The Darkest Corner (Gravediggers #1)(49)

He strolled in the opposite direction, toward the funeral home, and she realized she was standing right in front of the Clip n' Curl. Several pairs of eyes inside were staring straight at her.

"Well, this will be fun," she said in Russian and opened the door.

"He'd be an excellent choice for you, Tess," her mother said by way of greeting. "He seems very stable. Though I've heard he's not the most endowed, if you get my drift." Theodora waggled her eyebrows and pointed to her privates.

"Very subtle, Mama. I think everyone gets the drift."

Theodora was dressed in head-to-toe black, like she normally wore when she was cutting hair. She had a chain belt around her hips, and she was wearing a pair of leopard-print ballet slippers. Seeing mother and daughter standing next to each other was one of those WTF moments. They couldn't have looked or acted more different.

"You're looking a bit peaked today, Tess. I've got some of my vitamin juice in the fridge if you want some."

Tess thought it over for a second or two, tempted, but she declined. "I'll stick with coffee."

She poured a cup from the pot and doctored it up, and then took her place on the stool behind the counter. Taking the money and booking appointments kept her busy for the next hour and a half.

Besides her mother and grandmother, there was Debra Lassiter, in the chair next to her grandmother, looking sour, probably over the fact that Tatiana had beat her inside. Though if it bothered her so much, Tess wasn't sure why she kept booking her appointments on Fridays, when everyone in town knew Tatiana always had her hair done on Fridays at ten o'clock. Debra was round, and there was no differentiation between her head and her neck. But she wore bright red lipstick with confidence, and she was sucking down one of Theodora's vitamin juices, so Tess had a feeling she'd be pretty relaxed before long.

Twenty-year-old Crystal Rose sat behind the nail counter on the other side of the salon, waiting for her first customer. Theodora hated doing nails, but she hated Hard As Nails, which was two shops down, to get business she could steal a piece of the pie from. So she'd hired Crystal fresh out of beauty school.

Crystal's parents were Bobby and Lynette Rose, and Bobby owned the mechanic shop a couple of blocks over. They were good, blue-collar people who worked hard and went to church the occasional Sunday. So it was a little disconcerting to see the three of them together, since Crystal was more suited to the Addams Family.

Her jet-black hair was shaved to the scalp on one side of her head, and she'd dyed the other side a bright blue. She had piercings in both eyebrows, her nose, and her lip, and she had circles in both her earlobes big enough to throw darts through. From a conversation that had taken place at the Clip n' Curl after Crystal had started working there, Tess also knew she had her nipples pierced and she'd tried having her clit pierced, but it had hurt so bad she ended up throwing up on the piercer, and she'd had to pull the needle out herself because he was so pissed.

Her eye makeup was dark, and her lipstick was black. In a place like Last Stop, when Crystal Rose walked down the street, people stopped to stare. She might look like a freak, but she did a mean set of nails.



       
         
       
        

"I'm just saying," Theodora continued. "You could do a lot worse than Cal Dougherty. And you're not getting any younger. I know women are waiting longer to get married these days, but you've got to think about your eggs. There's a shelf life on those babies."

"Nonsense," her grandmother said. "I was almost forty when I had you, and I breezed through pregnancy and delivery. I was out of bed and working the next day. Age makes you tougher. Your memories are clouded because you got pregnant with Tess so young. You didn't have any fortitude. Never did I hear such wailing and complaining while you were giving birth."

"She was breech, Mama. It fucking hurt."

"Kiska," Tatiana said with a snort of derision.

Tess's eyebrows shot up to her hairline. It wasn't often one heard one's grandmother call someone a pussy. Much less if that someone was her own daughter.

Fortunately, the little bells above the door chimed as Jo Beth Schriever and Carol Dewberry walked in.

"Sorry I'm late," Carol said. "I was picking up my prescriptions at the Drug Mart, and I wasn't sure I was going to make it out of there alive. Mavis Beaman was in there."

There were several sympathetic groans that accompanied the news. Tess waited while Carol put her purse in one of the cubbies, grabbed one of Theodora's special vitamin juices, and sat down across from Crystal at the nail table.