One Door From Heaven

Deserving of Being Stabbed." Leilani could act as tough as anyone, and if real toughness could be measured by how much adversity you endured, then she figured that her cup of toughness was more than half full. But the type of toughness that involved violent action, that required a capacity for savagery, might be beyond her.
        She would tape the knife to her body anyway.
        Eventually the time would come to act, and Leilani would do what she could to defend herself. Her disabilities were less severe than Luki's; she'd always been stronger than her brother. When at last she arrived at her unwanted moment alone with the pseudofather, when he cast aside the mask behind which he lived, revealing his true booger face, she might die as horribly as sweet Luki had died, but she would not go easily. Whether or not she had the stomach to use the knife, she would put up a fight that Preston Maddoc would remember.
        A groan from old Sinsemilla caused Leilani to turn her powered chair away from the windshield, toward the lounge.
        In the soft lamplight, Sinsemilla rolled off her side. She lay prone, head raised, peering into the shadowy kitchen. Then, as though she'd been brought here in a ventilated pet-store box, she crawled on her belly toward the back of the motor home.
        Leilani sat watching until her mother reached the galley and, still prostrate, pulled open the refrigerator door. Sinsemilla didn't want anything in the fridge, but she wasn't able to get to her feet to reach the switches that turned on the central ceiling fixture and the downspot over the sink. In the wedge of icy light, which narrowed as the door slowly swung shut, she crawled to a cabinet behind which the liquor supply was stored conveniently at floor level.
        Something in Leilani held her back as she rose from the co-pilot's chair and followed her mother into the galley. Her braced leg didn't respond as fluidly as usual, and she clumped through the motor home in an ungainly gait rather like the one she used when she wanted to exaggerate her disability in order to enhance a joke.
        By the time that Leilani reached the galley, the refrigerator closed. She switched on the sink light.
        Old Sinsemilla had gotten a liter of tequila from the liquor supply. She was sitting on the floor, her back against a cabinet door. She held the bottle between her thighs, struggling to open it, as though the twist-off cap were complex futuristic technology that challenged her twenty-first-century skills.
        Leilani took a plastic tumbler from an upper cabinet. All the drinking vessels aboard the Fair Wind were in fact plastic, precisely because of the danger that Sinsemilla would injure herself with real glassware when she descended to this condition.
        She added ice and a slice of lime to the tumbler.
        Although the motherthing would happily pour down tequila warm, without a drinking glass and condiments, the consequences of allowing her to do so were unpleasant. Swigging from the bottle, she always drank too fast and too much. Then what went down came up, and Leilani was left with the mess.
        Until Leilani stooped to take the bottle from her mother, old Sinsemilla seemed unaware that she had company. She relinquished the tequila without resistance, but she cringed into a corner formed by the cabinets, holding her hands protectively in front of her face. Tears suddenly washed her cheeks, and her mouth softened in these salt tides.
        "It's only me," Leilani said, assuming that her mother was still operating from an altered state and was less here in the galley than in some tweaked version of the real world.
        With her wrenched face and tortured voice, Sinsemilla made an anguished plea for understanding. "Don't, wait, don't, don't… I only wanted some buttered cornbread."
        Pouring the tequila, Leilani nervously rattled the neck of the bottle against the plastic tumbler when she heard the word cornbread.
        On those occasions when Leilani had awakened to find her steel support missing, when she had been forced to endure a difficult and humiliating game of find-the-brace, her mother had been highly amused by her struggle but had also insisted that the game would teach her self-reliance and remind her that life "throws more stones at you than buttered cornbread."
        That peculiar admonition had always seemed to be of a piece with old Sinsemilla's general kookiness.