“Anytime,” he said. “Well, not anytime. Never again, I hope.”
“So we’re okay?” she asked. The sooner he forgave her, the sooner the feather would heal. Her apology was the same as her cousins returning that Camargue colt.
Something behind Lace got Cluck’s attention. “Great.” He stopped a girl who looked about his age, wings on her back. He said something to her in French and set the paper bag and watermelon into her arms.
The girl eyed the watermelon. “I don’t think it’s ripe. It’s purple.”
“It’s supposed to be purple,” Lace said.
The girl startled, realizing Lace was there. Were they all this jumpy whenever anyone who was not a Corbeau came near the Craftsman house?
The girl eyed Lace, then took the fruit toward the house.
Cluck sprang toward one of the vanity mirrors, where the red-haired woman leaned over a pale-haired one, dotting color on her eyelids. The red blossoms on her flower crown almost touched the vanilla roses on the other woman’s head.
“Eugenie,” he said. “What are you doing?”
Eugenie paused her fingers. Her free hand was full of makeup brushes, the bristles color-drenched.
Cluck grabbed the brushes out of her hands. “Where’s Margaux?”
“She never showed.”
“Again?”
“She has a new boyfriend. I don’t think she’s coming back. Not this run anyway.”
Lace followed him. She needed his word, for him to pronounce her forgiven, like a priest.
He felt her shadow cut across the light. “Sorry,” he said, half looking over his shoulder. “My flake cousin flaked again.” From across the yard, the sound of ripping fabric distracted him. It sounded thin, like the shantung or dupioni her mother wore to church on Easter Sunday. Old or expensive.
“Here.” He shoved the bouquet of makeup brushes into Lace’s hands. “Hold these for a minute, will ya?” He took off toward the Craftsman house.
With a bare foot, the pale-haired woman pushed a vinyl stool toward Lace. The sole was brown, like it had been painted. It was the only thing dark about the woman. She had a pinkish forehead, and hair blond as bean sprouts. Half the women here looked like her. Where had their gitana blood gone? Had they cast it out like el Diablo?
The other women, except for the redhead called Eugenie, had hair as black as Cluck’s. But even some of them were pale as whipped-up egg whites. Same with the men.
Cluck was one of the darker ones, his forearms like the lightest peels of jacaranda bark. It almost made her sorry for him. He had that wrecked hand, and he didn’t match his relatives. Even Lace’s family teased Leti and Reyna for being light-haired güeras.
“Do you want to sit?” the woman asked, her consonants sharpened by a French accent. Lace wondered if it was real or put-on. The Corbeaus had been in this country as long as the Palomas, cursing them and stealing their business.
She sat down. The vanity was crowded with pots of color and powder compacts. Blue and green glass bottles, clusters of pastel rhinestones, and canning jars of cotton balls filled any extra space.
An open bag of cake flour leaned against the mirror. Lace didn’t ask.
The makeup brushes looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since spring. Pastels tipped the eye shadow brushes. Face powder and blush stained the bigger ones. The smallest ones had been dyed red with lip color and violet with eyeliner.
Her hands opened and closed, wanting to fix them. Lace cleaned her own brushes after making up one cousin and before starting the next. Were these people trying to make each other sick? One eye infection, and the whole show would have it.
Lace dampened a few tissues with an open bottle of alcohol, and rubbed the makeup from each brush. Yes, these things had touched Corbeau skin, but they weren’t Corbeaus themselves. If she had to look at those stained brushes any longer, she’d throw them at somebody.
She turned each one over, pressing the color out until it wiped clean. The lip and eyeliner brushes were always the worst. She squeezed the color from the base of the bristles up through the tips, and her shoulders felt heavy with missing the other sirenas. These were things she did for them. Cleaning brushes. Rubbing color from bristles. Seeing each shade come off on the tissue like a streak of paint.
The blond woman looked over at the color-striped tissues. “You do makeup,” she said, not a question.
“No.” Lace put down the brushes.
“This is what you do, n’est-ce pas?”
“Not anymore,” Lace said.
“But you did.”
“But not anymore.”
The woman closed her eyes, showing Lace her face. “Will you paint me?”
“Do your makeup?” Lace asked.
The woman nodded, eyes still closed.
“You don’t know if I’m any good,” Lace said, stalling, trying to figure out if there were enough brushes and sponges here that she could fix the woman’s face without touching her skin. “What about Margaux?”
“My sister? She has her boyfriends, she forgets we have our shows.” The woman hair-sprayed a loose curl. “She will marry one of them soon and have five hundred babies. The beauties always do.”
She said “beauties” like she wasn’t one.
“If you don’t,” the woman said, “I’ll have to go on tonight looking washed-out, and it’ll be your fault.”
“My fault?” Lace splashed alcohol on another tissue, and wiped the color stains from her fingers. “Your sister’s the one who didn’t show up.”
“But who knows where she is?” The woman opened her eyes. “And you’re here.”
Lace folded her arms, hiding the feather burn. She couldn’t keep saying no without the woman wondering why.
It couldn’t be harder than putting waterproof color on the other sirenas. She just couldn’t use her fingers.
“What do you need?” Lace asked.
“Base, blush, lip color.” The woman gestured at her temples, holding her pinched thumbs and forefingers at the corners of her eyes, opening them as she moved her hands out. “The eyes are more difficult. Liner, highlighter, shadow.”
Lace remembered the wings of color on Eugenie. The lilac pink had fanned across the bridge of her nose, all the way to her hairline, the color dotted with press-on jewels. “I think I know what you mean.”
She sponged foundation on the woman’s face, then powder, then concealer, then more powder. She brushed color onto her cheeks, and picked a green cream eye shadow that matched the woman’s dress.
A man stopped at the vanity as Lace was gluing on rhinestones. One of the winged men, his hair neat and gelled, good-looking enough to be a festival queen’s older boyfriend.
If not for his size, Lace might have laughed at his bare chest and his costume. That the Corbeaus put their men into their shows made her family trust them even less. Men shouldn’t display themselves like quetzals.
Justin and Oscar never got tired of the jokes. Male fairies. Maricas. Reinonas.
But Lace couldn’t laugh. His wings made his muscled frame even bigger. He was the kind of man Lace had feared meeting in the woods the night she first saw Eugenie.
“What is this?” he asked, his voice a little like Cluck’s, but edged with irritation.
Her spine felt tight and hard as the barrel of her father’s Winchester. Her pulse beat against the raw skin on her back, like a moth in a jar.
The woman opened her eyes. “The locals are friendly here, non?”
“She’d better be the only local you’re getting friendly with.” He left, the shadow of his wings following.
The moth under Lace’s skin shook itself off, and slept.
“Dax.” The woman stuck out her chin and laughed. “He sees to it we children follow all the rules.” She shut her eyes again.