Gemstones in Ashtrays - Shannon Matalone

They called her Lover.

She was beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, and poised.

She was perfect in every way and they knew it.

The model agency and her managers thought her beauty was theirs.

All of them began to feed her lies and false positivity about her looks and how she should be acting.

Everything was scrutinized and she fell for all of it.

She even fell for the love that man that I have to call my dad said he had for her.

When she died, no one was there for Lover.

It was just me.

Her daughter and a couple of grave diggers on a rainy Saturday morning.

Because my mother, Laverne Haven, the real person behind the model Lover, was always alone.

...

Let me start at the beginning.

My name is Hailey Haven, I’m about to be 28 years old, and my mother was all I had growing up.

My mom was the epitome of an angel. Kind, protective, and beautiful.

My mom looked a little like Joni Mitchell but her nose had a slight hook to it and her cheekbones weren’t as high.

Her hair was the color of gold and she had these deep cerulean blue eyes. Any time I was upset over something, all she had to do was look at me and it was like I was floating in a calm ocean. Weightless, nothing fogging my brain.

I wish I had eyes that powerful, all I had were these lousy dark brown ones. My hair wasn’t even the same shade as hers too. It was more copper than gold and while my mom was thin and stood at 5 '10, I was about 5' 5 and had more curves than I knew what to do with.

My mom would always compliment me and say how jealous she was of my looks, but I was jealous of her too.

Mom could be found in our apartment, dancing, cooking, or reading some book she found while out shopping. However, if she wasn’t home then she was next door lending a hand to our elderly landlord, Mr. Bernard, and his wife. She sort of became their caretaker and that was how we were able to stay in our two bedroom apartment on 610 Ashbury Street in San Francisco.

The apartment, or Haven Heaven as my mom called it, was our safe place. We decorated the place like it belonged to a twenty-two years old college student. Fairy lights everywhere, comfy pillows and blankets, and giant gray plush couch, perfect for making blanket forts.

I had lived in this apartment my whole life, even into college and graduating with my journalism degree in 2017.

My mom and I were always there for each other. She was my best friend. So when my mom got sick, I was ready to help out in any way I could. Even though I was barely making enough money to even afford my own place in San Francisco.

I told her to quit smoking cigarettes multiple times growing up, but she never listened.

Her lung cancer was violent and it spread rapidly. She went through chemo and we hoped it would help her fight, but the cancer was too strong.

It was Tuesday, September 20th, a month before my birthday, when she died and I didn’t know how to cope.

I didn’t go out and I called in sick to my job at the San Francisco Chronicle as an advice columnist. All I did was order takeout and wallow.

I was slowly sinking into myself and I felt like I couldn’t go on.

I knew I had to tell someone she was dead, but I wasn’t ready to say anything yet.

That didn’t stop my friend Penny from coming to see me and yelling at my front door for me to open it.

Penny was one of my longtime friends. I’ve known her since we were in grade school and she was now one of my coworkers. She was like a big sister to me, even though we were the same age. Penny was also one of my friends who had their glow up in high school and I can’t help but be jealous of her every time I see her.

She could have been a model like my mom, but thanks to her parents’ genes, she never grew past 5’4.

That didn’t stop her from looking amazing though.

When I opened the door, Penny stood there with a brown bag from McShane’s, a small restaurant that had some of the best burgers in the world, and an angry look on her face.

She was dressed in one of her killer outfits, a white button up tucked in a pair of navy dress pants with some navy heels, heightening her by about two inches, and her straight hickory brown hair was up in a spiky 90s bun. Her makeup was a simple smokey eye and some lip gloss, but it accented her charcoal brown eyes and olive skin perfectly.

“Why do you like to scare me?” Penny said as she entered my apartment, “Why weren’t you answering my calls or texts?”

Penny set the bag down, turning her head towards me, she looked me up and down.

She looked taken back by my appearance.

Just like Penny, I was pretty good at putting an outfit together, but right now, I wasn’t looking that amazing.

I was in a big gray t-shirt covered in old stains, black pajama pants, a tan cardigan with a giant hole in the shoulder, and my copper hair was in a bun, now lopsided from my restless nights.

“Why do you look like you pulled an all nighter for a year?” Penny laughed a little at her joke and then all she was able to say next was my mom’s name and I was on the floor sobbing.

Penny was shocked at first, but she instantly ran towards me, going right into a protective mood.

It was through a phlegmy, ugly sob, as Penny led me to my couch, that I told her my mom was dead.

Penny would check on me everyday after work. She told our friends at work and the HR department what happened and I was able to get out of work for a few weeks. I was thankful I didn’t have to worry about the piles of emails I was probably getting from people who needed advice.

Not that I cared though, I wasn’t thinking about work at all since my mom passed. It wouldn’t be the same coming home to an empty apartment.

After about a month and with Penny’s help, I was able to get the apartment and myself cleaned up enough to celebrate one of our coworkers’ birthdays, which was on October 3rd.

