Lilac Mines Read Online Free PDF Page B

book is facing out, the cover tight against her chest. “Things were slow at the store.”
    Suzy pulls the hat off her head. Her blonde-brown hair, previously prone to schoolgirl braids and the occasional Swiss Miss crown, now stops abruptly just below her ears. Hence the hat in the 95-degree heat. For the first time, Anna Lisa notices her sister’s delicate shoulders, the naive pout of her chin.
    â€œPlease don’t tell Mother and Daddy,” Suzy says.
    â€œAbout your hair or the boy? Because they’re going to notice the hair.”
    â€œAbout Kevin, obviously. Oh goodness, Nannalee, what am I going to do?” Anna Lisa hasn’t heard Suzy’s childhood nickname for her in years. She wants to melt into it, to protect Suzy from attic ghosts. But the girl in front of her is two severed braids away from Anna Lisa’s help. She’s suspected it since Suzy graduated in June. As her classmates got engaged and packed for college, Suzy began to stand taller. She started polishing her shoes. She stopped singing along (badly) to the radio, and started dancing to the songs instead—better and better, more hips and winks in front of their bedroom mirror. And the boys whose girlfriends were away at school picked up on her scent and edged toward their house, a phone call here, a slow-driving Chevrolet there.
    The haircut proves it. Suzy’s life is dynamic and sexual. Anna Lisa takes it personally. They’ve never quite been close, but people tend to confuse the two of them, or lump them together, which is almost the same thing. The Hill Girls. Squares with B- averages and home-cut hair. You can find them behind the counter at their parents’ store; they’re not going anywhere. Except now Suzy is. It wasn’t until Suzy’s graduation that Anna Lisa realized that she herself had not “just graduated.” She was 19, two years into the so-called real world.
    â€œWell,” Anna Lisa considers, “do you like him?”
    â€œI do… Not as much as Roy, though.”
    â€œRoy?”
    â€œYou know, with the white Buick, the convertible? He works at the real estate office. He says Fresno is due for a boom.” Suzy glows. Her life is a convertible.
    â€œThen why were you… with Kevin?” Anna Lisa blushes, as if it were her indiscretion.
    â€œI don’t know, I just… oh God, I’m awful, aren’t I? I seem to like whoever I’m with. Not who ever, but, well, I keep thinking that it will all sort itself out. Please don’t tell Mother and Dad,” she repeats. This is her most urgent concern. This is what she wants from Anna Lisa more than advice on her over-popularity problem.
    â€œFine,” Anna Lisa says curtly. “I’m not six years old, you know. I’m not some tattle-tale.”
    From there, they retreat to the safe territory of haircuts. Their mother came of age during the Depression and cannot imagine why anyone with a pair of scissors and a mirror would pay a stranger to do the job. Suzy skipped the Lovely Dove, she tells Anna Lisa, for fear of seeing someone who knew Eudora Hill, and ventured across town to Lola Felix’s Beauty Shoppe.
    â€œI think she was a Mexican,” Suzy whispers. “But it was amazing. She was so kind. I just love saying it, Lo-la Fee-lix. And her fingers in my hair during the shampoo part… glorious!”
    It’s several days before Anna Lisa is alone again with her book. She surprises herself by feigning illness and skipping church.
    â€œPoor dear,” says Eudora Hill, pausing as she fastens her pearl necklace. “And the day we’re planning the picnic, too.” Her expression tells Anna Lisa this is something she should be sad to miss. Anna Lisa wishes she liked the things she was supposed to like. The first time I saw
    your father, in his crisp white shirt…. Eudora has told them the story many times. How she met Gerald Hill at the annual