Page 36 of How Lulu Lost Her Mind

“No.” I shake my head and ask through a yawn, “Do you want me to braid your hair, so it won’t be tangled when you get up?”

She nods, and I grab a brush and a hair elastic from her nightstand. When I was young, I brushed her hair for hours while we watched TV together. “Remember when I gave you side buns like Princess Leia?”

“Who?” she asks, and reaches for Booty.

“No one.” I slide the elastic around my wrist and brush the tangles from her long, dark hair. “Do you want me to take you to get your ends trimmed?”

“G,” she calls out around a mouth filled with popcorn.

I glance at the television. “Paris is for lovers.”

“What?”

“I solved the puzzle. Paris is for lovers.”

I part her hair as she changes the channel to Hollywood Squares. I guess she doesn’t like that I guessed the answer.

?

??That John Denver is a handsome man.”

It’s John Davidson, but who cares? She laughs at a joke Paul Lynde makes about a mini pig, and I wonder if she really gets it or is just laughing along. She is so engrossed in the game show and her popcorn that I wonder if she knows I’m with her, braiding her hair like I used to.

I lean to one side and smooth her hair with my hand. My neck pinches, and I slowly move my chin to my shoulder. “Crap. Ouch.”

“Don’t curse.”

I guess she knows I’m here. “Sorry,” I apologize, even though crap isn’t a curse word. Not like shit, anyway. “My shoulder hurts.”

“Call the foxy doctor,” she says without taking her eyes from the television. “He’ll give you something.”

“Simon? He’s a house doctor.”

She licks a sprinkling of powdered cheese from her lips. “He comes to the house.”

“He restores houses for a living.”

“Yep, that’s right. Not many doctors come to the house these days.”

“?‘Squeezed and pulled and hurt my neck.’?” I mutter a quote from Rain Man.

“Call the foxy doctor.”

“He’s performing an emergency appendectomy.”

“I always wanted to marry a doctor,” she says as she flips through channels before settling on an old episode of Family Feud. “That Peter sure is handsome.”

I glance at the television as Richard Dawson asks the Brown family, “Name something you blow.”

“A job interview,” I say, before I forget that I’m not supposed to answer.

Mom glances over her shoulder and gives me the stink eye. “Periwinkle,” she yells, and returns her stinky eyes to the television.

“A red light,” the contestant answers.

“Periwinkle.”

By the time I slide the elastic from my wrist and finish Mom’s hair, she’s yelled “Periwinkle” six more times, and I want to stab my brain.