Aida sighs and gets off the bed. Her body weighs three tons. The rehearsal dinner dress sticks to her in the early summer heat. It is black and covered with bright-yellow sunflowers, like a tablecloth. It seems the role of a junior bridesmaid is to be humiliated so that the bride shines. In Las Vegas she will wear bikinis and cover-ups in lime green and hot pink. She will smell of baby oil and iodine, like the older girls at the beach. This idea makes Aida smile as she goes down the stairs, past all of her father’s ugly souvenirs.
The souvenirs are all they have left of him. When she was six, there was a blizzard and school got canceled. Her father went out to shovel the snow and died of a heart attack, just like that. Boom! No warning. To Aida, he is just Old Spice and Vitalis, a scratchy wool sailor’s uniform, a pile of worthless figurines and clocks and colorful money from faraway places. Sirens still make her feel like she can’t breathe. Snow days still make her sad.
“The Queen of Sheba,” her mother says. “Finally.”
Terry’s rehearsal dress is short and yellow with a matching bolero jacket. She looks like a jaundiced matador.
“You’re all wrinkled,” Aunt Connie says, disgusted.
Aida shrugs. Her great-grandmother, Mama Jo, pulls her aside and whispers harshly in her ear. “If those people bring any food into this house, don’t eat it. You hear me?”
“All right,” Aida promises.
Mama Jo pinches her arm. “Don’t eat it,” she says again.
People are gathering their matching purses—yellow, blue, red. They primp their hair and twirl their lipstick from their cylinders, the poppy and crimson and coral emerging.
“Let Aida wear some,” Aunt Gloria says.
“No!” her grandmother, Mama G, says. “She’s a little girl. She’ll look like a puttana!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aunt Gloria says, coming at Aida with her hot-pink lipstick wielded like a sword.
Aida steps back. No one wears this thick matte lipstick anymore. Girls her age wear plum-flavored lip gloss or Yardley Good Night Slicker all pale pink, almost white. “That’s okay,” she says.
But Aunt Gloria grabs her shoulders and holds her in place, then smears lipstick across her bottom lip. It’s oily and tastes like crayons.
“Do this,” Aunt Gloria tells her, and presses her own hot-pink lips together.
Aida does the same, miserable.
“Look at you,” Aunt Gloria says, grinning, her breath sour with cigarettes and Mama Jo’s homemade wine. “Your whole face opens right up.”
“Hey,” Aida says. “Any word from Cammie?”
“She called from Chicago,” Aunt Gloria says. “Who knows? She might just make it. You know she could have flown to Paris, France, with Howard Hughes but she said no, I got to go to my cousin Teresa’s wedding.”
Aida frowns. “But she’s afraid to fly, right?”
Already, Aunt Gloria has grown bored with her. She blinks her heavily mascaraed eyes and yells, “Terry! You need a little lipstick, honey.”
From somewhere in the distance, Aida hears a bell ring, muffled amid the shouting. She listens until she hears it again. Someone is at the door. Cammie, she thinks. She wants to open it, to see Cammie first. Maybe she can talk to her right away about leaving with her. Maybe they can make a plan.
Aida opens the front door and gasps. Standing right there, inches from her, is the boy in the white VW Bug. His nose is sunburned and he looks hot in his heavy blue jeans and army-green pocket T-shirt.
Immediately, Aida covers her mouth with its hot pink lips. She is meeting the second love of her life wearing an ugly dress covered with too-bright sunflowers and hot-pink old-lady lipstick. She considers closing the door and running upstairs. But it’s too late. The boy is talking. At least, his lips are moving but Aida seems to have gone deaf. She can’t hear anything except a buzzing in her ears.
The boy points to his car, which is parked on the sidewalk in front of their house, almost exactly in the spot where her father dropped dead.
Her hearing slowly returns. From behind her comes the sound of her mother yelling, “Is someone at the door?”
The boy is frowning at her. “Your phone? Okay?”
Somehow Aida makes sense of this. The car is broken down. He needs to call somebody.
Stupidly, she nods. She wants to tell him that she is not like the people he is about to meet. That she never wears ugly dresses with bright sunflowers or pink lipstick. I am not who you think, she screams in her head. But all she does is step aside and let the boy in. As he passes her, she catches a whiff of something familiar, but she cannot name it.
“Close the door!” her mother yells. “You’re letting the bugs in.”
Aida lets the screen door slam shut behind her. She sits on the front steps, trying not to cry.
“Get up!” Mama Jo yells through the window. “You’ll get piles sitting on the cement like that.”