The Costume His Mother Bought (When His Family Came First #11)

Chapter 1

JENNA

The wing was drying against a stack of cereal boxes when Lucy tipped her head at it and said, "It looks like a lung."

I laughed so hard I had to put the brush down.

She wasn't wrong, either. From that angle, with the veining half-painted and the top curve still bare wire, the left forewing of a moon moth is basically something off a medical poster — pale green membrane, silver branching through it, one long tail sweeping off the bottom edge like it wants to drag on the floor behind you.

"It's an anatomically ambitious lung," I said.

"It's a beautiful lung, Mom."

"Thank you."

We'd been at it since six thirty. The kitchen smelled like acrylic and the toast neither of us finished. I had a jar of gray water by my elbow, newspaper taped down the middle of the table, forty-odd scraps of organza on the floor that the vacuum was never going to pick up.

Lucy had her heels tucked under her in the chair, eleven years old, still in the sweatpants she refuses to retire even though the elastic's gone slack at the ankles.

Her hair was up in the clip she stole out of my bathroom in August. There was a green thumbprint on her cheekbone where she'd rubbed her face without thinking.

Six weeks we had in this thing. It started the second Saturday of September at this same table, with a library book about silk moths open to a photograph she couldn't stop looking at. Actias luna. Green like sea glass, those absurd tails, eyespots on the wings that seem to look back at you.

"That one," she'd said. "I want to be that."

So we built an armature out of millinery wire from the craft place on Route 9, then stretched crystal organza over it in two layers, because one layer looks cheap under a light. The veining took three tries. The first two came out looking like cracks instead of veins.

Now we were on the last coat, which meant the fiddly part. You load the brush, wipe most of it off on the rim, then run it along a vein you already painted so the second pass doesn't sit up on the first one like a scar. Get that wrong and you can see it from across a room forever.

"Hold this steady."

She braced the base with both hands while I ran the brush along the outer edge. Down at the end of the table the glue gun sat on its foil square, plugged in, cooling, a string of dried glue hanging off the tip like a spiderweb.

"Are the antennae going to stand up?"

"They'll stand up."

"Last year the ears fell over."

"Last year the ears were felt with no wire in them, because somebody insisted felt holds its shape."

"That was you."

"That was absolutely me. I stand by the attempt."

The fox ears are still in the bin downstairs, flopped over like a sad dog's, which was honestly funnier than the correct version would have been.

Lucy wore them around the house for a week.

She wore them to the school parade. She wore them out to the mailbox in November because she liked how they looked with her coat.

She never wore them to the party.

I put them back in the bin in March and hadn't thought about them since. What I was thinking about, standing there, was whether the silver would go chalky when it dried, and whether we had enough organza left to redo the hindwing if the tail tore.

The front door opened and the cold came down the hall ahead of him, that first real cold of the year, October air with some wet in it.

"I have pizza," Eric said, "and I have opinions about the parking at that place."

"Don't put it on the table," Lucy and I said together.

He stopped in the doorway with the box up at shoulder height like a waiter — fifty-four years old, still in the work fleece with the plant logo on the chest, reading glasses shoved up into his hair where he'd forget about them for the next two hours.

"The table is compromised."

"The table is a workshop."

"The table is where I eat dinner."

"Counter," I said.

He put the box on the counter, then came and stood behind Lucy's chair with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the wing, taking his time the way he does so that whatever he says next will sound considered.

"That's the best one you've done."

"It's a lung," Lucy said.

"It's a great lung."

"Dad."

"What? I'm supporting you." He leaned in. "How does it attach?"

That was the part I'd been dreading right up until eleven o'clock the previous Tuesday, when I solved it with a length of black elastic webbing and a harness I sketched on the back of an insurance statement.

I showed him: two loops over the shoulders, one strap across the chest, the wire spine zip-tied to a hidden panel that sits flat against her back.

"So the weight's on her shoulders."

"The weight's on her shoulders."

"Huh." He said it in the voice he uses at work when somebody else's fix turns out better than the one he had in mind. "That's smart."

"I have my moments."

"Can you hold this?" Lucy asked him, because the wing had started to tip, and he took the base in both hands without needing to be asked twice.

