Book Excerpt: 'Lit' by Mary Karr

April 27, 2010 — -- Excerpt appears courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Before the rehearsal dinner, I'm lying in a shampoo chair with my head in the black sink, neck arched upward in a perfect positionto have my throat cut, and I catch a distant whiff of marijuana.

Mother, I think.

With that single word, an unease comes shimmering into my solar plexus. My stylist, Richard, who's been vigorously scrubbing my scalp, twists my soapy hair into a unicorn horn, saying, Maybe you should wear it like this down the aisle. I interrupt him, rising up. Do you smell that? I say.

What? he says.

Pot, I say.

Lifting his nose in the air, he gives a stuffed-up snuffle, then says, Allergies.

It's dusk, and I've warned Richard and his beautician colleague Curtis in advance not to offer Mother and me their usual convivialglass of wine. Twice.

Reluctantly, I lie back down, but some engine of vigilance has been kick-started in my middle, and it's starting to rumble. I say, Curtis wouldn't give her marijuana. Curtis can't afford marijuana, Richard says, adding, It's probably floating up from the alley.

And with that, I tell him how -- visiting me once at college -- Mother got gunched out of her brains with my pals. In my twenties,she sat in on a poetry workshop with Etheridge, and afterward, I found her on his back step sharing a blunt with him and a bunchof young brothers. Which embarrassed me at the time, since she flirted like a saloon floozy, but also since her lack of maternal posture always unconsciously felt like some failure of mine on the child front.

By the end of the Mother stories, Richard's finger-combing through the suds in my hair with warm water has sent an ease from the scalp down my spine and along my limbs. She's in good hands with Curtis, Richard says. He's wrapped my hair in a towel, and I sit upright.

And there's nobody else here?

We closed the shop for you two. Very exclusive, Richard says, adding, we have caught kids getting high in the alley before.

Not long after, Curtis swans in, giving off an odor of patchouli oil as he rifles a drawer. He says, Your mom's a riot. I'm gonna visither in Texas. She knows a place I can buy ostrich-skin cowboy boots.

I'm sure she does, I say.