“Well, it’s not how I always imagined you returning to the stage, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.” Ruby’s mother held up a bottle of hair spray and started to apply it. Everywhere. Hair and face and, most important, all those spots where dress met skin. Although the modern style was to rely on tape and clever stitchery to hold a pageant gown in place, Laurel held true to the traditions.

Hair spray fixed everything.

“I’ve got to say, Ruby, I didn’t think the dress would look as good as it did when you were seventeen, but I was wrong. Now that your breasts have dropped a few inches, the neckline looks quite nice.”

Ruby choked. At her feet, Wheezy made a similar sound, but that was because he’d inhaled far more of the hair spray than was good for him.

“If you think your boobs have started losing the fight against gravity now, wait until you get to be my age.” Mrs. Orson, who sat well out of hair-spray range on a velvet settee on the opposite end of the dressing room, heaved a despairing sigh. “These days, they look like a pair of deflated balloons filled with cottage cheese.”

Ruby choked again, the sound bordering on a laugh. It was a daring move in more ways than one. Not only was laughter forbidden in the sacred dressing room—a small bedroom that her mother had converted to her own personal closet—but her mother hadn’t yet Vaselined her teeth. Her smile needed to be picture perfect before she was allowed to roll it out.

But her mom, giddy with all the sequins and sparkles that surrounded them, gave up and joined in.

“Oh dear. They really do, don’t they?” Laurel placed her hands underneath her breasts and hoisted them to unearthly heights. “I’ve been thinking about having mine done while there’s still enough elasticity in my skin to hold them up.”

“I think you should do it,” Mrs. Orson agreed. “My friend Darla had hers done about a decade ago. The rest of her is like wet crepe paper, but her décolletage looks fantastic.”

If Ruby wasn’t standing in the middle of her mother’s dressing room, a pair of towering silver heels on her feet and her hair so tall it practically brushed the ceiling, she’d have supposed she was dreaming. Never, in her wildest imaginings, could she have pictured her mother and Mrs. Orson casually discussing aging female bodies. Especially not while she was wearing a long, sweeping, off-the-shoulder ballgown that weighed almost as much as Wheezy did.