He stood there holding it for six or seven minutes while I ran the last of the silver down the trailing edge, which is a long time to stand still holding a piece of wire, and he never once complained.

He asked what a moon moth eats. Lucy informed him, with tremendous authority, that adult luna moths don't eat anything at all — they don't even have mouths, they live about a week, then they die.

"That's grim," Eric said.

"It's science."

"It's grim science."

"They only exist to have babies and then they die," Lucy said, delighted.

"Okay. We're eating now."

"One more thing about the mouths."

"Eat your pizza."

We ate standing up at the counter with paper towels instead of plates, because the table was compromised.

Lucy told us about a boy in her class who'd decided to be a stack of pancakes.

Eric said the pancake kid was going to get a lot of attention and should prepare himself.

Lucy said she wasn't worried about attention.

"Mrs. Vargas said no costumes with weapons," she reported. "Also no full masks. Also nothing that trails."

"Nothing that trails," I said.

"That's what she said."

"Lucy."

"I know."

"Your wings trail approximately two feet."

"I'm going to ask her." She'd gotten sauce on her thumb, which she dealt with by licking it, which I let go. "I'm going to explain that it's an accurate depiction of a real animal, so it's educational. She has to allow educational."

"That's a strong argument," Eric said.

"It's a science costume."

"You're going to lead with that?"

"I'm going to lead with that."

The parade rule has been an issue three years running.

Two years ago the umbrella got vetoed for being an umbrella, a policy I still don't understand, and Lucy walked the track in a plain black hoodie with ribbons safety-pinned to the sleeves.

She was fine about it. She's fine about most things.

She came home and told me it was fine about four separate times.

"If she says no, we shoot it in the backyard," I said. "Golden hour, full production."

"With the fog machine?"

"We don't own a fog machine."

"Dad wants a fog machine."

"Dad is not getting a fog machine," Eric said, "because Dad has priced a fog machine."

"They make a small one," Lucy said. "It's forty dollars."

"How do you know what a fog machine costs?"

"Dad looked it up on the couch and then said the number out loud. Twice."

What Lucy really wanted, she said, was for the wings to move when she walked.

"They'll move."

"Like, actually move. Not just wobble."

"They'll move the way they're supposed to move."

I could picture it, because I'd been picturing it since September — the party at Diane's, the driveway full of cars, folding tables in the garage under the orange cloths, all those kids in the yard under the string lights.

Lucy coming through that door with three feet of green wing on her back, silver catching, those long tails sweeping along behind her.

I'd also ordered a little battery pack. Four LEDs, cool white, wired into the eyespots. She didn't know. That was going to be the last night, the surprise, the thing she wasn't expecting.

Eric wiped his hands and kissed the top of my head on his way past, the same distracted way he's done it since roughly 2004.

"Is the glue gun off?"

"The glue gun is off."

"It's not off."

"It's off, Eric."

He checked. It was not off. He unplugged it, held up the cord like evidence, then dropped the whole subject without a word, which is his version of winning.

Lucy went up to shower at eight thirty. I stayed at the table with the wing across my knees, hunting the veining under the overhead light, and found two spots where the silver had gone thin.

I fixed those, dropped the brush in the jar, and listened to somebody down the block testing their fog machine, because there's one house on every street.

By then I'd been staring at the same four square feet of fabric since the second week of September, and I couldn't tell anymore whether any of it was any good. So I carried the wing out into the hall to trick my own eyes, and held it up against the wall by the stairs.

It was really good.

There's a spot on that wall where the paint sits a shade off, from when we did the stairwell and ran out, and against it the green went nearly white. I moved it a foot to the left, into the good paint, and it came back.

Standing there at twenty to nine on a Thursday holding up a piece of painted fabric, I felt ridiculous about how much I liked it.

Eric came back through in a T-shirt with his phone in his hand.

"Mom texted."

"Mm."

"She's got a surprise for Lucy. Wants to bring it by Saturday."

I was still looking at the wing, still thinking the tail needed one more pass at the tip where the organza had gone slightly translucent.

"A surprise," I said.

"That's what she said."

"What kind of surprise?"

"She didn't say." He was already scrolling to something else. "You know Mom."

I did know Mom. I set the wing down on the cereal boxes slowly, both hands, and looked at his phone for longer than I meant to.

"Okay," I said.