Small World by Tabitha King Page A

Her mother had remarried and had younger
    children; she led a busy suburban life around her teaching career and her second family. There seemed to be little energy left over for more than a superficial relationship with her grown-up, widowed daughter.
    Nick stole a glance at Lucy as they paused for a stop light. She had her hair up, in the elaborate quasi-Oriental style just coming into fashion. It brought out the barbaric structure of her bones, inviting touch the way a smooth-polished curve of wood did. ‘You’re beautiful tonight.’
    She looked at him gravely. ‘Thank you. You’re very . . . ‘Distinguished?’
    She laughed with him.
    ‘Did Dolly call?’ she asked him.
    ‘Oh, yes. Between your electric raspberry and the endless meeting on security.’
    ‘She called me, too.’
    ‘And what did she say and what did you say?’
    ‘I said as little as I could. I made sympathetic noises about the sacrilege the magazine committed. Apparently the editors were quite cruel about it when she upbraided them.’
    Nick snorted.
    ‘She wanted to know how her litle darlings were. Weren’t they just adorable in that photograph, peeking at Grandmother’s dollhouse?’ Lucy mocked. ‘I almost threw up.’
    ‘Don’t you worry about them taking after her?’
    Lucy smiled thinly. ‘I examined them closely in the cradle. If I’d seen the slightest resemblance, I’d have strangled them, right then, with my bare hands. Which, by the way, she told me were obscene, very distracting in the photographs.’
    ‘She must have been a wonderful mother-in-law?’
    ‘Yes. I’ve earned my heavenly crown. We always lived on military bases. We didn’t have the money to visit her, and she wouldn’t visit us. The housing was tacky; it offended her. Anyway, I told her Zach was putting gesso on his toothbrush and hung up, before she could lecture me on leaving the stuff where he could reach it.’
    ‘I didn’t know you ever lied.’
    ‘I don’t. He was.’
    ‘Yuck. It isn’t poisonous, is it?’
    ‘I don’t think so. Not really nutritious, you know?’
    ‘My little talk with Dolly was fun, too.’
    ‘Really?’ Lucy smothered a giggle. ‘Tell all.’
    ‘The dear sweet thing accused me of using her name and fame, and her dollhouse. to promote you, me, and the Dalton.’
    ‘Did she?’
    ‘Oh, yes. And got in one particularly cheap shot about—’
    ‘I can guess. Shit.’ Lucy’s voice faded. ‘How long have you known Dolly, Nick?’
    ‘Since we were kids. My father painted her picture once.’
    ‘I remember. That’s the painting that was stolen a little while ago.’
    ‘The next summer, I think it was, after her father was ejected from office, Dolly and her mother spent some time in England. Her mother used the connection with Sartoris to introduce herself to my mother. Mother’s the original marshmallow, you know. There’s no meanness in her; she doesn’t see it in other people. I suppose that goes a long way to explaining not only how she could love Sartoris, who’s a right old bastard in a lot of ways, and why my stepfather loved her.
    ‘Be that as it may. She put them up for several months. I came home from school one holiday and there they were, ensconced like exiled royalty in the house. I was severely instructed by my mother to ignore Mrs. Hardesty’s heavy hand on the brandy bottle, and to suffer what Mother termed “Dolly’s high spirits”.’ ‘Be a good Boy Scout?’ Lucy put in.
    Nick smiled at her. He would have been happy to abandon this particular reminiscence, but Lucy pursued it.
    ‘Don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me what Dolly got up to. Give me a weapon, for Christ’s sake, for the next time she tells me I’m letting her grandchildren grow up like savages.’
    There was a silence, and then Nick confessed in a funereal tone. ‘Besides being a miserable spoiled brat, she cock-teased every male in the place, including my poor stepfather, who was by then a doddering