“I’m sure you haven’t heard it all just yet. And I’d prefer ‘Harper,’ ” I replied. “I think I’m a bit tall to be a snippet.” And “Snippet” hadn’t always been an endearment, either.

His hand fell away from mine. “Ah. Well. I was on my way out, so I’ll let you two have some privacy, then,” Damon said, not quite frowning.

“Thanks.”

My mother waved and blew him a kiss. “Be good, Damon! Dinner at Marmont—don’t forget!”

“Of course not, bunny,” he answered, waving as he passed through the gate.

I just stood still until I heard the Mercedes purr to life and crunch away across the eucalyptus pods scattered on the pavement. I walked over to the table and stood beside Damon’s vacated chair—all the others were up against the cool white wall.

My mother looked me over, scowling. It didn’t become her. “Good God, baby, aren’t you sweltering in that jacket? Take it off; you’re making me sweat just looking at you,” she added, flicking her hand airily at me. Queen Veronica.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

She glared and leaned forward, all trace of the royal charm wiped away. “I said take it off, Harper.”

I shrugged and slipped out of the jacket, dropping it onto the back of Damon’s chair before I sat down on the seat.

My mother stared, aghast, at the holster tucked into my jeans. “Jesus, Harper! You bring a gun into my home? Into my home,” she repeated. She clasped a hand to her chest like someone from a silent film. I didn’t think it was the gun that offended her so much as my having it on my person.

“I bring a gun everywhere, Mother. I have a license for it.”

“But this is my home! How could you possibly think you’d need a gun in my house? This is a safe place! Not a. a barrio pool hall.”

“I was killed in a ‘safe place’ two years ago.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Harper. You’re not dead.”

“How would you know? You’re listed as my next of kin, but I never saw you at the hospital, Mother. If you’d bothered to show up, they’d have told you I died for two minutes.”

“You were fine! I called.”

“Not while I was conscious.”

She waved my words away. “How did I raise such a drama queen?”

“Because that’s what you wanted. Twelve years of professional dance and every audition and road show you could get me into was kind of a hint. I’m sure you remember it as well as I do. Like, when I was ten and instead of summer vacation, I did fifty-four performances of Annie.”

“In the chorus! And if you’d only lost a little weight, you’d have been first understudy!”

“I am not fat and I never have been. But I was much too tall to play a ten-year-old orphan. I’m five ten, for heaven’s sake!”

“Well, you weren’t then.” She looked me over and snorted. “And you could stand to lose five pounds. ”

Since I’d worked hard to put on that five pounds of muscle, I disagreed, but I didn’t say so. Instead I answered quietly, “And, if we’re slinging personal criticisms, you could stand to gain a few.” A woman in her late fifties shouldn’t have the body of a heroin-addicted teenager. I didn’t like my mother, but that didn’t mean I wished her ill.

She glared at me and kept her mouth shut—score one for me. She picked at the pineapple rind that sat on her plate and sighed, exasperated. “You don’t know how hard it is to compete in this town, sweetie. ”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes.

“You don’t,” she insisted.

“Do we have to have this conversation?”

“It’s entirely your choice.”

I’d heard that before—usually before emotional blackmail. “Then my choice is that we don’t.”

“Fine.” “Fine.”

We sat there in silence for a minute as birds called and traffic grumbled in the canyon below. Finally, I leaned forward and said, “Look, Mother, I need to know some things about the past—things about me. And maybe you and Dad, too.”

“What? You have a medical condition or something? I assure you, sweetie, no one in our family—”

“That’s not it. I’m not dying of cancer or anything screenplay- worthy. There have just been a few. things lately that indicate something creepy or bad happened sometime in the past. Do you have any idea what that could be?”

She looked surprised. “Well, dear, of course! Your father killed himself.”

Sitting in the sunny perfection of her tiny mock- Mediterranean villa, I stared at my mother. “What?” I felt like someone had punched me in the chest and pushed me off a cliff and I was hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote, waiting to fall. I stammered, shook my head, and kept repeating myself. “What, what, what?” It just didn’t make sense. My mind rejected it and everything sensible screamed in my head that it wasn’t—couldn’t be—true.

My mother grabbed my nearest arm and shook me. “Baby, stop that! You’re a trouper—we just go on; we don’t go to pieces over this sort of. thing.”

“ ‘ This sort of thing’?” I shouted, yanking my arm out of her grip. “What sort of thing? Suicide? Holy shit, Mother!”

She slapped me. “Don’t you talk like that, Snippet! I won’t have it! You’re not a filthy little street urchin to be using words like that. Buck up!”

I knew that phrase, that tone. What she meant was “Shut up and don’t embarrass me,” but I didn’t see anyone around who needed to be impressed by my restraint. I articulated with venom and care through my confusion and a sudden flare of rage. “I will not buck the fuck up, Mother. This is not an audition. I don’t need to be a little lady. You just said my father killed himself! Don’t you think that deserves a bit more explanation than ‘buck up’? You always told me Dad’s death was an accident!”

She rolled her eyes and waved my upset away. “Drama, drama, drama. He was a dentist. Dentists don’t have accidents. What would they do? Slip with a drill? Die from a leak in the laughing gas? He blew his brains out. It was just so. nasty, I never wanted to tell you. There. Is that awful enough for you?”

I just kept gaping at her. “What the hell.? My God, Mother. Do you know why? Did he say? Did he leave a note? Something?”

“He left a note, but it didn’t make any sense, and I don’t know why he did it. He was depressed. All dentists are depressed. If I’d known, I’d have married a plastic surgeon.”

I was flabbergasted. What could I say? I didn’t remind her that husband number threehad been a plastic surgeon. No doubt a contributor to the fact she looked closer to forty-nine than fifty-nine. I didn’t scream or throw things, even though they both sounded like more reasonable reactions than her unreal calm.

“He had nightmares,” she went on. “Your father was losing his mind. I should have seen it coming. ”

I was still staring, shaking my head, and not sure what to think, but my investigator instincts started kicking in. “How?” I asked in a quivering voice. “What did he do?”

“He stopped talking to me.”

I couldn’t fault him for that. I’d stopped talking to her for years.

“He got quieter and quieter and sometimes he’d just. leave.”

“Go out of town without telling you, go on benders. what?”

“No, I mean he’d sneak away. He’d just leave the house and I didn’t know he’d gone. Then he’d come back and sometimes I didn’t know he’d come home. He was so odd. spooky even, by then.”

“He wasn’t always odd?”

“Oh, yes, but I thought it was kind of charming at first. Like the way Lyle was charming—you remember Lyle?”

“The guy with the dogs? The TV writer?”

“Yes. That Lyle.” At least she hadn’t married him.

He had been a very funny guy—he’d made me laugh even when I was still crying over my dad and on the days my whole body ached from dance classes and dieting—and he’d had two ridiculous retrievers he’d called “the labradork twins.” We’d moved in with Lyle and the labradorks about six months after my father died. Normally the dogs had the run of the house, but Mother had put the dogs in the yard when one of them started using the carpet as a toilet, and that, for some reason, had been inexcusable to Lyle—the expulsion, not the piddling. When he’d come home from work and seen the dogs in the yard, he’d hauled back and smacked her hard enough to knock out one of her front teeth. She’d packed both our bags and we were gone within fifteen minutes, me carrying her knocked-out tooth in a glass of water while Lyle ran after us, babbling, “I didn’t mean it, Verry! I’m sorry, Verry!” She’d mailed the glass back in one of my tap shoe boxes two days later. The Lyle incident had cemented her aversion to pets; we never had another dog, cat, bird, or even a fish after that.