Outside Beauty by Cynthia Kadohata Read Free Book Online Page A

the kind of woman our mother had once described to us—a woman who was by turns plain and beautiful, depending on lighting, her mood, and the cosmic and whimsical forces of beauty. Our mother always said it took a special man to appreciate women like that as much as they should be appreciated. They were like the weather, our mother said. You never knew when they would turn beautiful.
    Lakey also said that she started crying during the ceremony. Everybody thought she was crying becauseshe was so happy, but she was really crying because she was so sad that Larry didn’t marry our mother. When Lakey got back from California, Mom asked her casually for details of the wedding, and then she never brought it up again.
    That night as we lay in our beds, Lakey started sobbing. We all clamored onto her bed. “What’s wrong?” Marilyn asked.
    Lakey reached for a tissue and blew her nose before saying, “Larry’s great-aunt told me that Mom called up Larry last week and told him she would marry him. And he said no because he was going to settle down with someone ready to settle down. Do you think it’s true?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. It made some sense. But I just couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever not want to marry my mother. I knew Larry used to want to marry her. If he used to want to, and he still loved her as he’d said, why wouldn’t he marry her, even if he was engaged to someone else? Shouldn’t you marry someone you still love? I didn’t say any of this out loud. We just sat in the dark. Finally, Lakey fell asleep, and we all got into our beds again.
    Then Maddie slipped into the bed with me, and I held her like a teddy bear. She wet the bed in the middle of the night, so I got up to change the sheets.She didn’t even wake up fully. But once I’d changed the sheets, I just stared at the dark ceiling. Somehow I knew it was true that my mother had called Larry to tell him she would marry him. So I cried that night too, but unlike Lakey, I cried quietly.
    Anyway, that was the end of my mother and Larry.
    As for the other fathers, they were there and not there. I wrote my own father now and then, and every so often I received a brief reply. He, too, had gotten married once a while back, but he divorced eight months later. Whether or not he was married mattered not a twit to my mother.
    Marilyn’s father lived in a suburb of Chicago. Sometimes she didn’t see Mack for weeks, and sometimes he stopped by every day. He wrote her letters all the time. Some of his letters were so long, Marilyn would never finish them. Marilyn said he wrote those letters when he was drunk. He spoke wistfully of the times we ate dinner out together, and he called us “the best family unit” he ever had. It seemed to me that it would take more than some dinners to create a family unit, but what did I know? As for Maddie’s father, we didn’t know for sure what was going on, so one night when our mother went out, we got to talking about it.

    We were playing Crazy Eights when Marilyn said, “Do you think Mr. Bronson has sued Mom for custody or threatened to or what?”
    â€œThe only way to find out is to find those papers the guy gave her at Larry’s,” I said. “I’ll bet they’re in her filing cabinet.”
    â€œBut it’s locked!” Lakey said.
    Maddie leaned forward and whispered, “I know where the key is.”
    Nobody spoke for a moment. Finally, Marilyn said, “How do you know?”
    â€œI saw her hiding something, and then later when she was in the bathroom, I checked what she was hiding.”
    â€œYou mean you could unlock the cabinet, like, right now?” I asked.
    Marilyn said, “There must be interesting stuff in there, or she wouldn’t lock it.”
    That was a good point. But I brought up another good point. “It wouldn’t be nice to look in it,” I