Some mothers flatly refused to give it up. Tina Stinnet had her Marine Corps brother ship her a case of Final Net from the Philippines, where it could still be purchased. This infuriated the mothers whose military connections were limited to the Middle East. During a trip to Tijuana to get her ten-year-old daughter McKaty, a bottle of Cal-Ban diet pills (also banned in the United States), Marcie Krawinkel found a beauty supply shop that sold CFC-propelled hair spray for next to nothing. She returned with thirty cases, which she sold to desperate moms for upward of fifteen dollars a can.
Adding to the thick clouds of mist and envy was the steady increase of personal airbrushing systems. Resentment was growing among the mothers who could not afford such systems—especially since those who had the systems refused to share them. Each burst of air was a mocking whisper:
Psssst. Psssst. Psssst.
“I have an airbrushing system and you don’t.”
Psssst.
The systemless mothers grumbled among themselves that the machines were elitist at best and cheating at worst, essentially allowing rich families to buy their children smoother-looking skin. But despite their complaints, everyone was saving up for her own system, and when she got one she wasn’t going to share it, either.
One corner of the dressing room was buzzing significantly louder than the rest. Bright lights and a throng of cameras surrounded Starr Kennedy, a stunning eight-year-old who looked exactly like Catherine Zeta-Jones. Her full lips were tinted with an original color created specifically for her by a former Revlon color engineer to complement her flawlessly airbrushed olive skin. Her eyebrows were immaculately crafted fermatas commanding you to linger on her infinite amber eyes. If a human being could be Photoshopped, she would look like Starr Kennedy. As Starr practiced her talent—a precise reenactment of Britney Spears’s 2001 VMA performance, complete with live albino python—Theresa spoke a little too loudly into a camera, leaning forward to make sure the lights picked up the glitter she’d applied to her sun-battered cleavage.
“Starr’s just got that something special, that indefinable thing movie producers call ‘it.’ I don’t know where she gets ‘it’ from, but she’s got ‘it’ in spades!”
Catching herself, she quickly turned to the African American sound engineer. “No offense.”
Bailey’s dressing area was directly across from this bullshit.
Starr took a seat in front of her makeup mirror, swaying back and forth to the music blasting through her earbuds. Her every movement, down to the slightest facial tic, was a conscious choice. For a child, Starr was incredibly
aware
of her surroundings, especially the cameras. She knew where they were, if they were on or off, and if they were trained on her or someone else. When they were off, she was an average eight-year-old girl—playing with her American Girl doll, whining to her mother for a candy bar, even picking her nose. But Starr had the senses of a bat, and whenever a photographer attempted to steal one of those “real” moments, she would effortlessly slip back into glamour mode. It confounded the producers and infuriated the mothers, who were desperate for the world to see Starr for what she truly was: a little phony.
“Pageants are a great stepping-stone,” Starr said as if she were sitting on Oprah’s couch, “but they’re only one small part of what I’m capable of. God has given me many gifts. And I believe it would be a sin not to explore every single possibility. I mean, not to sound … whatever, but I’m talented. I’m not ashamed of it. If you’re good at something, you should share it with people. And that’s what I want to do.”
Miranda could see Theresa mouthing along to her daughter’s words, making sure the girl got them exactly right. But she needn’t worry. Starr was a pro. Since the age of four, she had been the Kennedy family’s primary source of income, and Theresa worked tirelessly to expand her empire. The reality show was a godsend. It paid for the next three months of pageants and gave the family enough money to trick the bank into approving a second mortgage. The Kennedys needed their lives to change in a big way, and Starr was going to be the catalyst for that change. Theresa had never been more certain of anything in her life.
“We’ve also been having real success in print modeling,” Theresa said, raising her voice just enough to make sure everyone could hear, “but Starr’s modeling career might have to go on the back burner because of all the TV work. And not just this show. I’m not supposed to say anything yet, but … last week, Starr booked her first commercial!”
Theresa smiled broadly, pausing to make sure Miranda heard her.
Was that a wink? Did she just fucking wink at me?