That day ended with Penny carrying me back to my apartment, drunk from the bar crawl and upset all over again.

According to Penny, I started drinking more that night when a young woman and her mom passed by us. The daughter had a bride sash on and a tiara. Her mom was wearing the maid of honor sash.

I started scream-crying at Penny about seeing that mom and her daughter and how I’ll never get a chance to do that with my mom. Penny then said that she tried to get me in my bed, but after puking my mom’s toilet, I passed out in my mom’s bed.

I knew I would never truly get over my mom’s death, but I d to face it. Even if it was slowly killing me.

I realized I didn’t have enough money to plan a funeral or find a gravesite.

So instead, I started to go through my mom’s belongings.

I didn’t think it would be easy to go through them alone so I asked Penny if she wanted to help.

Apparently, Penny had mentioned it to our friends.

On October 15th, I opened my door just expecting Penny and what I got was a lot of warm hugs and large bottles of different Merlots.

We started to box my mom’s clothes and books as I began to tell stories of my mom to everyone.

I was putting one of my mom’s cheesy romance books in the box and was telling this story about how my mom and I went to the Randall Museum and almost let their ducks loose when I found a diary.

My mom never mentioned that she ever had a diary.

I assumed it was an old one from when she was a teenager, probably filled with entries about different boys and her grades, but what the diary actually contained was much more dark.

The first entry wasn’t that bad, it was dated in June of 1991 and it was about a trinket dish.

The dish was decorated like a small beach with raw crystals and amethyst adorned on it. My mom found it at a farmers’ market on the Fishermans’ Wharf and the seller said to my mom that the blue resin looked like my mom’s eyes. My mom bought it on the spot and told herself that this trinket dish was going to help her succeed.

My mom joined an agency called Delote Models and from what I gathered about them, they were awful. Demeaning, discouraging, and constantly gaslighting. They told her once to lose weight because she was “beautiful but a little chubby.” They would also encourage her to fight the other girls at different shoots because it was “good publicity.”

My mom was only able to walk a runway a few times, most of the time she was left in San Francisco and was given assignments to go to different parties in town. She was told it would help her make connections, but all it really did was make her hungover the next morning.

One day during another round of test photos, her fifth time overall at Delote, the photographer kept, weirdly, calling her Lover. It ended up sticking.

The new name shaped her into something of a shell. A place to hide the past. She was less of a sweet 20-something years old and more of the drugged out model who would wake up alone in the club, a mix of snot and white powder coating her nostrils.

My blood was boiling at this point, but what really sent me over was the diary entry where my mom was invited to go to the CEO of Delote’s house. When she arrived, she was stripped naked and photographed. They told her it was for another round of test photos.

I threw the diary down on the ground after reading that. Who were these test photos for? My mom wasn’t a model for Playboy. She was just trying to walk a few runways and see the world.

I took a deep breath and told myself I needed a break. I took a few days to relax, but my mind raced regardless.

How did any of this happen? Why was no one there for my mom? I wanted her to have a happy ending. I wanted to read about how she kicked Delote’s butt and came out victorious, but that was wishful thinking.

As time went on, Delote would assign her to this new manager and from my mother’s words, “He was a gorgeous angel sent to save her.”

But he did not save her, he manipulated her further.

The two of them started to have a relationship and yes, he did stop her drinking and kept the cocaine away from her. The way he did those things though was to have her smoke cigarettes with him. He would usually bring an ashtray with him to her apartment, but one day he forgot it and saw the trinket dish in her bathroom. He would start using the trinket dish as an ashtray and before long, my mom was doing that too.

He would slowly consume her life and feed her the same lies Delote did, just this time those lies slept in the same bed.

Finally one morning, my mom woke up and realized that she hadn’t gotten her period yet and that’s when she truly woke up to everything that was happening.

This is what she wrote that day.

...

December 16th, 1993

Dear Diary,

What have I done? Why was I so blind to everything that was happening to me? I don’t feel like Laverne anymore. I need to tell Todd. Especially since I missed my period.

...

My mom stopped writing after this last entry.

I wasn’t really sure what to do now except to be angry.

I ranted to myself over and over again about my mom’s life as a model named Lover.

Over the next week though, I started to rethink my anger and wondered if everything that my mom wrote about actually happened.

I know what you’re thinking.

How could I not believe my mom? But it’s not like that. I did in some way believe her, but the life my mom led in the diary wasn’t one I was a part of and I felt like I needed more proof before I made any more judgments.

The trinket dish turned ashtray popped into my head.

I had never seen it before.

The ashtray my mom used when she was alive was this pink one I made in my ceramics class in high school.

So where was this ocean-inspired trinket dish?

After finding the diary, I sent everyone home and we never finished collecting my mom’s things. I started tearing the apartment apart, opening the finished boxes, clearing out the hall closet, I even threw my mom’s mattress off the bed frame.

