The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin Read Free Book Online Page B

pomme frite into her mouth. “From what you’ve told me about her, anyway.”
    Brian was thinking the same thing, having already felt certain echoes of Barbary Lane. “I invited her,” he said with a shrug. He liked Wren’s face in this light, the way her own glow fused with the room’s. “She said to join her for dessert.”
    â€œShe’s not that mobile, huh.”
    â€œYeah, but mostly I think she wanted to receive you at home.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œSort of a tradition for newcomers.”
    â€œNow you’re making me nervous.”
    He reached across the table to squeeze her small, well-manicured hand. His own hand was piebald with spots, most of them too freeform to be written off as freckles. Liver spots, his dad had called them, back when Brian was still in law school and the old man was feeling his age. Liver spots . There had to be a better term, something that invoked a life robustly lived. Steak spots? Burger spots?
    â€œDon’t worry about Mrs. Madrigal,” he told Wren. “She’ll get you, I promise.”
    â€œI feel like I’m meeting your mother,” she said.
    In a way, of course, she was. Not the mother who had died of cancer when he was barely thirty—the Irish housewife from Harrisburg who collected spoons from every state—but the mother who had surreptitiously given him a home in a new city when he was too strung out on women to notice. Anna had been his stealth mother.
    Wren fussed with the low neckline of her blue velvet dress. “You sure this outfit’s not too much?”
    â€œAre you kidding? It’s right on the nose. She was raised in a Nevada whorehouse.”
    Wren raised an eyebrow, but it was comically intended and more in curiosity than indignation. “And why have you never told me that?”
    He shrugged. “Thought I had.” The truth was, he thought he’d told her everything. He wanted to tell her everything. His new aim in life was to tell her everything. “She ran away when she was young,” he explained. “Sixteen.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Sort of an odd question, he thought. “If you were a boy who felt like a girl, would you want to grow up in that environment?”
    She pondered the issue for a moment. “Seems as good as any. Depends on the whorehouse, I guess.”
    Her cavalier tone made him smile.
    â€œSeriously, women as a rule are kinder than men. Sorry, babe, but you know it’s true. A kid like that would do much better in a whorehouse than . . . you know, a military academy.” She picked up another frite . “Did she have family there?”
    Brian sawed on a corner of his filet mignon. “Her mother was the madam.”
    Wren absorbed that for a moment. “Did she love her?”
    â€œDid who love whom?”
    â€œEither one. Mother or daughter. Son, whatever.”
    â€œNot for a long time. Maybe. Who the hell knows? They didn’t reunite until the seventies. Mona bumped into her on a bus to Reno and got a job answering phones at the Blue Moon. When she figured out their lineage, she brought the old lady back to Barbary Lane. Sorta forced the issue. It wouldn’t have happened if—”
    â€œWait! Bumped into the mother? The madam?”
    â€œYeah, the mother, the madam.” He knew this was bound to take a while, so he popped a morsel of steak into his mouth and chewed it.
    â€œAnd Mona was Anna’s daughter? The one who married the English lord and . . . passed away in England?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œSo she bumped into her own grandmother on the bus to Reno?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd reunited her with Anna, who used to be . . . Mona’s father.”
    â€œ Exactemente .”
    Wren tilted her head and widened her tigress eyes. “Jesus Christ, you people are complicated.” She reached out with the corner of her napkin and, delicately, did minor repairs