Free Ed Lynskey - Isabel and Alma Trumbo 02 - The Cashmere Shroud by Ed Lynskey Page B

album’s right-hand corner. Her lemon yellow smiley decals remained untouched.
    S he flipped over the front cover. Inside it, she’d printed in block letters with a black Magic Marker, “YOU’VE STOLEN THE PROPERTY OF MS. SAMMI JO GARNER!” Luckily, she’d grown up when Kodachrome was still used, and no digitized pixels had corrupted the visual world. Sporadic snapshots documented her maturing years. Coffee and chocolate stains discolored a few images while Mo had printed the dates in the top white borders to the other snapshots. A frisky cat named Tyger had chewed on a few snapshots’ corners. Sammi Jo had Scotch taped two snapshots to repair their rips.
    S tudying the snapshots struck an emotional chord to resonate through her. She didn’t attempt to curb or harness the churn of emotions, but rather she rolled with it.
    “All aboard the Memory Lane Express,” she said, poking fun at her nostalgic mood. “I haven’t had a reason to board it in too long.”
    Almost reflexive ly, she began singing the lyrics to a children’s nursery rhyme Mo had taught Sammi Jo one afternoon while they were at the Cape Cod. They’d been eating strawberry Moon pies with Mountain Dews under the shade of the honey locusts in full bloom. Despite her wild streak, Mo had spent her all-too-rare tender moments with her daughter between watching the soap operas and game shows. The song that Mo had learned from a favorite aunt ran:
     
    Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,
    Fly away home.
    Your house is on fire, and your children are gone,
    All except one,
    And her name is Ann,
    Her name i s Ann,
    And she hid under the frying pan.
     
    Sammi Jo’s mother was Maureen Lionheart, or simply Mo. She was born a free bird that no cage designed was able to hold. Sammi Jo reflected on Mo’s footloose ways. The partygoer hard-cores stopped and collected her (she always wore the same little black dress) at the end of the Garners’ driveway. If it was boogie down night at the Lions Club building, be sure to pick up Mo. If a honky-tonk located within an hour’s drive hired a live bar band to crank out country and western hit tunes, be sure to pick up Mo. If a festive neighbor threw a wingding with forty-ouncers chilled on wash tubs of shaved ice, be sure to pick up Mo. Nobody danced faster or longer than she did because she brought the hottest get-down fever.
    Sammi Jo sized up the snapshot of her mother’s struck pose in the little black dress with a hipshot casualness, devil-may-care eyes, and an imp’s smile. Sammi Jo kept a few memories of Mo who’d the last time gone alone to the beer keg party thrown at a hay barn in May. Perhaps the band had driven up from a small town like Stuart’s Draft, which the steel pedal guitarist told her between his guzzles of beer. Perhaps they laughed. Perhaps she dug his style and wanted to hit the road. At any rate, she didn’t return home to the Cape Cod with the salmon-pink streaks painting the eastern sky to sunup.
    Sammi Jo had been six and started reading Dick and Jane with Puff and Spot at the elementary school. Ray Burl fixed their breakfast—sunny-side-up eggs, scrapple well-fried, and rye toast with raspberry jam—and didn’t say a word about it then, or ever after that fateful morning.
    He hadn’t shrugged, winced, or shed a single tear. It was as if Mo had been a short-term visitor in their household and overstayed her welcome. She’d split with no advance notice. Her exit didn’t render her persona non grata so much as she was seen as a passing fad, here today and gone tomorrow.
    Ray Burl continued to wear his wedding band, even after he signed the official divorce papers that had arrived by certified mail. He got rid of her things, the hospital ladies’ auxiliary accepting them, no questions asked. He also never dated another lady as far as Sammi Jo knew. He wasn’t bitter, just seemingly indifferent.
    S he resolved to become everything unstable Mo wasn’t although Sammi Jo was the