and a copper laser treatment to eliminate the brown spot on her chin. Polly Mauney had
been filled with terror when her plastic surgeon had made it clear that no light source
could substitute for a scalpel. That was how bad she had gotten.
“Mrs. Mauney,” her plastic surgeon had told her.
“I don’t think you’re going to be happy with the results. The lines most troublesome are
too deep.”
He traced them on her face so gently. She relaxed, held hostage by tenderness. Mrs.
Mauney was addicted to going to the doctor. She liked being touched, looked at,
analyzed, scrutinized, and checked on after surgery or changes in her medication.
“Well,” Mrs. Mauney had told her plastic surgeon.
“If that’s what you recommend. And I suppose I am to assume you are referring to a face
lift.”
“Yes. And the eyes.” He held up a mirror to show her.
The tissue above and below her eyes was beginning to droop and puff.
This was irreversible. No amount of cold water splashes, cucumbers or cutting down on
alcohol or salt would make a significant difference, she was informed.
“What about my breasts?” she then had inquired.
Her plastic surgeon stepped back to look.
“What does your husband think?” he asked her.
“I think he’d like them bigger.”
Her doctor laughed. Why didn’t she state the obvious? I Unless a man was a pedophile
or gay, he liked them bigger. His gay female patients felt the same way. They were just
better sports about it, or pretended to be, if the one they loved didn’t have much to offer.
“We can’t do all of this at once,” the plastic surgeon warned Mrs. Mauney.
“Implants and a face lift are two very different surgeries, and we’d need to space them
apart, giving you plenty of time to heal.”
“How far apart?” she worried.
Chapter Twenty-three.
It did not occur to West until she was home and locking herself in for the night that she
would have to set her alarm clock. Perhaps one of her few luxuries in life was not getting
up on Sunday morning until her body felt like it, or Niles did. Then she took her time
making coffee and reading the paper, as she thought about her parents heading off to
Dover Baptist Church, not far from the Chevon, or from Pauline’s Beauty Shop, where
her mother got her hair fixed every Saturday at ten in the morning. West always called
her parents on Sunday, usually when they were sitting down to dinner and wishing her
place wasn’t empty.
“Great,” she muttered to herself, grabbing a beer as Niles sat on the window sill over the sink.
“So now I’ve got to get up at eight-thirty.
Can you believe that? ”
She tried to figure out what Niles was staring at. From I this section of Dilworth, West
would have no reminders of the city she protected were it not for the top thirty stories of
US Bank rising brightly above West’s unfinished fence. Niles had gotten really peculiar
lately, it struck West. He sat in the same spot every night, staring out, as if he were ET
missing home.
“What are you looking at?” West ran her fingernails down Niles’s silky, ruddy spine,
something that always made him purr.
He did not respond. He stared, as if in a trance.
“Niles?” West was getting a bit worried.
“What is it, baby? You not feeling well? Got a hairball? Mad at me again? That’s
probably it, isn’t it?” She sighed, taking a swallow of beer.
“I sure wish you’d try to be more understanding, Niles. I work hard, do everything I can
to provide you a secure, nice home. You know I love you, don’t you? But you gotta try
and cut me a little slack. I’m out there all the live-long day.” West pointed out the
window.
“And what? You’re here. This is your world, meaning your perspective isn’t as big as
mine, okay? So you get pissed because I’m not here, too. This isn’t fair. I want you to
give some serious thought to this. Got it?”
^r7 W The words of the owner were chatter, the buzzing of insects, the drone of sounds