Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

Riveter as Venus de Milo.
    It was hard for Temple to credit this view of womanhood, her being so small and so often underestimated because of it. But... hey, the goddess/Amazon type never died.
    “That’s my mom,” Mariah breathed.
    “Yup.” Larry.
    Boy, men were inarticulate about feelings!
    “Yeah,” Temple told Mariah. “Quite a set of pipes. I don’t think anyone knows about this now, besides us.” Mariah sat back, a troubled expression on her face. “Why’d she keep it a secret?”
    “Imagine what the guys at work would say? What would the boys at school say about you? Miss ‘Tween Queen singer/hip-hop heroine/beauty queen?”
    “Oh. Not good. I don’t get it. We’re supposed to be pretty and talented and we’re supposed to be... no competition.”
    “You got it. That’s right. Doesn’t make sense. Guys often don’t.”
    ‘Then why do we bother with them?”
    “You gotta answer that one for yourself.”
    Mariah regarded Larry.
    “What?” He sounded defensive.
    “You don’t look worth much.”
    “Appearances are deceiving. Look. I’m your mother’s biggest fan. She’s good, isn’t she?”
    “Yeah. She is. Is that why you like her?”
    “Right.” He high-fived her.
    Temple watched Mariah ratchet another puzzle piece of life into place. This had been a busy week for her.
    Something was disturbing here though. Molina had left the real secret, Mariah’s father, securely closeted. Temple had assumed that was the thing Mariah was old enough to know” now. Apparently not. Apparently Molina could be as much of a coward as the next woman, if the right stakes were involved.
    And then, at the mike, Molina/Carmen sat back on the stool. She nodded at the instrumentalists and segued, a capella, into “Mariah.”
    She sang it low and slow. It wasn’t nightclub fodder. It was a musical-stage number, dramatic and mock Western. It wasn’t urban, it wasn’t hip but it was powerful and it was pure torch song in its dark, contralto melody, meant for a man to sing, with unexpected hints of tenor, or tender soprano in this case.
    The song started “way out here.” The frontier. The urban edge. The selvage of self. The rain had a name. Tess. It hissed. The fire had a name. Jo. It spat. The wind was something else. More than monosyllabic. The wind was a woman named Mariah. Mah-rye-ah. This woman turned the stars around and made the trees sigh and whine. This woman wind was an icon for “only” and “lonely.”
    Molina’s voice made the wind mourn, made loss a sustained note, made the word “Mariah” into the most beautiful elongated three syllables in the English language.
    Temple, caught up in the exquisite beauty of the styling, still managed to gauge the reactions around her. She was a PR woman; she always took a room’s ambient temperature.
    Mariah, herself, was enraptured by the poetry of her name, which she really understood for the first time.
    Larry. Larry was no doubt enamored by the artistry of the woman he escorted, but was there more than that to his sudden pursuit of Molina?
    Temple sat by herself, moved but measuring, sensing, understanding. A siren had sung, momentarily throwing off her human guise. Each person here had heard a different song.
    Temple—cursed by the gift of Cassandra, the prophet no one would believe—could see that some good, and a lot of bad, would probably come from this night, this siren song, this guarded family of two that was being inexorably circled by unpredictable outside forces.



An Invitation She
    Can’t Refuse

    “Temple.”
    Matt stood speechless when she answered his knock. It wasn’t just the longish straight blonde hair—
    “Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of it.”
    “Your eyes will wash out? Temple, they’re green. Is it some strange dietetic reaction?”
    “Don’t mention dietetic reactions! One of those was murder on my last case.”
    “Have I got the right unit?”
    “I just forgot about the green contacts. Let me go change them. The hair will have to be redyed to my natural color, then grow out. Come in. Sit down. Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
    Matt did as instructed, which left him confronting Midnight Louie and his thoroughly natural green eyes over the flimsy barrier of a throw pillow.
    Other than Temple’s radical change of appearance, everything else around her place seemed the same. Seemed... normal.
    She came clattering back over the hardwood floors on a pair of feminine and creative shoes. That was the same,