Watch Me Disappear

you, too, Mrs. Howston,” I manage to say.
    “Oh, no! You have to call me Anna,” she says. “Mrs. Howston is my mother-in-law.” She laughs. “So you two are putting together a flapper costume today?” she asks, stepping back from our prolonged hug.
    I nod.
    “I think you’ll find everything you need, although you’ll have to do some rummaging. A lot of that stuff hasn’t gotten unpacked, and I feel less inclined by the day,” she says, patting her belly. She sighs and turns toward her canvas. “What do you think, Mis? Better?”
    Missy walks over to look at her mother’s painting. “Hmm. I do like the way you’ve brightened the colors,” she says after a moment.
    “Missy is my consultant,” Anna says, casting me a smile. “Well, I have some more to do here, and then it’s time for my midmorning nap.” She fakes a yawn and then turns back to Missy. “How do fajitas sound for lunch?”
    “That’s great, mom,” Missy says.
    “Ok for you, Lizzie?”
    They eat fajitas for lunch. I love it. We don’t eat Mexican food ever at my house. My mother thinks it’s too fattening and low class. “Yeah, that’s fantastic,” I say.
    In the attic, Missy moves boxes around, but I am still distracted by the news that Anna is ready to pop any day now.
    “You didn’t tell me your mother was pregnant,” I say.
    “Really? No. I must have told you,” Missy answers.
    “I think I would remember.” I wonder if Missy hasn’t mentioned it because she’s embarrassed or something.
    “Well, I guess I’m so used to her being pregnant now that I didn’t think to tell you.” She moves aside a few more boxes. “When she first found out, I told everyone.”
    “Wow. So how do you feel about it?” I know how I would feel. I would be pissed. I mean, my mom barely has enough affection for two kids. If she had another baby, I’d end up being a full-time nanny. Not that it would ever happen anyway, because my mom had her tubes tied right after I was born. In her words, two are enough.
    “Are you kidding? I’m so excited! I’ve always wanted a sister or brother.” She looks at me and I can see from the smile on her face that she is sincere.
    “But did your parents plan this?”
    “Oh, yeah. My mom has wanted this for years, but she didn’t want to do it while my dad was still in the army. I guess it was pretty hard on her when I was little and he was deployed, and anyway, with a war going on, it was just too scary. But as soon as he got out, they got busy. Hey, I think I found the right boxes,” she says, kneeling down and pulling open the top of a large box labeled “Costumes.”
    “But how old is your mom?” I ask. However nonchalant Missy is about her family situation, I’m having a hard time taking it in.
    “Thirty-seven,” she says, pulling various pieces of clothing from the box. “Look at this!” She holds up a leather vest with fringe on it. “My cowgirl vest! I wore this to school every day in the third grade.”
    “Wait, your mom is only thirty-seven?”
    “Yep. She was a child bride.”
    “She had you when she was twenty?” I ask, trying to sort out the math in my head.
    “Yep. My parents were childhood sweethearts, but my dad is a few years older than my mom.”
    “Wow.”
    “I know, right? Makes me wish I had a childhood sweetheart. I guess we’ve missed the age cut-off for that, though.”
    “Yeah,” I say.
    “Shoot! This box is just kid stuff. Somewhere over here there’s a box of my mom’s dress-up stuff, costume jewelry, stuff like that.”
    I haven’t been very helpful. I kneel down beside Missy and start combing through the boxes she set out. I want to hear more about her parents’ romance, but I don’t want to seem too nosy, so I drop it. Eventually we find a couple of boxes full of Anna’s old dresses and random adult-sized costumes. By the time we emerge from the attic for lunch, Missy is wearing a gold lamé dress that drapes at the neck and falls to the floor with a slit up to the middle of her thigh, elbow-high black gloves, a black boa, an enormous rope of fake (but convincing) pearls, a “hat” made of black feathers mounted on a hair comb that sits slightly askew on her head and looks like some wild bird—Anna tells us at lunch it is a cocktail hat that she wore to a wedding in England—and strappy black stilettos. She also found one of those long cigarette-filters that you see women holding in old movies.
    “I’m going to have to practice if I