Leave It to Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

skirt and navy slingbacks. With a few grunted curses and twenty minutes of frowns and finger snapping, he made me over from in-your-face vamp to staid-on-the-outside, sultry-on-the-inside secretarial assistant. He slicked my thick hair down with gel and pinned it up in a neat roll. He lightened the blush and the eyeshadow, but plumped up my lips to a lotus pout. In the back of the closet he found a tan faux-croc pocketbook with a metallic shoulder chain.
    “Voilà!” he whispered when he had adjusted the links for the pocketbook to hang just right against midhip. “Perfect! Smashing!”
    I looked in the spotty, thrift-store mirror above the mantel. Frankie had paled down my eyes, brows, cheeks, but given them clarity. I had dared to cast myself as mysterious, I’d thought I was playing in Frankie’s league, and he’d bounced me back to upstate reality. Clarity was the bond of give-and-take between us. Clarity, not love.
    He scoured my drawers for accessories, and came up with a shirt length of emerald silk, which he draped like a shawl around my shoulders. “What do you think?”
    “Do I need it?” DiMartinos do their thing with scarves. Shawls are exotic.
    Frankie twitched the silk piece this way and that for the right effect. “Green looks good on you. When you walk in, have the bloody thing frame your shoulders just like that,” he advised my speckled reflection in the mirror. “When you settle into your chair at the table, let it glide down on its own. You’re not thinking about clothes, that’s the main idea.”
    Because I’m thinking “Expiration date”? And what’s he thinking? Rhino horns and tiger balls?
    “Well,” he said, giving me the final once-over, “it’s in your hands now.”
    I caught the kiss he air-blew.
    Frankie slapped his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. “Shit! I’m all out. Meet me at L’Auberge? We shouldn’t both be late!”
    It’s in your hands now . I’d believed Frankie then. Maybe I still do. Success or failure’d been in my hands that evening. But the question I can’t stop asking myselfis, How had these hands come to belong to a DiMartino woman?
    An orphan doesn’t know how to ask, afraid of answers, and hopes instead for revelation. Ignorance isn’t bliss, but it keeps risky knowledge at bay. I never badgered Mama to tell me all she knew about my toddler days. Mama must have liked it that way too. She kept my origins simple: hippie backpacker from Fresno and Eurasian loverboy, both into smoking, dealing and stealing. She left my bio data minimal: some sort of police trouble my hippie birth mother had got herself into meant that the Gray Nuns in Devigaon village had had to take me in; one of the nuns had renamed me Faustine after a typhoon, but Mama’d changed it officially to Debby after Debbie Reynolds, her all-time favorite.
    It was in my hands. I didn’t want it to be in anyone else’s. This was a night I expected revelations. It would close on champagne and Frankie’s saying, one hand on mine, another on Baby’s, “Mama, she is the most important person in my life.”
    I was demanding acknowledgment, not a wedding ring.
    Frankie slipped out of the apartment. I didn’t stop him. From my window I heard Frankie slam the building’s outer door, then slip into his Flash walk, swiveling and strutting through the parking lot, leap into a silver Jaguar I didn’t know he owned and vanish around the block. I stayed at the window awhile, savoring the splintery roughness of the window frame, and the play of shadows cutting across the sidewalk. In the park the Dixieland band was doing a halfhearted job, but, thinking Tonight’s the big night, tonight Prince Flash will fit the glass slipper on the Foundling’s foot, I didn’t mind at all .
    By the time I made my teetery way on the slingbacks with the high heels and the pointy toes, an upscale crowd in a party mood was already clotting the sidewalk outside L’Auberge Phila, and the small open space around the