Family Business. Jezi was not with them to eat it, but Dad had still materialized after school hours in his secret life with a cake for her. Jezi, he had explained to Mara and Lola, was feeling down because she could not come home, so he thought it might cheer her up if they had her party and took lots of photographs of themselves with whatever gifts they had each procured for her and generally let her know that they had been thinking about her as much as she had surely been thinking about them on her twelfth birthday, even though seeing her was quite impossible even for her mom and their mutual father.
Mara, with a sister's insight into Jessica's character and a sister's lack of excessive charity, had a strong suspicion that this scheme would not go very far down the road toward lifting Jezi's spirits. She did not, however, see any good which could come from pointing this out to her parents. For one thing, said parents would be cross with her for saying so, and for another - well, Mara hoped Dad was right about how Jessica was going to take the gesture, but for the meantime, Mara was certainly enjoying it, and if all the squealing and mess was anything to go by, so was Lola, so what was the harm?
A gloomy afternoon drifted slowly into a cold, rainy February night as they ate cake and played board games and then ate cake again. Droplets thummed almost rhythmically against the windows of the apartment, broken occasionally only by gusts which sent the drops careening off at angles, all combining to turn the glass into a great grey funhouse-mirror onto a city seemingly done in watercolor. That was the kind of thing, Mara thought, which Jessica would have thought; she would have thought it in the window seat over there, her notebook in her lap, writing poems about a girl looking out the window at the rain until Mara or Lola dragged her out of her head and into some more active fun. She lowered her eyes to her crumbs, feeling a momentary trace of guilt before her father turned to her with a smile.
"It'll be your birthday before you know it," he said. "Any ideas what you might want?"
Mara tried not to show her thrill of excitement over the question. Always, within a few days of Jessica's birthday, Dad said something like that to her - asked her what she wanted, or if she was thinking about what she wanted yet, even though her birthday wasn't until May. Expecting this, she had already thought about it, and she had developed an idea.
"I want a lip gloss," she said.
Her parents both looked at her incredulously, as well they might - even if Dad had not had the ability to just go to work and get all the free lip glosses he wanted, they were not exactly luxury items. Mom could have gone to Target and bought Mara pretty much as many as she could want, or at least as many as could be considered reasonably practical. Mara enjoyed their full attention for a moment before she clarified. "One like Jezi's," she added.
Her father blinked. "You want us to develop a shade for you?" he asked, as if this were a remarkable thought - as if he had not made Jessica a perfume just for being born, long before she had any practical use for it.
"Yeah," said Mara, as casually as possible. "Why not? You can name one after me, and one after Lola, and you already have Jessica Rose - you could put together a whole kids' line."
Her father, if anything, started looking even more incredulous. "Mel?" he asked. "Is my nine-year-old trying to pitch a product line to me?"
"I always said she was too much like you," said Mom calmly, sounding slightly amused.
"You have said that, now I think about it," he admitted. From how he smiled as he said it, Mara was already nearly sure that she was going to get what she wanted. "So, then, Miz Morales," he said, in a slightly more exaggerated version of his usual accent, slightly mispronouncing Mara's last name, playing at being a Southern businessman. "Do tell me why you think Arvale Cosmetics needs a child focused line."