Theresa continued, “She’s going to be a beautiful angel for Dillard’s department stores’ Christmas campaign! Can you believe it?” She forced a laugh as fake as her breasts. “We are just so blessed.” A perfectly calibrated sigh was followed by a piercing scream, “Next stop, Hollywood!”
Miranda wanted to throw up in Theresa’s whore mouth. Instead, she took a deep breath and listened to her gut.
“You’re right, Brixton,” Miranda said, rubbing her belly. “Mommy
is
better than that.” She felt a small kick from her baby and smiled. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’re going to show that skank who she’s messing with.”
Ray woke up every morning at five thirty, an unfortunate remnant of med school when his body learned to reject anything that gave him comfort. No matter how late he worked, how exhausted he was, or how many pills he took, he was never able to sleep more than three consecutive hours. Over time, Ray had grown to appreciate his quiet mornings alone in his small kitchen. Those dark, wordless hours—standing over the sink overflowing with dishes; drinking his coffee, staring out the window onto his perpetually overgrown backyard, wondering if the rotting tree house built by the previous owners would collapse on its own or if he would have to pay someone to remove it; hoping to catch a glimpse of Cindy Ellis, his big-breasted neighbor who occasionally worked her core in her underwear on her back patio—had become the only time he could truly call his own.
Ray fiddled with his morning erection but quickly lost interest and slipped on a frayed Miami Hilton bathrobe, a present from his father for his twenty-first birthday. He padded down the hall and looked in on Junior and J.J., both asleep in the top bunk of their bunk beds. When they were younger, the boys had shared a much larger queen bed that had once belonged to Joan and Roger. After Roger’s violent death, Joan refused to get anywhere near it, afraid her husband’s ghost would haunt her dreams. It had been Ray and Miranda’s marital bed until Bailey won their current king size Tempur-Pedic at the Cherokee Heritage Pageant and Pow Wow (Cherokee, North Carolina).
The boys didn’t care about their grandmother’s haunted mattress. They wanted bunk beds, and when Miranda ignored their request, J.J. went over her head and wrote a letter to Santa. A week later he received a response.
“So last night Santa texted me a list of chores,” Miranda said, handing them her phone as proof. “He said if you really want bunk beds, you have to earn them.”
The boys scrolled through the extensive list, presumably typed by fat jolly thumbs.
“And he said he might call every now and then and add to it, if he thinks of something else.” Much to her disbelief, the boys did every chore on the list.
When they saw their new beds on Christmas morning they laughed and screamed and wailed, then spent the next four days arguing over who should get the top bunk. J.J. said he should get it because he was older, and Junior said he should get it because he was a Jedi. After a threat to text Santa to have him take the beds back, the boys agreed to share the top bunk, giving them each half the space they’d enjoyed in Joan’s old queen. At least once a month, one of them would fall over the side, plummeting five feet onto a pile of toys and dirty clothes.
They were both still tucked in when Ray tiptoed into their room and placed the new football in the small space between them. Figuring he had at least two hours before they woke up, he closed their door and went to make hotel reservations for his girlfriend’s eighteenth birthday in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
The last time Ray was in Gatlinburg he was a junior in high school. The wholesome, family-friendly tourist attractions made it
the
vacation destination for every church youth group within a four-hundred-mile radius. Ray’s youth group had spent six months selling crates of oranges to raise money for a choir tour that would send them on a spiritual sojourn through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While the word “tour” implied chartered buses and rock star escapades, the word “choir” promised something else entirely. Eleven teenagers, quivering with earnest Christian entitlement, traveled to sparsely attended churches and dilapidated campgrounds to perform sign language versions of contemporary Christian songs and speak sagely about how empty and sinful their young middle-class lives were without Christ. The only vaguely rock star moment was when a freshman girl let Ray feel her boobs (under the shirt, over the bra) in the back row of the van.
Ray’s most lasting memory of Gatlinburg was watching endless rows of outlet stores, souvenir stands, ironic Christian T-shirt kiosks, and overpriced novelty yard art carved out of tree trunks with chain saws zip past his window.