I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Something inside of me decided to look inside the cabinets in the kitchen and after pulling out cereal boxes and mixing bowls, I found it in this large cat-shaped cookie jar my mom had hiding in the back of the bottom cabinet where we kept our case of cookie cutters.

My mom had to have bought it before I was born because we never had a cookie jar. I didn’t even know we owned one.

The jar was heavy, making it hard to set on the table, and its black lid was covered in duct tape. It took me a good two hours just to get the tape off with the baby blue craft scissors my mom had bought for me, but when I finally got that lid off, it was filled to the brim. Crumbled pictures, dead lighters, and at the very bottom, there was something wrapped in newspaper.

It was circular, a shiny cobalt blue stone ripped and poked out of the newspaper a little.

Was this the trinket dish?

My hands shook a little as I slowly unwrapped the paper and as the ripped pieces laid on the hardwood floor underneath me, a resin blue sea shone in the kitchen’s light. It was the same color as my mother’s eyes and I felt myself starting to get choked up.

It was all true.

Everything my mom wrote about was true. The pictures I found confirmed it as well. They were ones of her test photos, a bald man, I assumed that was Todd, and her together in this very apartment smoking a cigarette, and of her passed out at a table, in some restaurant or club, almost as if she had just overdosed.

My anger was restored and my plan hatched from there.

I started by researching Delote online which led me to find out the company wasn’t in California anymore. They weren’t even in the United States, they moved to Canada two years after I was born. I also learned that Delote moved back to the United States, settling in Miami, Florida after the Great Recession in 2008. They went bankrupt in 2010 after a large lawsuit happened between them and a few different models.

One of them being a dear friend of Iman, Gale Darlings.

Gale was a huge part of the modeling industry especially in the movement of hiring models who didn’t fit “sample size” in 2018.

I wondered what Gale would think of my mother and what happened to her.

Once I had that information, I went to my boss’s office, showing him everything that I found.

My boss said to write an expose on them.

That expose turned into an editorial piece about the dark side of the modeling world and how dangerous it can really be.

After the article was released, The San Francisco Chronicle received a call from Gale Darlings’s lawyer. He said they would be happy to reopen the case against Delote Models they filed in 2018.

Darlings’s lawyer even said, “This is enough to go back to trial and sue the pants of those fuckers once and for all.”

Former models from Delote came forward with their stories as soon as the breaking news of the son of the CEO for Delote and all the former employees were arrested.

The noise from the editorial died down once the trial date was set. Thankfully it wouldn’t be until after New Year’s, giving me enough time to properly bury my mom.

I still didn’t have enough money for the funeral itself, but I was able to make enough to afford the burial and the casket.

The burial would be on November 12th.

I decided to go alone despite Penny’s protests.

On the 12th, as I got ready to head out to the gravesite, I had a knock at my apartment door.

I answered it expecting Penny or another one of my friends, but it was Todd.

It was pouring outside and the man my mom said was an angel was standing in my doorway with the collar of his gray overcoat up against his neck and covering his bald head with an old newspaper.

I looked at him hard and all I saw was a gross old man.

I scoffed, wanting to slam the door in his face, but glimpsed at my smartwatch to see it was past 3 and the sun was beginning to set.

I walked past him as he asked if he could talk to me.

I ignored him.

He kept trying to get my attention as I locked my front door and as I tried to open my car door. I had just put my bag inside my car when Todd slammed the door shut and yelled at me to talk to him.

He said my mom never treated him like this, so why was his daughter and before he could finish, I slapped him.

My face was hot as I opened my mouth.

“I will never be your daughter,” I screamed.

“You ruined my mom’s life and you made her a shell when she was...”

I started to stutter as a lump formed in my throat and hot tears formed in my eyes.

“When s-she was a gem!”

Todd was holding his cheek as I put my hands up and pushed him away from me.

He looked scared as he stumbled backwards, like I was some kind of monster.

“My mom was a fucking gem and you and Delote ruined her by putting her in your ashtray!”

I was screaming at the top of my lungs, it felt like they were going to burst.

A couple came running up to us and went in between Todd and I. The girl asked me if I was okay while her boyfriend stood over Todd, hiding him from my line of sight. The girl asked me if I wanted to call the police but before I could say anything, Todd was gone.

Now I was at the beginning of this story. Standing in front of an open grave, two gravediggers standing on either side, waiting for instructions.

The rain had finally stopped as I watched the mud fall over my mom’s mahogany casket and the tears rolled down my face.

I sobbed into my hands as I remembered the last thing I said to Todd before he ran off.

My mom was a gem.

And all that was left was cigarette ashes in a dead ashtray.

Shannon Matalone is a graduate student of California State University, Fresno. She is a Creative Writing Major with an emphasis in Publishing and Editing. Shannon is from Modesto CA. When Shannon isn't buried in homework, she is spending her free time either writing or reading, but sometimes she is also either playing video games or watching movies with her two cats Izzy and Nova at her parents' house. She has never been published.