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      REUNION

      The apartment my mother shared with Ron is possibly the tackiest I’ve seen. Everywhere, there are mirrors and furry rugs. The lights are off and the curtains drawn. Lit candles cover every surface and there is a giant photograph of my mother above the fireplace. It’s the photo that accompanied her column. It’s at least twenty years old and her lipstick is magenta.

      Seth pushes a glass of champagne into my hand. The bar is open; we missed the service thanks to the wake-up call I forgot to book at the hotel. I hear someone say something about a pagan priestess and down my drink too fast and the bubbles stick in my head, fizzy needles pricking at my brain. “She’s here,” Seth says in a whisper.

      “Who?”

      “Your mother.”

      “Not funny.”

      “I’m serious, Mason. She’s in the bedroom. She’s wearing fur. And big earrings that look like diamonds but they’re so big, they might just be—”

      “They’re real,” I say. I know the ones. My father gave them to her before I was born, when she was his mistress and the scandal whore of San Francisco. I edge through the crowded living room, my head down and Seth a pace behind me. I have no idea where Janet is, but I need another drink more than I need to find her. I order a vodka from the tuxedoed bartender and he pours me an ounce over ice. It is not nearly enough. He pours another careful ounce and now this is tedious, so I take the bottle from him and pour until the vodka is flush with the rim of the glass. “There,” I say and take a sip. Half burns down my throat while the rest dribbles down my chin. Seth gets a napkin and dabs at my dress. I swat him away. I don’t care. It will dry.

      I’m wearing a black dress and heels. My blond roots are showing but I have the pearls my mother gave me for my eighteenth birthday clasped around my neck. I bring my hand to my throat to make sure they’re still there, that they haven’t fallen off and already been pawned. That’s surely what she’d expect. She’d call it typical and then write about it in her column.

      We find Janet in the bedroom, talking with Ron, who is crying, but his face is perfectly still. He may have had more work done than my mother.

      “Mason! Thank God you’re here!” Ron pulls me into a hug and weeps onto my dress. He kisses my cheek and his fluffy mustache tickles my skin. I’ve met him only once before, about five years ago, when he and my mother came to visit me in Canmore shortly after I started working at the bookstore and was living with Neil. The trip was a disaster. Neil and I split up a week after my mother and Ron left. He said the timing was a coincidence but he wasn’t a good liar, and I added him to the list of things my mother has fucked up for me. The list is in a spiral notebook in the bottom of my suitcase back at the hotel. I started it when I was fifteen. It has three hundred pages and is nearly full.

      “I just feel like it’s my fault,” Ron is saying, “that I shouldn’t have bought her the gift, but that’s what she wanted, she really did, Mason. And you know there was no way to stop Britt from getting what she wants—you know that, right? But I can’t help thinking that it’s my fault.”

      Ron is blubbering and he keeps trying to touch me. I think he’s right: it is his fault. He’s the one who bought her the stupid vaginal rejuvenation surgery. It was a gift for her sixtieth birthday, which would have been next week. As much as I’m sure she’s pissed about this whole situation in whichever afterlife she believed in lately, she’s undoubtedly glad she is forever fifty-nine because it sounds so much better than sixty.

      Ron is a tacky asshole with a cheesy mustache and he killed my mother, whose body is laid out on the double-king four-poster bed, dressed in fur and diamonds just like Seth said. Her eyes are closed, her makeup is perfect and in the forgiving candlelight she looks almost as young as she did in her twenty-year-old column photo. I wish I had a magenta lipstick so I could smear it on her lips—then she’d be perfect. But I only have red.

      Two men are staring at me from across the living room. They’re young—well, youngish. I’d say they were in their thirties, like me. They’re impeccably dressed in tailored black suits and polished leather shoes that even from a distance I can tell are too expensive for them to be writers or arts people.

      “Who is that?” Seth asks, pointing to the taller of the men. Seth has never been known for his subtlety.

      “Stop pointing,” I say.

      “Do you know him?”

      I turn my head to the side, and pick imaginary lint off my shoulder. I squint and focus. “I don’t think so,” I say. I really do need to get glasses.

      “You don’t think what?” Janet asks as she joins us.

      “That she knows those yummy guys over there,” Seth says.

      “Which guys?”

      “Never mind,” I say.

      “The ones in the good suits?” Janet asks.

      “Yes, the ones in the good suits,” I say. Can we please change the subject? I’m trying to mourn.

      “The ones who are walking over here?” Janet asks.

      “What?” I spin around and sure enough, there they are.

      “Mason, I’m so sorry about your mother,” the shorter man says. He knows my name. “She was always my favorite, you know.”

      “Favorite what?” I take the bait, though I know where this is headed: your mom was great, your mom was funny, I loved her column, you’re so lucky. He looks like someone I know, or maybe someone on TV. He’s grinning and staring at me like he’s highly amused.

      He looks puzzled. “My favorite stepmother.”

      My mouth falls open. I look at him. It’s Aaron. I remember the dimples, those bright blue eyes. I look at the other man, the taller one. God, it’s got to be Edgar. My mother was married to their father when I was—what, five, maybe six at the most? He was a widower and we lived in a big house on his vineyard in Sonoma. We were only there for a year.

      Edgar leans in and hugs me. “It is so wonderful to see you after all this time,” he says. “I just wish it was under better circumstances.” I look up at him. He’s awfully tall. “You look great, by the way.” He smiles down at me. Edgar, I

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