Hot Ice

too. I’ll be here at nine to make sure you’re up and dressed.”
    “I hate interviews,” Clare mumbled.
    “Tough.” Angie took her by the shoulders and kissed both her cheeks. “Now go get some rest. You really do look tired.”
    Clare perched an elbow on her knee. “Aren’t you going to lay out my clothes for me?” she asked as Angie walked to the elevator.
    “It may come to that.”
    Alone, Clare sat brooding for a few minutes. She did detest interviews, all the pompous and personal questions. The process of being studied, measured, and dissected. As with most things she disliked but couldn’t avoid, she pushed it out of her mind.
    She was tired, too tired to concentrate well enough to fire up her torch again. In any case, nothing she’d begun in the past few weeks had turned out well. But she was much too restless to nap or to stretch out on the floor and devour some daytime television.
    On impulse she rose and went to a large trunk that served as seat, table, and catch-all. Digging in, she riffled through an old prom dress, her graduation cap, her wedding veil, which aroused a trio of reactions— surprise, amusement, and regret—a pair of tennis shoes she’d thought were lost for good, and at last, a photo album.
    She was lonely, Clare admitted as she took it with her to the window seat overlooking Canal Street. For her family. If they were all too far away to touch, at least she could reach them through old pictures.
    The first snapshot made her smile. It was a muddy black-and-white Polaroid of herself and her twin brother, Blair, as infants, Blair and Clare, she thought with a sigh. How often had she and her twin groaned over their parents’ decision to name cute? The shot was fuzzily out of focus, her father’s handiwork. He’d never taken a clear picture in his life.
    “I’m mechanically declined,” he’d always said. “Put anything with a button or a gear in my hands, and I’ll mess it up. But give me a handful of seeds and some dirt, and I’ll grow you the biggest flowers in the county.”
    And it was true, Clare thought. Her mother was a natural tinkerer, fixing toasters and unstopping sinks, while Jack Kimball had wielded hoe and spade and clippers to turn their yard on the corner of Oak Leaf and Mountain View lanes in Emmitsboro, Maryland, into a showplace.
    There was proof here, in a picture her mother had taken. It was perfectly centered and in focus. The infant Kimball twins reclined on a blanket on close-cropped green grass. Behind them was a lush bank of spring blooms. Nodding columbine, bleeding hearts, lilies of the valley, impatiens, all orderly planted without being structured, all richly blossoming.
    Here was a picture of her mother. With a jolt, Clare realized she was looking at a woman younger than herself. Rosemary Kimball’s hair was a dark honey blond, worn poofed and lacquered in the style of the early sixties. She was smiling, on the verge of a laugh as she held a baby on either hip.
    How pretty she was, Clare thought. Despite the bowling ball of a hairdo and the overdone makeup of the times, Rosemary Kimball had been—and was still—a lovely woman. Blond hair, blue eyes, a petite, curvy figure and delicate features.
    There was Clare’s father, dressed in shorts with garden dirt on his knobby knees. He was leaning on his hoe, grinning self-consciously at the camera. His red hair was cropped in a crew cut, and his pale skin showed signs of sunburn. Though well out of adolescence, Jack Kimball had still been all legs and elbows. An awkward scarecrow of a man who had loved flowers.
    Blinking back tears, Clare turned the next page in the album. There were Christmas pictures, she and Blair in front of a tilted Christmas tree. Toddlers on shiny red tricycles. Though they were twins, there was little family resemblance. Blair had taken his looks from their mother, Clare from their father, as though in the womb the babies had chosen sides. Blair was all angelic looks, from the top of his towhead to the tips of his red Keds. Clare’s hair ribbon was dangling. Her white leggings bagged under the stiff skirts of her organdy dress. She was the ugly duckling who had never quite managed to turn into a swan.
    There were other pictures, cataloging a family growing up. Birthdays and picnics, vacations and quiet moments. Here and there were pictures of friends and relatives. Blair, in his spiffy band uniform, marching down Main Street in the Memorial Day parade. Clare with