Nowhere but Home by Liza Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

cook. It’ll be fine. I’ve been not thinking about Everett Coburn for going on twenty years.
    I walk into Merry Carole’s salon with my plan. I open up the front door to the salon, and am met with country music, the hum of hair dryers, and gossip. As I’m pulling a butterscotch hard candy from the decorative bowl, it all screeches to a halt.
    â€œQUEEN ELIZABETH!” Fawn yells, coming around the front desk and diving into me with a hug. She has always been a big woman; her ability to take up space astounded me. Fawn’s ever changing hair color is now an orangey shade of red and cut in a diagonal razored style that should be reserved for teenagers. Her trendy clothes always one size too small and, as always, some version of a rhinestone cowboy boot on her feet. She hasn’t changed a bit. She pulls away from me and settles her eyes on mine.
    â€œGood to see you again,” I say, smiling.
    â€œOh, she is thin, Merry Carole. Just a slip of herself. You said you been feeding her?” Fawn talks as if I’m not there.
    â€œWe had a proper Sunday supper,” Merry Carole says, focusing on the hair she’s cutting.
    â€œYou’d think after working in all those fancy kitchens you would have bothered to eat some of it,” Fawn says, anxiously swiping my lifeless bangs out of my face.
    â€œI was working in all those fancy kitchens making food for other people,” I say.
    â€œLook at you,” Fawn says, her voice breathy.
    Fawn is my mother’s age and would like to think of herself as a maternal figure in our lives. But she’s too much like our mother to be anything close to maternal. Merry Carole and I play our parts anyway. While Fawn and my mother trolled the bar scene back in the day, like two peas in a pod, Yvonne Chapman was the happily married friend who finished out their tight trio. Momma and Fawn would lament their love lives while Yvonne endlessly doled out relationship advice to the hapless duo, trotting out her happy marriage like a prize pig. When Mom stayed away for days at a time, Fawn and Yvonne would always come by with a couple of Happy Meals, an apology, and the assurance that Mom was doing the best that she could . . . she really was. We took the food, but could never quite swallow the excuses. I don’t begrudge Fawn any of it. She wasn’t our mother. She chose not to have kids and is now happily married to a roughneck named Pete who works the oil rigs on the Coburn back forty. And Yvonne? Well, she made her bed.
    â€œI want to cook supper for you guys tonight if you can make it. All of you,” I say, hoping that the customers don’t think I mean them.
    â€œWe’d love that,” Merry Carole says, brushing the freshly cut hair from her customer’s shoulders.
    â€œPete and I are definitely in,” Fawn says.
    â€œIs Dee working today?” I ask, scanning the salon. Dee Finkel is my oldest friend in North Star. When I left I remember thinking how small her dreams were—she wanted to get married, have some kids, and work in a hair salon. I was going to set the world on fire. No, you go ahead and cut some old lady’s hair in some backwater in Texas Hill Country. What an epic jerk I was.
    â€œShe’s back in the shampoo room.” Merry Carole nods toward the back of the salon.
    â€œSix? Tonight?” Fawn says, trying to hammer out the details.
    â€œSounds perfect. Don’t bring a thing,” I say, walking toward the shampoo room.
    â€œI can’t wait!” Fawn says before launching into a diatribe about how worried she is about me.
    I walk into the shampoo room and see Dee pouring big gallons of shampoo into smaller bottles of shampoo that are next to the washing stations. She looks exactly the same.
    â€œDee Finkel, is that you?!” I say, walking toward her.
    â€œDee Finkel?” Dee asks, still focused on the shampoo. I stumble a bit, thinking she would welcome me