Mark had been talking about the GMAT since the summer we first met. He had already been at McKinsey for a year at that time, and, like many consultants, he was intent on working his way up by working long hours for a few years and then cashing in on a free ride to business school.
I told him that if he wanted to stay in consulting, it seemed like a smart idea to me.
“It depends on my score, but if I can do well, my top choice would be Penn. Keep it in the family.” Mark’s mom and dad had met at Wharton, so that wasn’t intimidating at all. Then, after a pause, he added, “So, let’s say I did get in.”
“Okay,” I said. Being both a double legacy and an alum had to count for something. “And you probably will. So? That’s great. Right?”
“I mean,” he said, “would you ever consider moving to Philly?”
The night I met Mark, I told him two things as we sat side by side in a sticky booth at BBar, intermittently making out: The first was a lie, that he was the first person I had made out with at BBar, and the second was the truth, that I didn’t think I would ever leave New York. I had come too far, worked too long, wanted it too much. That was still true.
“I think I would want to stay in New York either way. For work. This is where publishing is,” I reminded him gently. “But Philly is only an hour and a half away.” It would be an easy commute, if we were still dating when any of this ever became more than theoretical. I felt a flash of sadness at the idea of Mark leaving, the sting sharper than I expected. But I knew I would put my career ahead of any relationship at this point, and it made sense that he would want to do the same. As Dana was prone to saying, there was still “a lot of life to live” before settling down.
“Well, I mean, I could also stay in the city. Columbia or NYU, maybe,” he said, a little too quickly.
“No, I want you to go.” I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t go to the best school possible—what if he got into Harvard? “No matter what, you should do what you’ve always wanted. I mean, obviously.”
Mark opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then paused, his jaw slack.
“What?”
He leaned down to kiss my forehead, a gesture simultaneously sweet and somehow patronizing in a way I couldn’t quite put a finger on. “Nothing. Well, I definitely don’t have to decide anything just yet,” he said. “I have to get a decent score first.”
CHAPTER 9
When I stepped out onto the curb at the Birmingham airport the weekend of Michelle’s shower, the humidity hit me full force. I had forgotten that an Alabama October still sizzled like full-fledged summer. Feeling my waves frizz up as the stickiness enveloped me, I remembered why I had always been so jealous of Michelle’s fine, silky hair.
I hauled my suitcase into the trunk of a cab and gave the driver Michelle’s address. She would probably already be out at her parents’ place decorating for the shower, but I knew how to find the key hidden in a special sleeve under her doormat.
“So, in town for business or pleasure?” The taxi driver looked at me in the rearview mirror, clearly eager to strike up a conversation. From the flight attendants to the cab line, I had forgotten how chatty the South could be. I thought about the complicit silence of New York Uber drivers, which never felt rude but instead like a tacit admission that we would both rather focus on our own thoughts than force small talk. I already couldn’t wait to get back to the city.
“Pleasure, I guess.” I tried to smile politely while keeping my answer short. It feels more like business, I thought. I looked out the window and trained my eyes on the emerging city skyline. There wasn’t much to see, but I remembered the days when it had looked so impressive and foreboding from my comparatively rural vantage point. When Michelle and I were in middle school, Marcia would drive us into the city on occasional Saturdays for a shopping trip at the Riverchase Galleria mall, and I always thought of it as a trip to the big city.
My suitcase rattled in the trunk as the cab bumped over I-20. It contained a pair of pajamas, athleisure shorts and tanks for running around the city, and a secondhand Lilly Pulitzer dress left over from high school that I knew would find approval from Marcia, even though it had been relegated to the back of my closet in New York for three years. I also had four necklaces, because I still didn’t trust myself to pick the right ones to match the shower dress without Michelle’s counsel. Packing had presented a challenge. I had skirts and cardigans for work, black sheath dresses for book parties—selected with advice from Dana—and ripped jeans for nights out dancing in Bushwick. I used to be all pastels, but now I had nothing to wear for a garden party bridal shower. Eventually, I had grabbed my phone and done a quick Google search, actually typing in “what to wear to your best friend’s bridal shower when you are the maid of honor.” Ridiculous, I decided. But then I remembered the one floral dress in the very back of my closet and breathed a sigh of relief: All hail Lilly Pulitzer, the patron saint of preppy prints.
I shouldn’t have been worried. But it didn’t help that most of the guests were old acquaintances of mine, and they were the real reason I usually dreaded going back to our hometown. Around those people, I could feel myself fading back into a person I wasn’t even sure that I liked. Old friends, like Michelle, could allow you to be the relaxed, lived-in version of your former self. The paradox is that sometimes they require you to be that person, as though they can’t understand you any other way. I could feel a gap between us when I referenced an inside joke she couldn’t find funny, or a memory she hadn’t been a part of, and I wondered if she felt the same about me.
As the cab driver finally turned off at the exit, I realized that I had forgotten to text both my mom and Michelle that I had arrived. I thought about it for a minute and then sent the same message to both of them: “Sorry, forgot to text—I landed in Birmingham. See you soon x.”
“Ma’am,” the cab driver said. “We’re here.”
