Katherine’s story, Sally knows that. But it’s Katherine’s to tell, not Sally’s to ask.
     
    “Are you okay, Mom?” Mia asks.
     
    Sally shrugs, opens her purse to look for a mint, scraping the soft bottom with her hands. “Darn it.”
     
    “What? What’s wrong?”
     
    Sally clicks her purse closed. “All I want is a mint.”
     
    Mia opens her purse and pulls out a rectangle tin of mints Sally can smell before Mia opens the box.
     
    “Here, Mom. This will wake you right up.” Sally takes a mint from the box and looks at Mia. Her oldest girl.
     
    None of the pictures of Mia with her high school dates that clutter Sally’s hallway—photos of junior proms and senior balls—elicit the oohs and aahs from Sally’s bridge friends. None of them say, “What a lovely girl” as they do when looking at photos of Katherine and Dahlia.
     
    Even now that Mia is a published author and has done readings at Monte Veda Books to a crowd full of Sally’s friends, the comments Sally gets about Mia are in regards to her brilliance and humor and work ethic. At first, the kind of compliments Mia received bothered Sally. She could feel her long dead mother Frona at her shoulder saying, “She’s an attractive girl. If we could just get her to shape up! And that dress, dear. It’s not appropriate for this venue. In front of all these people in cotton. My goodness.”
     
    Sally often has to shake her mother’s voice out of her head, even now, twenty years since Frona died of lung cancer. She can still feel the slice of her mother’s words when Sally came down to breakfast over fifty years ago. Sally was experiencing her one and only overweight period, an adolescent push toward flesh, her new woman’s body greedy for hips and breasts.
     
    Her mother untied her apron and stared at her, hissing, “Girls do not wear jeans. And certainly not with your hips!”
     
    Not only do her mother’s words still ring in her ear, but she can feel the way the stiff denim felt as she pushed the jeans down her plump butt and thighs, the tears in her throat as she tried not to cry.
     
    Even worse, in the past and sometimes, rarely, now, Frona’s vitriol slips out of Sally’s own mouth, leaving a bruising sentence in the air, one usually directed toward Mia. Frona would cringe at Mia’s hips in pants, and without meaning to or wanting to, Sally has said, “There’s got to be a way for you to lose weight,” and “If you could only get rid of a few pounds.”
     
    Sally wants to swallow down those words, take them back. She doesn’t know why she keeps hurting Mia this way, hurting this daughter who has always been with her. The daughter who is always there for her. It’s like Frona takes her over like a possessing spirit, uses Sally’s brain and mouth for an instant, and then vanishes, leaving Sally to deal with what remains
     
    And lately, Sally has felt a bruise on her heart for Mia, something she can’t really articulate, a sadness in her oldest daughter, feeling a pain that maybe Mia doesn’t even notice. Sally isn’t sure what could be wrong. Mia seems happy in her life, especially now that Lucien and all his issues are squared away. Ford is a lovely man, so there couldn’t be anything wrong with their marriage. But at times—in the car at an intersection or at a lunch in between salad and entrée—Sally bite back words before she begins to say something that might hurt Mia, might tell her more than she wants to know. Before Frona can come out of Sally’s mouth.
     
    Sally pats Mia’s knee again and looks up at the television set that flickers all day long in the waiting room. She knows that if she had to have one of her daughters as a mother, she’d pick Mia. In a