The Weight of Feathers

Eugenie paused her fingers. Her free hand was full of makeup brushes, the bristles color-drenched.

Cluck grabbed the brushes out of her hands. “Where’s Margaux?”

“She never showed.”

“Again?”

“She has a new boyfriend. I don’t think she’s coming back. Not this run anyway.”

Lace followed him. She needed his word, for him to pronounce her forgiven, like a priest.

He felt her shadow cut across the light. “Sorry,” he said, half looking over his shoulder. “My flake cousin flaked again.” From across the yard, the sound of ripping fabric distracted him. It sounded thin, like the shantung or dupioni her mother wore to church on Easter Sunday. Old or expensive.

“Here.” He shoved the bouquet of makeup brushes into Lace’s hands. “Hold these for a minute, will ya?” He took off toward the Craftsman house.

With a bare foot, the pale-haired woman pushed a vinyl stool toward Lace. The sole was brown, like it had been painted. It was the only thing dark about the woman. She had a pinkish forehead, and hair blond as bean sprouts. Half the women here looked like her. Where had their gitana blood gone? Had they cast it out like el Diablo?

The other women, except for the redhead called Eugenie, had hair as black as Cluck’s. But even some of them were pale as whipped-up egg whites. Same with the men.

Cluck was one of the darker ones, his forearms like the lightest peels of jacaranda bark. It almost made her sorry for him. He had that wrecked hand, and he didn’t match his relatives. Even Lace’s family teased Leti and Reyna for being light-haired güeras.

“Do you want to sit?” the woman asked, her consonants sharpened by a French accent. Lace wondered if it was real or put-on. The Corbeaus had been in this country as long as the Palomas, cursing them and stealing their business.

She sat down. The vanity was crowded with pots of color and powder compacts. Blue and green glass bottles, clusters of pastel rhinestones, and canning jars of cotton balls filled any extra space.

An open bag of cake flour leaned against the mirror. Lace didn’t ask.

The makeup brushes looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since spring. Pastels tipped the eye shadow brushes. Face powder and blush stained the bigger ones. The smallest ones had been dyed red with lip color and violet with eyeliner.

Her hands opened and closed, wanting to fix them. Lace cleaned her own brushes after making up one cousin and before starting the next. Were these people trying to make each other sick? One eye infection, and the whole show would have it.

Lace dampened a few tissues with an open bottle of alcohol, and rubbed the makeup from each brush. Yes, these things had touched Corbeau skin, but they weren’t Corbeaus themselves. If she had to look at those stained brushes any longer, she’d throw them at somebody.

She turned each one over, pressing the color out until it wiped clean. The lip and eyeliner brushes were always the worst. She squeezed the color from the base of the bristles up through the tips, and her shoulders felt heavy with missing the other sirenas. These were things she did for them. Cleaning brushes. Rubbing color from bristles. Seeing each shade come off on the tissue like a streak of paint.

The blond woman looked over at the color-striped tissues. “You do makeup,” she said, not a question.

“No.” Lace put down the brushes.

“This is what you do, n’est-ce pas?”

“Not anymore,” Lace said.

“But you did.”

“But not anymore.”

The woman closed her eyes, showing Lace her face. “Will you paint me?”

“Do your makeup?” Lace asked.

The woman nodded, eyes still closed.

“You don’t know if I’m any good,” Lace said, stalling, trying to figure out if there were enough brushes and sponges here that she could fix the woman’s face without touching her skin. “What about Margaux?”