by Minka Kent
I glance up, readying to take the man’s place in line, only my heart drops and my body breaks into a cold sweat when I remember Daphne is standing there, and it takes me a second to realize this is real.
This is happening.
I’m not imagining this.
With my heart pulsing in my ears, I move forward. I move closer and closer still until I’m directly behind her.
If I thought I was star struck before, watching from an aisle endcap twenty feet away . . . that was nothing compared to this.
I observe from my periphery as Daphne chitchats with the checker, some barely-nineteen-year-old kid with acne and auburn hair and a smattering of freckles across his full face. His movements are jittery and uncoordinated, like he’s extremely self-aware in her presence, though she’s calm as can be. Her skin is the color of bisque porcelain, creamy and flawless, and her golden blonde hair falls around her shoulders in all the right places, shiny and lush.
Four-year-old Sebastian, sits in the front of the cart, kicking his legs and singing some wildly annoying yet equally adorable little nursery rhyme to himself.
“Just a minute, my little love,” she says, her voice soft as cashmere and rich as honey as she cups his chubby cheek in her right hand. I think about all the hashtags, and especially her oft used #mylittlelove, and my chest expands with warmth. “We’re almost done.”
Glancing in her cart, I spy things like pomegranates and starfruit, unsweetened almond milk, organic dates, and arugula. These are the foods she’ll feed her family.
These are the foods she’ll feed my daughter.
It’s a far cry from the processed casseroles and frozen, prepackaged dinners and store-brand potato chips I grew up on.
“Two hundred five dollars and eleven cents,” the cashier says, clearing his throat after his voice cracks. He pops his knuckles against his green apron and scans the line, avoiding eye contact with the rest of us as Daphne slides her shiny silver debit card through the machine.
Sebastian kicks her again. Harder this time. And she turns to him, leaning down and whispering something in his ear that makes him stop. She makes parenting look like a breeze, and everyone around us is watching in awe.
“Do you have children?” she asks the cashier.
“No, ma’am,” he says, clearing his throat again. The color of his face intensifies the longer she focuses her attention on him, and I wonder if she has this sort of effect on everyone she comes across.
Probably.
“I didn’t think so,” she says with a kind chuckle. “Almost naptime for my little guy.”
Checking my watch, I note that it’s only ten in the morning. I’m not a parenting expert, and I only worked at the children’s clinic for a couple of years, but I’m pretty sure four-year-olds don’t take morning naps.
“Thanks so much.” Daphne takes the receipt from the red-faced teen, folds it in half, and slips it into her wallet in a hurry. In the process, a twenty-dollar bill falls out, fluttering to the cement floor as her heels click away.
A swift tap on my shoulder from the man behind me pulls my attention from Daphne momentarily.
“You going to give that to her?” A mustachioed Good Samaritan points to the lifeless bill that has come to a stop a few feet before me.
Up ahead, Daphne is almost to the exit, and without thinking, I reach down to grab the twenty before chasing after her.
“Ma’am,” I call out, though Daphne McMullen is much too youthful and beautiful for such a common formality. “Excuse me . . .”
Her heels, because of course this beautifully enigmatic creature would grocery shop in heels, come to a quick stop, and she scans the area around her until her gaze stops on me. My hand is outstretched as I move closer, my heart pounding so hard in my chest, I struggle to breathe.
“You dropped this,” I say, marveling at how such a simple exchange could knock the wind out of me.
Her lips, shaded in rich mauve, pull into a smile that lights the rest of her face. Smoothing her hand along her flat belly, she saunters toward me, taking her time and meeting me halfway, and I’m amazed at how a person can strut along in heels the same way anyone else would strut along in tennis shoes.
“Thank you so much,” she says, her eyes searching mine as if they’re vaguely familiar. And they should be. Grace, our Grace, has my brown eyes. She has my wide forehead. My round face. My muddy brown hair.
I nod, releasing the breath I’d been sheltering and finding myself uncharacteristically incapable of forming a response.
Daphne smiles, releasing me from this moment when she turns back to her impatient Sebastian. Just like that, our exchange is over, and the only mother my daughter has ever known walks away, pushing Grace’s little brother in her overflowing shopping cart, loading the organic groceries in the back of the SUV that hauls my daughter from soccer to ballet, heading to the home my daughter runs to after the bus drops her off from school at three fifteen every afternoon.
Returning to the checkout lane in a daze, I retrieve Ben’s credit card from my wallet and pay for Marnie’s gifts. The cashier doesn’t fumble and flit in my presence. He doesn’t clear his throat or crack his knuckles. His eyes don’t dart around. He only stares at me with dull, vacant eyes, and then he calls out, “Next!” before I have a chance to gather my things.
Within minutes, I’m seated in the front seat of my car, slamming the visor down to take a good look at myself. Or rather, Pretty Girl. My red lips are fading, some of the lipstick smudged beyond my lip line, and my perfectly messy bun has fallen loose in several places, sagging past my crown. I can never get these things to stay in place for more than an hour or two.
I’ll never figure out how these women make it look so easy, but I’ll never stop trying. After all, they’re proof it’s possible.
I start my engine and blast the AC. Autumn, the one who does not turn heads or make teenage boys nervous, stares back at me from the rearview mirror, a stark reminder that she was always there, hiding beneath the façade. Being Pretty Girl was fun for all of two hours, but the second I get home, I’m retiring her in favor of Daphne.
Daphne trumps them all.
The years have come and gone. I’ve followed and unfollowed more people than I can recall. I’ve tried on a dozen personas purely for fun and neatly placed them back in their box when I was done. I’ve been inflicted with all-consuming obsessions and morbid fascinations that have dissipated just as quickly as they began, but it’s different with the McMullens.
They’re practically family.