Ma’am instead of miss—yikes. I brushed it off and looked up: Michelle’s building, named Parkside Condos, loomed over us, casting a shadow across the street. The first time I had visited Michelle there at the end of our first postgrad year, the building’s modern facade, all new brick and sleek glass, amazed me. I told her that living in a building with a name was a big deal in New York; she pulled a face and told me she couldn’t wait until she and Jake could get an actual house somewhere quieter, ideally in Mountain Brook or some other nice Birmingham neighborhood closer to her parents out in Langham. The vast, often Tudor-style homes in Mountain Brook struck me as eerily quiet and depressingly cut off from any sort of excitement—especially for the cost, which could reach into the millions—and I had been surprised Michelle found it so appealing. Though to be fair, she probably felt similarly confused about my desire to live in an overpriced shoebox with roommates from Craigslist.
I thanked the driver, paid, and headed inside, past Michelle’s suited doorman, who mercifully remembered me. I found the key under the mat where I expected, and I spotted fresh flowers and a note on the foyer table as I stepped inside. And, thank God, she had left the air-conditioning on.
“Julie!” the note read. “I’m already out at my parents’—major crisis with the food for tomorrow. If you’re seeing your mama, know that y’all are welcome for dinner at ours. Otherwise, see you tomorrow at 10. Sharp! Haha. XO.”
As much as I wanted to drink a glass of wine on the Davises’ sprawling veranda while Marcia fussed in the kitchen—nothing took me back to simpler times like hearing her clink pans and call, “Y’all better get in here and help”—the idea of spending time with Michelle, her family, and my mother all at the same time seemed more than I could handle. Instead, I would meet my mom at a restaurant. That would make it easy enough for her to join me for an early dinner at six before her drinks date at eight. In the meantime, I could just barely squeeze in a nap. I hauled my suitcase into Michelle’s guest room, threw back the floral duvet
, and fell asleep.
* * *
• • •
That evening, I called an Uber to the restaurant. Forgetting that I didn’t need to account for New York traffic, I got there ten minutes early. My mom arrived fifteen minutes late.
“Julie!” she called loudly as she flung open the door. I didn’t flinch, not at her shouting and not at her use of my old nickname. I was used to it. “Am I late? Damned traffic.”
“Hi, Mom. It’s fine,” I told her, gesturing to the hostess that we were ready to sit down. As we walked toward the table, my mom began to unwind the first of two wispy scarves draped around her neck. It appeared that the scarf phase, which had been preceded by the giant-necklace phase, continued to endure.
She smiled at me over her shoulder as we followed the hostess. I saw myself in its quick flash: the broad spread across her face, the subtle dimple near the left corner, the warmth in her brown eyes. Then she turned away and folded the second scarf over her shoulder, painted with a rendering of a Monet, which I recognized as a gift from a boyfriend who had been at Christmas dinner during my freshman year of college. She had kicked him out before New Year’s.
I stared at her for another moment, awash with the strange sensation of seeing so much and yet so little of yourself in the person who made you.
We turned our attention to the menus and studied them for a few moments in silence. “So,” she finally said, setting her menu down on the table with a declarative thwack. “How are you, really?”
“Fine. I like my apartment; roommates are nice enough. Work is good. Mark is—”
“Mark! How is he? It’s been so long. Maybe it’s about time I meet him.”
I ignored her second statement. “Mark’s doing well. He’s still traveling back and forth to Omaha for the project he’s consulting on, so we’re both really busy. I did get a promotion, though, so—”
“Omaha, well. That’s a long way from NYC. Hey, maybe he could get a project down here, huh?”
I sighed. “Yeah. Maybe one day.”
She held up her hands. “But I know, I know, you love New York.”
I half smiled. Well, at least one thing I had said to her over the past few years had gotten through. “I do. You know, you should come up and visit.” We both knew that this was unlikely to happen—and most likely impossible unless I let her stay in my room so she didn’t have to pay for a hotel. Our relationship did seem to function best with a thousand miles between us, but it might be nice to have her come up once or twice. To see the life I was making there before it was made.
“Well, of course, you know I’d love to. Hey, maybe I’ll even be able to bring Jeff!”
Jeff: the guy she was going on a second date with after we finished dinner.
This statement evoked a pattern that had repeated itself throughout my childhood. My mom had been endlessly enthusiastic about planning things for us to do. She chased me around the playground, whooping as she followed me down the tunnel slide. She planned daylong antiquing trips to nearby towns, picking out knickknacks to match her latest décor vision and letting me touch and play with everything, to the shopkeepers’ chagrin. She had a spirit, an indomitable energy, unmatched by almost anyone else I had ever known. And when she was in a good mood, when her sun shined in my direction, nothing was warmer. But these outings followed another pattern, too. Mom would inevitably invite some guy she had been on a date or two with to join us, always hopeful from the first day that this one was “the one.” Sometimes he would come and we’d play at being a family, but more often than not he’d balk at the prospect of a full-day date with her daughter and she’d spend the first quarter of the day inconsolably upset. Then she would recover and we would have fun, but she’d still do the exact same thing the next time. I hoped it would work out between her and Jeff, but past experience taught me not to count on it.
