Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! by Birdie Jaworski

Sit down. I never heard of the Deep Crease. Is this something new?” She walked to a black leather stuffed chair and I noticed she held a lit herbal cigarette. She sat down and drew a long breath, closing her eyes as she inhaled. “Avon is a great company. We used to have a girl come around but I haven’t seen her in a coupla years.” She blew out pungent smoke in my direction. I sat on the edge of the matching leather couch, my bag in my lap, and I tried to look at her eyes and nothing else.
    “Well, the Avon Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate is a brand new product. I got a bottle at the product expo in Anaheim last weekend. It will be in the Campaign 20 brochure, in about six weeks. But I do have some samples to give to interested customers. It’s like a botox treatment, but you can still move your face afterwards.” I continued explaining the benefits of the serum and opened the white glass bottle and squeezed out a drop onto my hand and showed her how it melted into your skin with no greasy after-effects. My eyes jumped from the bottle to my skin to her eyes, not seeing, not registering the places in the middle.
    “Hmmmmm. Interesting.” She drew on her cigarette again, stubbed it out in an overfilled ceramic tray and leaned back, staring at me with cat-like slits for eyes. She looked vaguely Italian, with a soft complexion and carefully sculpted nails, a Rubenesque figure, an aquiline nose.
    “Well I gotta run, gotta pick up my kids from art class. Nice to meet you! Don’t forget my big yard sale! I’ll let myself out!” I stood up and shoved the Deep Crease Concentrate in my kilt and headed for the door. I didn’t screw the bottle tight, and my kilt smelled like a beauty treatment and pot and burnt herbs and embarrassment as I pinned fliers to telephone poles.
    A few hours later I collected my boys. Eighteen signs pointed the way, stuck into dry sand along two fancy hillside streets, taped to a telephone pole in front of the Vons grocery, written in chalk on the ground by the tennis courts, every place that looked good, that looked like maybe someone nearby might need a good makeover.
    Marty carried a clay sculpture of a moose in the crook of his tiny arm. His blonde hair fell into his eyes and he smiled with just one side of his mouth. Does my birth daughter look like him? Does she have the same brown eyes? The same freckles along her arms? I looked at my older son. His artwork sat in my bag. He walked with hands stuffed into jean pockets, his dark hair as wild as any Einstein. He stared straight ahead with the expression of a Samurai warrior, all intention and focus and deliberate action. His hips swung out one, then the other. Does she look like him? Like me? We turned the corner to find twelve stacked boxes of newly delivered Avon resting on the porch.

Show and Tell at School, at Train Station
    I packed forty-eight tubes of Moisture Therapy hand cream in three large Avon tote bags that night, sprinkling samples and two crisp new brochures over the top like Parmesan cheese. Avon shorted me two tubes, so I stuffed a conciliatory bottle of Orange Delight bubble bath in one of the bags with a backorder note to my mysterious customer.
    When I was finished packing product, I rummaged through my closet. What does a nearly-middle-aged-momma wear to a biker bar? Velvet? Jeans? Burlap? Something that can handle dripping booze, I guessed. I threw a few outfits into a huge canvas tote and added several pairs of heels and boots. I tried to call Shanna to go over our date details, but got her voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. I fell asleep and dreamed of rocker boys in leopard tights and long black hair, guitars rocking against naked, glistening chests.
    I woke to the sound of my boys swinging and laughing in the hammock outside my window. Louie’s voice boomed through the glass. He described the inner workings of a jet airplane to his younger brother, the way it pitches and rolls, how the wings tip to