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actually darker than The Donald’s and painstakingly styled by my father. Every morning he started with a handful of thickening mousse.
    Then he pulled it strand by strand across the top of his head.
    Finally, he filled in with a spray designed to “Cover Your Bald Spot Instantly.” Maybe his shiny brown eyes and the swagger in his step took your attention away from the fake hair on his scalp, since he’d still managed to attract three ex-wives.
    “Is Mom going to the wedding?” Angela asked.
    I held my breath, the way I always did when my mother was mentioned in front of my father.
    “She’s the grandmother. Of course she is,” Mario said. “At least I think she is.”
    My father grabbed his cornicello . He really believed it Summer Blowout
    27
    warded off the evil eye. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said. “Back to business.”
    Tulia pushed the front door open. Her three kids came running in to hug their grandfather around the knees. Mack was wearing a red T-shirt over his bathing suit and carried a red toy train. Maggie and her doll were both dressed in blue sundresses. Myles and the wagon he was pulling were both yellow. I leaned over and whispered to Mario, “Is she actually color-coding her kids, do you think?”
    “Maybe. I’m surprised Dad didn’t try that with us, he’s such a control freak. I’d be the one in therapy, saying, ‘It all started because everybody but me got to be a primary color.’ ” Todd laughed, and he and Mario exchanged one of those married looks I vaguely remembered. “It would make a great memoir,” Todd said. “ I Was a Secondary Color: A Shocking Story of Sibling Abuse .”
    Tulia’s mother came in right behind her and headed for a chair. “Sorry,” Tulia said. “Mike had to work late, and I forgot it was Mom’s week for the meeting.”
    “No skin off my nose,” my father said. “They’ll be working here soon enough anyway.” He peeled the kids off him, and they headed over to the kiddie area.
    When people first meet us as a group, we probably should give them a diagram. Even then they might not be able to get us all straight. It’s just the way it is with big, messy families. I tell everybody to take notes—there might be a test later.
    It didn’t help that we all looked so much alike. My father’s children all had thick brown hair and pale skin, plus big eyes and, most of the time, big smiles. His ex-wives looked pretty much the same, except for the hair, which ran the gamut from gray to gold.
    Sometimes when I was explaining my family to people, I’d 28
    C L A I R E C O O K
    call my father’s ex-wives A, B, and C to simplify things. Mary, who was Angela’s, Mario’s, and my mother, was A. Tulia’s mother, Didi, was B. Linda, who was Sophia’s mother, was C.
    It also simplified things that, after a rocky transition from B to C that included some minor hair pulling, Didi and Linda worked in separate salons and went to the weekly meeting on alternate Fridays. My mother didn’t go at all. She lived a few towns away and had gone back to school to become a social worker as soon as she left my father, which was shortly after he started fooling around with Didi, his second wife-to-be.
    My father was looking particularly dapper these days. This probably meant his fourth ex-wife-to-be was somewhere in the wings. I just hoped if she ended up working for us, she at least knew how to give a decent haircut.
    “Now where were we?” my father asked.
    “Nowhere yet,” I said.
    “Angela,” my father said. “Sophia. I mean Bella. You’re a beautiful girl, but you have to learn to watch the big bocca talk.”
    “That would be mouth,” Mario whispered.
    I elbowed him.
    “How’re we doing in the moolah department, Toddy?” my father asked.
    “Not bad, Lucky, not bad at all,” Todd said. When it came to handling his father-in-law’s political incorrectness and annoying nicknames, he’d come a long way. “We’ve got most clients booking their next