Scissor Link, Georgette Kaplan [best 7 inch ereader .TXT] 📗

She guzzled from her water bottle after. The bottle was by Alexander Wang. The water was by Angelina Jolie.

Shower routine: warm water. She preferred to be scorched, but lukewarm was better for her skin. Shampoo rubbed into her scalp, especially at the nape of her neck. Sixty seconds. Conditioner. Brush. Soap. Scrub. Blast of cold water to seal the cuticle for shiny skin. Then, as the steam hung in the air, she moisturized. She didn’t admire the tautness of her own body, but she did appreciate it. All her exercise, her dieting, her care, they’d given her this raw material that she could now play with. Make something out of.

Beauty routine: she washed her face with cleansing crème. Moisturized with Luzern lotion, adding a mist of rose water and a light helping of sunscreen. She considered a perfecting mask, but no. Once a week was enough.

Makeup was minimal. Highlighter, mascara, rose balm. A touch of lip sheen. Then a dab of fragrance on her wrists, the nape of her neck, by her ears. She used her hands for as much of the application as she could. She liked to be sure with her makeup, to know what she was crafting. Brushes and other tools were always so imprecise.

She put on a cream-colored shearling and cashmere vest underneath a beige long-sleeve sweater tunic. Then a suede pencil skirt. Brunello Cucinelli. Pink underwear beneath. Kitten heels in sable-black. A low-key look. Light, but ascetic. She stared into the reflection of herself and saw nothing to chisel away, to grind down or excise.

Not yet.

9 a.m. She’d finished breakfast, but the notebook sat in the kitchen nook, the pen an unsteady bookmark to an unfinished page. She gave it a wide berth, as she took her dishes to the sink, rinsed them, then placed them into the machine. The job seemed unfinished, though—she’d tried to think what hadn’t been done.

Of course. She hadn’t washed Roberta’s dishes.

Dear Roberta,

I know you think that if you’d stuck with your legal career, you would have become a senior partner by now. You were a fair legal mind, but in all honesty, the point is moot. You became a paralegal. You supported me as I pursued a career at Savin. We moved here. We built a life here. I attained a position of respect and responsibility. And now you want to throw it all away to start a law firm with some college buddy and pretend you’re fresh out of law school?

Clearly there’s something lacking in our life. Fine. Tell me what it is, because I can’t see it. You have a wife who loves you. A wife who is intelligent and successful. A wife who looks practically the same as the day we met, and I am well aware of how long ago that was. What else must I contribute to your happiness?

The maid arrived slightly behind schedule. Janet left little for her to do, but whatever there was, she did it.

Janet sat in her living room, listening to the spritz of spray bottles, the squeak of washcloths, the burr of brooms. She didn’t know why—after seven years, surely she could trust the woman with her homestead.

Perhaps it was just her place, as it was the maid’s to clean.

She tried to concentrate on her book. Unfriendly Skies: The Air Battles of World War II. It was hard to be engrossed in it. The author made the most basic errors, confusing the SBD and SB2C dive bombers, mistaking the caliber of the IJNS Yamato’s guns. She tossed it aside and lifted another from the tower of To Be Reads. Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II by Carl Hoffman.

On February 21, 1947, the Kee Bird crashed on a frozen lake in the Arctic. A Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Kee Bird had been one of the last of its kind—at the time, the pinnacle of American engineering. Its development had cost a billion dollars more than the Manhattan Project, and two of the Kee Bird’s brethren, the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car, had ended the war they’d been designed for.

As part of Project Nanook, the Kee Bird was sent on a top secret mission to search for possible Soviet military activity in northern Greenland. Encountering bad weather and the North Pole’s compass-killing magnetic anomalies, the Kee Bird’s crew became disoriented and flew off course, burning fuel for over nine hours, until they had no choice but to crash land and await rescue. Three days later, they were rescued by First Lieutenant Bobbie Joe Cavnar aboard the C-54 Red Raider.

And the Kee Bird stayed in the ice. Ninety feet long, its wingspan 141 feet wide, its only damage was the props bent from a wheels-up landing and a leak in the number-three engine. The plane that had won the Second World War, still fully functional, still a beauty of a machine, was now only so much scrap metal.

Janet closed the book before she started, blaming her sudden emotion on the overall melancholic day she’d had. She wanted literary comfort food, an old familiar friend in paperback, but she didn’t want to taint a good book with her present mood. She wanted to slip out of herself, just for a moment, and fill her lungs with something other than this numbness.

The maid started vacuuming. Janet could hear the steady thrum of air being sucked in, the slight rattle of chunks disappearing into the intake. Morsels of food. Particles tracked in from inside. Outcroppings on her perfect life that just had to be chiseled away, sanded down, made pure.

She didn’t know the maid’s name. She’d forgotten it.

Roberta would know.

The maid was done by 11 a.m. Janet had an appointment at her nail salon for noon.

She got there early. Someone else had canceled. She got to have her manicure at 11:40. Janet liked saving time, even when she didn’t know what she was saving it for.

The manicure took