One Door From Heaven

wrong corner."
        "The day before the July Fourth holiday," Geneva said, "you sell lots of lunchmeats and beer. It's mostly a cash business."
        "And someone wanted the cash," Leilani guessed.
        "He was a perfect gentleman about it," Geneva recalled.
        "Except for the shooting."
        "Well, yes, except for that," Geneva agreed. "But he came up to the cash register with this lovely smile. Well dressed, soft-spoken. He says, 'I'd be really grateful if you'd give me the money in the register, and please don't forget the large bills under the drawer.' "
        Leilani squinted with righteous indignation. "So you refused to give it to him."
        "Heavens, no, dear. We emptied the register and all but thanked him for sparing us the trouble of paying income tax on it."
        "And he shot you anyway?"
        "He shot my Vernon twice, and apparently then he shot me."
        "Apparently?"
        "I remember him shooting Vernon. 1 wish I didn't, but] do." Earlier, sadness had cast a gray shadow across Geneva's face at the counterfeit memory of her anguish-filled love affair with a heroin junkie; but now a flush of happiness pinked her features, and she smiled. "Vernon was a wonderful man, as sweet as honey in the comb."
        Micky reached for her aunt's hand. "I loved him, too, Aunt Gen."
        To Leilani, Geneva said, "I miss him so much, even after all these years, but I can't cry over him anymore, because every memory, even that awful day, reminds me of how sweet he was, how loving."
        "My brother, Lukipela-he was like that." In spite of this tribute to her brother, Leilani was not inspired to match Geneva's smile. Instead, the girl's cocky cheerfulness melted into melancholy. Her clear eyes clouded toward a more troubled shade of blue.
        For a moment, Micky perceived in their young visitor a quality that chilled her because it was like a view of the darker ravines of her own interior landscape: a glimpse of reckless anger, despair, a brief revelation of a sense of worthlessness that the girl would deny but that from personal experience Micky recognized too well.
        No sooner had Leilani's defenses cracked than they mended. Her eyes glazed with emotion at the mention of her brother, but now they focused. Her gaze rose from her deformed hand to smiling Geneva, and she smiled, too. "Mrs. D, you said apparently the gunman shot you."
        "Well, I know he shot me, of course, but I have no memory of it. I remember him shooting Vernon, and then the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital, disoriented, more than four days later."
        "The bullet didn't actually penetrate her head," Micky said.
        "Too hard," Geneva declared proudly.
        "Luck," Micky clarified. "The angle of the shot was severe. The slug literally ricocheted off her skull, fracturing it, and furrowed through her scalp."
        "So, Mrs. D, how did your wires get scrambled?" Leilani asked, tapping her head.
        "It was a depressed fracture," said Geneva. "Bone chips in the brain. A blood clot."
        "They opened Aunt Gen's head as though it were a can of beans."
        "Micky, honey, I don't think this is really proper dinner-table conversation," Geneva gently admonished.
        "Oh, I've heard much worse at our house," Leilani assured them. "Old Sinsemilla fancies herself an artist with a camera, and she has this artistic compulsion to take pictures of road kill when we're traveling. At dinner sometimes she likes to talk about what she saw squashed on the highway that day. And my pseudofather-"
        "That would be the murderer," Micky interrupted without a wink or a smirk, as though she'd never think to question the outrageous family portrait that the girl was painting for them.
        "Yeah, Dr. Doom," Leilani confirmed.
        "Never let him adopt you," Micky said. "Even Leilani Klonk is preferable to Leilani Doom."
        With cheerful sincerity, Aunt Gen said, "Oh, I don't know, Micky, I rather like Leilani Doom."
        As though it were the most natural thing to do, the girl picked up Micky's fresh can of Budweiser and, instead of drinking from it, rolled it back and forth across her brow, cooling her forehead.
        "Dr. Doom isn't his real name, of course. It's what I call him behind his back. Sometimes at dinner, he likes to talk about people he's killed-the way they looked when they died, their last words, if they cried,