Little Blue Lies Read Online Free PDF

trip back, but my pace still quickens.
    No need to knock. He’s been watching for me.
    â€œGet in,” Ronny says.
    I follow as he leads me back once more to the breakfast bar. There he has spread out the portrait of me as the emperor. It feels really embarrassing now, with Ronny here. And he did scrunch it, the chin now looking like it has a wiry goatee.
    â€œWhy is that out?” I ask.
    â€œBecause it’s damn cute,” Maxine says.
    â€œPlease,” I say. “Please, don’t . . .”
    â€œNo, no,” Ronny says, tapping the portrait with his middle finger and looking like he is giving it serious contemplation. “It’s very good. It makes you look . . . like a real somebody. Who did this?”
    â€œMy mother.”
    â€œReally?” he says, very impressed. He looks up from the sketch to stare at me, working out whether I am leveling with him or not. I’m pretty sure he thought all portraits were done in a booth machine at CVS or the carnival. “Really? Your mother?”
    â€œYeah, really. Is there any aspirin or something?”
    Maxine pats my shoulder on her way past to get me something. Now my shoulder hurts.
    â€œThis is beautiful work. Your mother is very talented. Tell her I said so, and I want one.”
    Maxine reenters the room, drops two tablets into my hand, and grabs me a glass with the remnants of somebody’s smoothie. Thank God we can assume it wasn’t Ronny’s.
    â€œWhat are these?” I garble after the tablets are already in my mouth.
    â€œAspirin’s friends,” she says, motioning for me to get the smoothie down me. I comply.
    â€œThanks,” I say to her. Then “Thanks,” I say to the hulking source of the pain in the first place. “My mother is proud of her work. She’ll be pleased to hear the praise.”
    â€œAnd the commission,” he reminds me.
    â€œRight,” I say. “I’ll check with her, see if she’s got the time. . . . She’s really busy with—”
    As I am talking, Ronny returns to studying the portrait but at the same time mimes a Call your mother gesture using his thumb and pinkie held to the side of his head like a phone. He could go whole days talking with his fingers, I think.
    I pretend to call my mother, pretend to get her answering machine, pretend to leave an enthusiastic message about this wonderful commission she will be doing over my dead body or pieces thereof.
    My head is swimming, in a lot of senses. I want to have as little to do with Ronny Blue as possible, and I want my mother to have even less to do with him. Having any kind of business arrangement with him is a truly horrifying proposition. And yet, Mom will want to do it, I know. She is fearless and ambitious and loves portraiture regardless of the unseemliness of the character, and in fact she is collecting something of a rogues gallery of faces for some ultimate artistic purpose, and for that, Ronny Blue makes an obvious poster boy.
    And I need to stay connected. To these people. To June.
    And the other swim my head is doing is more of a treading water.
    I am floating. There is no pain. There is no worry. There is the equilibrium issue still . . . but so what? Doesn’t seem to matter.
    â€œI’m gonna take you home,” Maxie says, putting one hand on my back and the other gently under my elbow the way you do when you help an elderly person across the street.
    â€œReally?” I say. “That’s nice of you.”
    â€œYeah,” she says, “well, I’m a nice kinda girl.”
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    â€œYou know what I would like?” Maxie says, her hand around my waist as we make our way up the road. The sun is just starting to work an orange cigarette burn through the gray fabric of the clouds.
    I reflexively look down at her hand on my hip, then turn to her close-by face. I can just about feel the