Hanging by a Thread. Karen Templeton

shorter than something I’d let my five-year-old wear? Please. And let’s not go anywhere near the six-or eight-or fifteen-hundred-dollar handbags. You’re supposed to be afraid that somebody might steal what’s in your purse, not the purse itself. Or am I missing something here?

      So I wear old, cheap and/or free stuff. Mind you, having never harbored a secret desire to look like a bag lady, it’s old, good-looking cheap and/or free stuff. I do have, if I say so myself, a certain flair. For the ridiculous, perhaps, but at least nobody can accuse me of looking like everybody else.

      Or around here, like anybody else. Sorry, but I don’t do big hair.

      Anyway…by the time I read Starr the next chapter of Through the Looking Glass—interrupted a billion times by her pointing out words she recognized—and did two thorough monster sweeps of her room (there’s a big hairy purple one with a snotty nose and “sticky-outty” teeth who’s been a real pain in the butt lately) and tucked her in, it’s too late to eat, and my stomach is pitching five fits.

      My grandfather, who’s been vacuuming the downstairs rooms, glances up from winding the cord into a precise figure eight, over and over, around the upright’s handles. It drives me nuts when I use the machine after he does. I keep telling him, it takes twice as long to do it this way, why not just loop it around the handles and be done with it? All that matters is that it’s up and out of the way, right? But he insists it’s neater the way he does it, that’s the trouble with the world these days, nobody takes the time to do anything carefully.

      “You’re going out?” he says, hauling the Eureka out of the room.

      “Yeah.” I cram an angora beret over my hair, yelling out, “Just to Pinky’s for a bit. Tina asked me to meet her there.”

      Leo returns, plopping down into his favorite armchair and picking up the Nintendo controller. A second later, one of the Mario Brothers games blooms on the TV screen. The game system’s a hand-me-down from some Scardinare brother or other. Leo plays for hours, insisting it keeps his reflexes fine-tuned. “What’s up with her?”

      “Couldn’t tell ya.”

      He pauses the game to give me a more considering look, although I can’t really see his eyes through the sofa lamp’s glare off his glasses. But I can sure feel it. You have to understand, my grandfather is by no means some shriveled, sunken little old man. Still more than six feet tall, with a ramrod posture he expects everyone around him to emulate, even seated he’s an imposing figure. Age-loosened skin drapes gracefully around features too broad, too crude, to be called handsome, as though the sculptor had been in too much of a hurry to do much more than get the basics down. If he chose to be mean, he would be frightening. As it is, no mugger in his right mind would dare mess with him. Ironic considering that nobody’s a softer touch than Leo. I don’t dare take him into Manhattan—he’d be broke before he’d been off the train ten minutes, giving everything away to every panhandler he saw.

      “Did you eat?”

      “When I get back, I promise.” I cross the thickly-piled Oriental—in mostly blues and dark reds, to match the overstuffed Ethan Allen furniture my grandmother bought the year before she died—bending down to give him a kiss on his scratchy cheek. Heat purrs soothingly through the registers; the house smells like brisket and freshly washed clothes (there’s a basketful on the sofa, waiting for me to fold) and my grandfather’s spicy aftershave, and all I want to do is crash in my bedroom with a slab of meat large enough to feed Cleveland and watch one of my Jimmy Stewart movies. But instead I’m dragging my hungry, exhausted carcass back out into the bitter cold, because my friend needs me. Because I know Tina would do the same for me.

      And has, I think as I hike to the bar, braced against the wind.

      I mean, there was that time a couple years ago when we all came down with the flu—I’m talking near-death experience here, not your run-of-the-mill chills and fever crap—when Tina, despite an aversion to illness bordering on the obsessive, basically moved in, force-feeding the lot of us Lipton’s chicken noodle soup and ginger ale for two days and disposing of mountains of tissues like the Department of Sanitation clearing the streets after a blizzard.

      Or going back even further, to when we were fourteen and had lied to our families about going to Angie Mason’s for a sleepover. Instead we went to this party at Ryan O’Donnell’s (remind me to never believe anything my teenage child tells me, ever), where I, being basically stupid and having zip tolerance for alcohol, got so drunk I wanted to die. And Tina, who even then could hold her booze like a three-hundred pound sailor, and who also knew if I went home in that condition, I would die, hauled me into the john and forced me to puke, made coffee in Ryan’s kitchen, sat there with me while I drank it, and got me home, shaky but sober, by curfew.

      She was also there, at her insistence, when I told Dad and Leo I was going to have a baby.

      I push open the heavy wooden door to Pinky’s; hops-saturated steam heat rushes out to greet me like long-lost relatives, defrosting my contacts. Like most neighborhood bars, the decor runs primarily to neon beer signs, dark wood and linoleum. At eight on a weeknight, the place is nearly empty—two or three guys at the bar, staring morosely at the rows of bottles lined up in front of the mirror; a couple talking softly at one of the small tables in the center of the floor. As Madonna yodels from the not exactly au courant jukebox, I take off my hat and gloves, shoving them in my coat pockets as I blink, willing my eyes to adjust to the dim, albeit smoke-free these days, light.

      “Hey, Ellie, how’s it goin’?”

      My gaze sidles over to Jose, wiping down the bar. A year or so older than me, Jose’s been the night bartender here for the past couple of years. He’s got this whole pit bull thing going. Solid, you know? Not necessarily looking for a fight but up for one should the occasion present itself. In the summer, when he’s wearing a T-shirt, the tattoos are nothing if not impressive. The man on the stool closest to me bestirs himself long enough to give me the once-over. I give him a withering look, then pop out the dimples for Jose.

      “Pretty good,” I say, then ask about his wife and kids—they’re doin’ okay, thanks, he says—then I ask if he’s seen Tina.

      “Yeah, she came in a while ago. In the back. She looks like shit.”

      Hey. If you’re looking for diplomacy, steer clear of Pinky’s.

      I spot her in the booth farthest in the back, waving, so I grab a bowl of pretzels off the bar and head in her direction. Except the woman sitting at the table turns out to be Lisa Lamar, who sat next to me in half my classes all through high school and who will be forever after known as not only the first girl in our class to give a boy a blow job, but to pass on her newfound knowledge to a select few of us the following day. An act which solidified my standing in the ranks of the “cool” girls, which means I owe Lisa my life.

      So of course we have to do the thirty-second catch-up routine. Only thirty seconds stretches into a good two minutes while she introduces me to her date, some guy named Phil whose unibrow compensates for the receding hairline, then fills me in on Shelly Hurlburt’s parents’ divorce after thirty-six years, could I believe it? (actually, I could) and asks me if I know whatever happened to Melody McFadden’s cousin Sukie, who was supposed to marry that baseball player, whats-his-name (I don’t, but I tell her I’ll ask around, one of the Scardinare daughters-in-law probably knows). Then after noisy hugs and both of us swearing we’ve got to get together, soon, I continue back to Tina.

      Jose’s assessment was, unfortunately, not an exaggeration. Even in the murky light, she looks like holy hell.

      While neither of us is, or was, a raving beauty—at least not without a lot of help—Tina’s always had a knack for making the most of what she has. No taller than I am, and in no danger of being mistaken for an anorexic, either (we were known in high school as the Boobsey Twins), her eyes might be set too far apart and her nose could use a little work, but with enough lip gloss and a Wonderbra, who cares? And she’s the only woman I know who can actually get away with that cut-with-a-weedwhacker-hairstyle—it hides a narrow scar over her right ear from where her mother threw a bottle