Kissing the Beehive Read Online Free PDF Page B

the night was ripe for reveries. Whatever, I came out of the trance and looked first at the girl, then my watch. "It's a quarter past nine."
    "Are you all right?" She had a sweet face, all concern.
    I looked at her and tried to smile. I didn't know what to say.

    "Did I ever tell you about the time I found the girl's body?"
    The person I loved most looked at me and smiled the smile I would remember on my deathbed.
    Her long brown hair fell in a perfect part over her shoulders and her thin nightgown had little birds on it.
    She shook her head. "That's one of the things I like about spending the night with you. In the morning you always tell me a story I never heard before."
    She was sixteen years old going on thirty. I reached across the table and caressed her cheek. She took my hand and kissed it.
    "It never ceases to amaze me you're my daughter."
    Cassandra Bayer frowned. "Why? What do you mean?"
    "I mean exactly that. How did your mother and I manage to hatch such a good kid? Your mom's lived a life that would make a nun blush. I've got more neuroses than Woody Allen. Yet here _you_ are -- solid, smart, funny . . .
    How'd it happen?"
    "Maybe my genes skipped a generation." She picked up the bottle of spooky black nail polish and went back to work on her thumb.
    "Can I paint my nails black after you?"
    She rolled her eyes and groaned. "So what about this body you found?"
    I got up and poured myself some more coffee. Without looking, she extended her cup to me. I filled it and looked at the top of her head. "I have a good idea: Why don't you shave your head and have DAD tattooed there? That would go with the nails and then I'd really know you loved me."
    "I know a girl who got a tattoo down below."
    "_What_? What'd she put there?"
    "A lightning bolt."
    I looked out the window, trying to absorb that one. "Cass, sometimes you tell me things that make me feel a hundred years old. I mean, I'm pretty hip for a guy my age, you've said so Page 15

    yourself. But if I went to bed with a woman and saw she had a tattoo there, I'd call the police."
    "I don't think you'd want to go to bed with _this_ girl, Dad. Her name is Spoon and the only thing she eats is lamb. It's some kind of new religion, like the Malda Vale."
    "What do Spoon's parents say about that?"
    She finished her thumb and screwed the cap back on the bottle. Her gestures were all so delicate and precise. "Are you going to tell me about the dead body or not?"
    "Okay. When I was fifteen, a bunch of us went down to the river to swim."
    "You _swam_ in the Hudson River? Dad, that place is _glowing_ with pollution!"
    "Yeah, well, I'd rather swim in a dirty river than tattoo my genitals!
    Anyway, it wasn't so bad back then; just a little smelly. But we didn't really go to swim. All the cool girls went there in their bikinis. Someone would have gotten beer, everybody'd be smoking Marlboros, there'd be a portable radio . .
    . WABC with Cousin Brucie. It was nice. I always think of it as the day of 'A Hard Day's Night.' I'll tell you why in a minute. Joe O'Brien and I were the first there."
    "Joe O'Brien -- your best friend who you once knocked out in a fight?"
    "That's the guy. Politics were rough back then. It was that kind of town. Everybody was tough or pretending to be. You could be best friends, but if the guy crossed you, _Bam_! you'd be in a fight in a minute."
    Cass shook her head. "Nice place to grow up."
    "It _was_ a nice place to grow up. It was innocent. We believed in loyalty, most of the girls were virgins. The music we listened to was about going steady, not eating someone's cancer. We could come and go as we pleased without worrying about being murdered in a drive-by. Girls weren't raped and no one carried a gun. Well, _almost_ no one."
    "I bet Frannie McCabe did. Is this a Frannie story?"
    "No, and he never forgave us for it. Frannie was the king of one-upmanship, but this turned out to be the biggest one-up in all our lives.
    "Anyway, Joe O'Brien and I got there