Diary of an Ugly Duckling Langhorne, Karyn (reading rainbow books txt) 📖

now?”

“Well . . .” Edith dawdled. “I think she said a camp

set up in the southern part of the country—”

“Fallujah,” Audra said, feeling the hairs rising on

the backs of her arms. “Is that where she is? Fallu-

jah?”

Thousands of miles away, Edith heaved a little

sigh that Audra knew instantly signaled the affir-

mative. “Shit,” she muttered, knowing fully well

that the Iraqi city was one known for violence and a

high number of U.S. casualties. “Shit.”

“She said she’s fine,” Edith continued quickly,

covering her own concerns with annoyance at Au-

dra’s reaction. “No need to panic. She’s fine. She

even said to tell you her superior officer got a call

from that girl—Shamya—”

“Shamiyah.”

“That’s the one. About her coming home for the

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227

show. She said she’d email you as soon as they get

the infrastructure set up.”

Infrastructure. Audra nodded to herself. That was

a word straight from Petra’s mouth, infrastructure.

Army-speak.

“Thanks, Ma.” Audra sighed, feeling a week’s

worth of tension drain from her body in a single

breath.

Her mother didn’t reply right away, and when she

did, she took the conversation in a different direc-

tion altogether: “I guess I should start getting ready,

shouldn’t I?”

“Ready? Ready for what?”

“I ain’t stupid, Audra. You’re up there, erasing

yourself, erasing me and your father and our entire

family—”

“I’m not erasing you, Ma,” Audra told her. “I’m

going to look more like you, not less. And as for my

father, it’s kind of hard to erase someone when

you’re not sure who he is—”

“His name is Andrew Neill.” Her mother blurted

out the name in a tumbled rush of syllables. “An-

drew Neill. Not James Marks.”

Audra caught her breath. “Ma,” she began in a low

voice. “You know this call is being recorded . . .”

“His name is Andrew Neill . . . or it was. He’s

dead now. Been dead, almost as long as you’ve been

alive.”

The words stretched around Audra like a swath of

cotton, swaddling close, blocking out light and air.

“Ma—” she began again.

“He was a good man . . . a good man,” her

mother ’s voice rose, defensive and angry. “And

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you are so much like him. If he’d lived, I would

have left James Marks—I would have left Petra’s

father for him and you would have known him,

Audra. Then maybe you’d be proud to look like

him.”

“I look like him?” Audra repeated. “He’s where

the dark skin and bumpy nose come from—”

Edith sighed.

“All these years every time I looked in your

face . . . I could remember . . . you don’t know how

many times I looked at you and felt—felt—”

“Ashamed?” Audra muttered. “That’s what I read

in your face over and over, time and time again

every since I was a child.” Audra heard her voice ris-

ing and swallowed hard, struggling to keep it down.

“And you know something else, Mama? I’d bet

every cent I’ll ever have that we wouldn’t even be

having this conversation if it weren’t for this sur-

gery . . . if it weren’t for Ugly Duckling. You’d have

been happy to keep staring at me like you didn’t

know where I came from—like you wished I’d never

been born—”

“Not true, Audra.”

“Then why now, Mama? Why now?”

From the other end of the phone, a long painful

silence, but no words. Audra felt her anger crest and

subside in that silence, making her insides hollow

and dry, as though every drop of feeling inside her

had been wrung out.

“That girl Shamiyah. She said they need it to help

you. That you need it to . . . move on. She said they’ll

keep it confidential . . .” Edith continued. “I been

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229

thinking a lot. And maybe I should have told you a

long time ago, but I didn’t. I thought it was for the

best.” Her voice had an edge of nastiness to it as she

said, “I suppose now you blame me.”

“Well, who else is there?”

“Fine, then, blame me,” Edith said tersely. “But

while you’re blaming me, you ought to under-

stand. It’s not so simple. I was a young woman

with two little girls. In the time James Marks and

I stayed together I was able to get this salon up and

running. Provide for you two. That’s something,

isn’t it?”

Questions swirled in Audra’s mind by the

dozens: angry questions, sad questions, practical

questions, dumb questions. But before she could

stammer out the first of them, her mother muttered,

“Shit, my customer’s here. I told that girl Shamiyah

I won’t be coming out there. You do what you gotta

do. I don’t need to see it,” and Audra could hear her

proclaiming to someone in the distance, “Well, girl,

I know why you’re early. Your head is a mess—”

then the connection was severed and Audra was

alone with the information she’d waited a lifetime

to hear.

“Andrew Neill.” Bradshaw repeated the man’s

name slowly. “That’s it? That’s all you know? Just

his name?”

“That’s it.” Audra repeated.

She wasn’t sure why, but he was the first person

she’d called.

“This is pretty heavy, Marks,” he began.

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“I guess that’s not even my name,” Audra inter-

rupted, trying to laugh it off. “My name should

probably be Neill, too . . .” She stopped, her voice

faltering. She was silent for a long moment, trying

to master herself and failing. Tears slipped from

her eyes and rolled unchecked down her face.

Art Bradshaw seemed to know what was going

on. For the longest time, he didn’t say a word, and

in a way, his silence just made it worse. Audra

dabbed at her face, still bandaged at the brow

and around the chin, her nose still packed with cot-

ton. She snuffed in a ragged breath through her

mouth and muttered, “I’m sorry,” in a shattered

voice.

“It’s okay,” he murmured and Audra heard the

words as license to sob in earnest.

“I don’t understand her,” she stammered. “How

she can just drop this on me . . . then go and do

some woman’s hair”—she gave a wild chuckle—

“Have you ever heard anything like it?”

“Beats any movie I’ve ever seen.”

“You got that right.” Audra sniffed, struggling to

bring herself under control. “Of course, they pretty

much didn’t do story lines like this back in the thir-

ties and forties. I