Still, if her flightiness grated on me, I had to remember that she was also the woman who had volunteered to chaperone field trips every time she could get off work, and had come into my elementary school classroom for arts and crafts even in what seemed like the deepest haze of her depression after she and Daniel had broken up. Our relationship had never been straightforward. She hadn’t been someone I could feel effortlessly close to, someone I could trust implicitly—at least not in a way that seemed at all similar to the bond between Marcia and Michelle. But I found that I couldn’t let our relationship go, either. I didn’t feel like I wanted to break away from her as much as I wanted to rewrite things, to change so much of how we had related to each other when I was growing up.
“Jeff would be welcome to come if he wants to,” I told her.
“Good. Now, let’s order some food. I’m starved!”
* * *
• • •
The rest of dinner was uneventful. She regaled me with tales of Mindy and Eleanor and the homemade candles, plus a few dating stories sprinkled in for good measure. At the end, I even got to tell her about my promotion and share that I had decided to try my hand at writing some essays in my spare time, even if she couldn’t pretend to be quite as interested in that as she was in hearing about my love life.
“I think I’m going to skip the shower tomorrow,” she told me as we walked out the door. She pulled an envelope out of her purse. “I have a card to send with you, but I thought I’d just let it be Michelle’s day. And yours. Look, we both know old Marcia isn’t exactly crazy about me.” She chuckled, unbothered.
I suspected that she was canceling partially out of a preemptive hope that the “date” with Jeff would stretch into the next day, but there was no point in trying to probe that theory. Or it was possible that she had been more perceptive about the nature of Marcia’s courtesy invite than I’d thought. Either way, she meant well—and in the end, I was relieved. “Michelle will appreciate the card,” I told her. “Really. I’ll tell her you say hi.”
“Thanks, baby. Have a good time.”
“You, too, Mom.” She wound her scarves around her neck and twirled away in a flourish, wiggling her fingers back at me as she started down the block.
“Bye,” I called after her, and then I looked down at my phone to call an Uber back to Michelle’s, my mind already far away.
CHAPTER 10
I don’t know exactly what I hoped to find on that morning ten years ago when Michelle and I set out for Chattanooga in her convertible to look for my father.
Maybe I wanted to confirm the story that I had been turning over in my mind ever since my mom stopped me from calling him years earlier, to prove that she had been the only thing keeping us apart. Or maybe, instead, I wanted it to be his fault. Maybe I wanted him to hang his head sheepishly, to hear him apologize. There were so many things I wanted, and so many things I was afraid of, so when Michelle asked me if I really wanted to go, I couldn’t think of anything to say but, “I think so?”
“Then, let’s get this show on the road,” she said, turning her head toward me in the passenger seat as she idled the car at the end of her parents’ drive. The click of her turn signal sounded like a ticking bomb. Did I really want to do this? My breath caught and she saw my panic rising. “Julie, I know how big of a deal this is. We don’t have to do it today if you don’t want to.”
I breathed in deeply. “No, I want to.”
“Well then, here we go. If we’re not back by sundown, you know my mama is going to start snooping around.” Our cover story for the day was that we were working on party preparations with the spring fling dance committee at Rebecca’s house. It wasn’t completely a lie—Michelle really had signed us both up for the planning committee, without asking me, of course.
“I think the better question is, are you ready? Like, you know you don’t need your turn signal for the driveway, right?” I teased.
“Shut up,” she said, reaching across to squeeze my hand. “I’m a natural.”
* * *
• • •
The drive calmed me down. Michelle and I blasted our favorite songs, from old-school *NSYNC throwbacks to that 3OH!3 hit that was all over the radio that year. Michelle screamed the first time a semitruck squeezed past us on the highway, making us both jump, but other than that, it was perfect. Just the two of us off on a road trip, the convertible’s top down, wind whipping our hair, on one of the first hot days of summer. It was a quintessential teenage moment, one that felt right out of a movie montage. Now that Michelle had her license, we could finally experience the unique freedom of just being able to take off somewhere alone, to go miles from home with no one watching us. Was this what the rest of my life could be like? I wondered. It was so much fun I almost forgot where we were going.
We pulled up to the ranch home on Mountain Creek Road at a crawl, squinting at the address on the mailbox to make sure it matched the one listed on our printed MapQuest directions. Suddenly I felt incredibly hot. I wished I could put the roof up and turn the air-conditioning on full blast. What if he doesn’t even remember me? I wondered. No, that’s impossible. You can’t forget your daughter.
Or can you?
I crossed my arms in front of my chest, my heart thumping hard.
“What if the info online was wrong?” I asked. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? “What if he doesn’t even live here?”
“Then we’ll go right back home.”
“What if he’s not there? This is creepy, right? Creepy. I should have tried calling first.”
“So you could just freak out and hang up? No way.”
I turned my head and stared. I looked at the red front door with its brightly polished brass knocker. I sized up the yard, which was nothing special but did boast well-tended shrubs and flowers along the sidewalk to the front door. Everything looked midsize, middle-class; these people had more money than my mom, that much was clear, but with none of the intimidating, capital-S Success of the Davis family. Why did I want to walk into the boring-looking home of some stranger?
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