One Door From Heaven

has far to go, according to the old nursery rhyme, and Micky Bellsong was born on a Thursday in May, more than twenty-eight years ago. On this Thursday in August, however, she was too hungover to go as far as she'd planned.
        Lemon vodka diminishes mathematical ability. Sometime during the night, she must have counted the fourth double shot as a second, the fifth as a third.
        Staring at the bathroom mirror, she said, "Damn lemon flavoring screws up your memory." She couldn't tweak a smile from herself.
        She had overslept her first job interview and had risen too late to keep the second. Both were for positions as a waitress.
        Although she had experience in food service and liked that work, she hoped to get a computer-related position, customizing software applications. She had compressed three years of instruction into the past sixteen months and had discovered that she possessed the ability and the interest to do well in this work.
        In fact, the image of herself as a software-applications mensch was so radically in opposition to the way she'd led her life to date that it formed the center of her vision of a better future. Through the worst year of her existence, this vision had sustained her.
        Thus far, seeking to make the dream real, she'd been thwarted by the perception among employers that the economy was sliding, dipping, stalling, coming under a shadow, cooling, taking a breather before the next boom. They had a limitless supply of words and phrases to convey the same rejection.
        She hadn't begun to despair yet. Long ago, life had taught her that the world didn't exist to fulfill Michelina Bellsong's dreams or even to encourage them. She expected to have to struggle.
        If the job hunt took weeks, however, her resolution to build a new life might prove to be no match for her weaknesses. She had no illusions about herself. She could change. But given an excuse, she herself would be the greatest obstacle to that change.
        Now the face in the mirror displeased her, before and after she applied the little makeup she used. She looked good, but she took no pleasure in her appearance. Identity lay in accomplishment, not in mirrors. And she was afraid that before she accomplished anything, she'd again seek solace in the attention her looks could win her.
        Which would mean men again.
        She had nothing against men. Those who destroyed her childhood weren't typical. She didn't hold the entire male gender responsible for the perversions of a few, any more than she would judge all women by Sinsemilla's example… or by the example she herself had set.
        Actually, she liked men more than she should, considering the lessons learned from her experiences with them. She hoped one day to have a rewarding relationship with a good man-perhaps even marriage.
        The trick lay in the word good. Her taste in men was not much better than her mother's. Committing herself to the dead-wrong type of man, more than once, had led to her current circumstances, which seemed to her like the burnt-out bottom of a ruined life.
        After dressing for a three o'clock job interview-the only one of the day that she would be able to keep and the only one related to her computer training-Micky ate a hangover-curing breakfast at eleven o'clock, while standing at the kitchen sink. She washed down B-complex vitamins and aspirin with Coke, and finished the Coke with two chocolate-covered doughnuts. Her hangovers never involved a sick stomach, and a blast of sugar cleared her booze-fuzzed thoughts.
        Leilani was right when she guessed that Micky had a metabolism tuned like a space-shuttle gyroscope. She weighed only one pound more than she had weighed on her sixteenth birthday.
        While she stood at the sink, eating, she watched Geneva through the open window. With a garden hose, Aunt Gen hand-watered the lawn against the depredations of the August heat. She wore a straw hat with a wide brim to protect her face from the sun. Sometimes her entire body swayed as she moved the hose back and forth, as though she might be remembering a dance that she had attended in her youth, and as Micky ate the second doughnut, Geneva began to sing softly the love theme from Love in the Afternoon, one of her favorite movies.
        Maybe she was thinking about Vernon, the husband whom she'd lost too young. Or maybe she was remembering her affair with Gary Cooper,