“Gatlinburg is so boring,” Ray told Courtney, trying to talk her out of the trip. “The whole place just needs to get hate-fucked by Las Vegas. Actually, that’s more Branson, Missouri.”
“That’s rude. What’s hate-fuck?”
Ray had since amended his opinion: Branson was like Vegas’s born-again younger brother. Gatlinburg was their paste-eating cousin.
The Miller family’s living room was never what Ray would consider “clean.” However, sometimes the room was what Miranda called “straightened,” meaning that everything was in its corresponding pile: gowns, toys, shoes, trophies, etc. This morning the room was not straightened. It looked like it had been ransacked by government agents searching for hidden microfiche. Ray did his best to not step on anything that looked important or expensive and settled at the small desk in the corner of the room. He turned on the Miller family computer—a primeval Dell that must have weighed fifty pounds, thirty of which Ray assumed was porn. After checking his e-mail, which was empty, he checked the Gmail account Miranda didn’t know about and saw three e-mails from Courtney: two forwards regarding some dancing reality show she kept insisting he watch, and a cringe-worthy poem she’d written about their sex in the chair the night before. He deleted them all, then read his joke of the day (Q: Why don’t orphans play baseball? A: They don’t know where home is.), considered a quick visit to RedTube but decided to give his penis a rest and instead Googled “Gatlinburg Tennessee.”
The city’s official Web site immediately depressed him. Gatlinburg had obviously gotten bigger in the last decade and a half, but it didn’t appear to have grown. Every activity seemed geared toward the elderly or mentally disabled: trolley rides; chair-making demonstrations; self-guided Segway tours of the city; Cooter’s Place, a museum dedicated exclusively to
The Dukes of Hazzard;
and “the most photographed attraction in Gatlinburg,” Christ in the Smokies, a six-ton marble carving of Jesus’s face with eyes that follow you around the room.
“Fucking creepy,” he muttered.
Clicking “accommodations,” Ray found a company inexplicably named Safari Leasing that rented log cabins guaranteeing “beautiful mountain views with speedy access to restaurants and attractions.”
Good enough,
he thought and opened the bottom drawer of the desk. Under a pile of old tax returns and current overdraft notices, Ray dug around until he found a three-inch stack of business cards bound with a rubber band. Tucked deep inside was a Visa card in the name of Walter Beddow.
Walter Beddow had been one of Ray’s favorite hospice patients. A lifelong travel writer, Walter circled the globe several times before pancreatic cancer forced him home. Ray sat for hours as the man gave him a tour of the world he knew he’d never get to see: the azure water of Plitvice Lakes in Croatia, the remnants of the orchard at the Killing Fields, Japan’s Bridge to Heaven.
“I’ve seen the whole world, Ray,” Walter said between small sips of water. “I don’t know what the next world is going to be, but I’m dying to get there.”
The hospice had very strict rules regarding caregivers receiving gifts from patients, but Walter—who’d never settled in one place long enough to start a family—insisted Ray take some of his most cherished possessions: travel journals, photographs, and a Pulitzer Prize he won for a series of articles about Polish concentration camps reopening as tourist attractions.
“It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. Normal families smiling for pictures in front of a walk-in furnace. What the hell is wrong with people?”
Walter did not give Ray his social security number, but after hearing stories of the man’s escapades in countries where seventeen was considered over the hill, Ray was pretty sure Walter wouldn’t have minded.
Besides, Ray
needed
a credit card. Miranda had maxed out their others—all fourteen of them. It had also come in handy with his new girlfriend. Recently he’d been keeping iTunes gift cards in his pockets like dog treats. And while effective at keeping Courtney pacified, it had done nothing to help him end the relationship. Ray’s role in his own extramarital affair had largely been a passive one. It was just something that repeatedly happened to him while he was at work. He never initiated, asked for, or expected sex. That, to his way of thinking, somehow made him less of a criminal. Ray had never studied the law, but he could only imagine “She touched me first, Your Honor” would be a slightly more tenable defense when he inevitably went to trial. Arguably, his biggest mistake had been assuming the teenager would get bored with him and leave him alone. That had not happened, and Ray believed the time had come to find a more active solution.