And they’re the only true family I’ve ever known.
Even if they don’t know it.
“You’re not ready yet?” Ben stands by the front door at four o’clock, dropping his keys in the small ceramic bowl on the console table. His expression is laced with a miniscule hint of frustration, but I know him, and he isn’t angry with me. In fact, he’s never been angry with me for anything. Ever.
He may be frustrated with the situation . . . but not with me. Not with his dream girl.
Marnie steps out from behind him, sighing audibly and avoiding eye contact. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve been around one another, the first fifteen minutes, give or take, are always awkward.
“Babe, we’ve got dinner reservations in the city at six.” Ben yanks on the cuff of his jacket, checking his watch, and then he claps his hands. “Come on, let’s go.”
His sister meets my gaze in passing before settling into Ben’s favorite leather chair and whipping out her phone like an addict in desperate need of a fix.
“I just have to fix my hair,” I say. “And throw on something different. I’ll be quick.”
I disappear upstairs for a while, frantically pulling myself together. I feel bad, I do. I feel bad for Ben. I should’ve been ready, but I made the fatal mistake of checking Instaface at two o’clock this afternoon and getting sucked into profile after profile, each click of a picture leading me to another and another. Before I kne
w it, I was in too deep and had completely lost track of time.
By the time I return downstairs, Ben and Marnie are standing next to the door, Marnie firing off a scathing text. I bet she’s bitching about me to their mother, accusing me of intentionally causing us to be late.
I saw his mother’s phone once, at a family dinner. She’d left it unlocked on the bathroom counter, and I read through all of her text messages with her daughter. Marnie would vent about me and his mother would half-heartedly agree, giving general affirmations and never once coming to my defense or saying she disagreed with her propaganda.
“Sorry,” I say. To Ben.
He gets the door, and we file out to his Subaru. It’s an hour and a half drive into Manhattan this time of day. The only reservations we could secure at Marnie’s favorite restaurant were for six o’clock, and we had to make them almost seven months ago. God forbid Marnie celebrates her birthday at a local restaurant. Monarch Falls, in all its uppity glory, apparently doesn’t contain the kind of options that best suit Marnie Gotlieb’s sophisticated palate.
“Shotgun!” Marnie calls out, because apparently we’re in high school tonight.
I groan silently while forcing a smile across my face. “Of course. It’s your birthday.”
I would’ve given it to her anyway, but now it feels like an irritating obligation.
I wanted to stay home. I even insisted to Ben that this night be about the two of them. I lobbied for a brother-sister bonding experience despite the fact that I knew thirty-six percent of the night would be spent with Marnie passive aggressively ragging on me and Ben changing the subject. But alas, Ben slipped his hand into mine, kissed my forehead, and teased me that I wasn’t getting out of it.
He doesn’t see what I see.
He doesn’t hear the snide comments or see the side-eyed glances. He doesn’t pick up on the ice queen body language or the fact that the two of us enjoy each other’s company about as much as someone with a hatred of sharply pointed objects would enjoy an acupuncture session.
It’s not that being around Marnie makes me uncomfortable. I’d just rather avoid it if I could. It isn’t pleasant. Knowing I have to see her is akin to knowing I have a gynecological appointment coming up. It just isn’t something I look forward to, and it’s one of those things I just want to get over with. Plus, she reminds me of those high school bitches, the ones that ran the school and tormented me every single day of my pathetic teenage existence. She’s one of them. One of those plastic girls. It’s like they’re cut from the same cloth. There must be some secret central brain somewhere that girls like her feed off of because they’re all the same carbon copy snobby legionnaires.
Privileged. Insecure. Entitled. Mean.
Ben can be so oblivious sometimes. It’s probably his best–and his worst–quality. But I knew that going into this. It was one of the reasons he was so perfect for me; for my objectives.
Sliding into the backseat, I buckle up and fix my gaze out the passenger window. I’m seated directly behind Marnie, appreciating that the headrest does a sufficient job of blocking my view of the back of her annoying, egg-shaped head.
I stifle my annoyance when I watch her fiddling with Ben’s radio. That’s what Marnie does when she comes around. She messes with things. She touches everything. Like it’s hers. Like she owns it. She’s like a goddamned cat rubbing her scent all over everything. She makes herself right at home. It doesn’t matter where we are, if Ben’s around, Marnie runs the show.
And Ben laughs!
Like it’s endearing.
Never mind the fact that his sister took it upon herself to rearrange our silverware drawer shortly after I moved in with him. She also rearranged our living room, insisting that he throw away some of my things because they just didn’t go with anything. She kept using the word “clash,” and it was fitting, that word. Because she and I clashed from the second we met.
“Do you remember this song?” Marnie squeals from the front seat, placing her hand on Ben’s arm as she bounces. “Summer before you went to college, we used to drive around listening to this CD over and over again.”
She sighs, resting her head back and grinning at her brother the way she usually does . . . looking at him like he hung the moon. I suppose it’s easy to understand why she’s so infatuated with him. He’s the only man, that I’m aware of, who pays her any mind. He’s the only man who puts up with her annoying little nuances and desperate cries for attention. If they weren’t brother and sister, and if he were about a decade or two older, he would so be her type.
I chuckle to myself at the thought.
It both sickens and entertains me.
Maybe this is normal behavior for a brother and sister? I wouldn’t know. I have an older brother, and he’s a giant dick. Always has been. Probably always will be.
“What’s so funny back there?” Ben turns the music down, glancing up at the rearview mirror.
I wave him off, biting my thumbnail because he thinks it’s cute. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of something funny I saw online earlier.”
Marnie’s posture is tense now, her head slumped against the passenger headrest as if I’ve just sucked all the air out of her birthday balloon.
“Can you turn the music back up, babe?” I ask. The last thing I need is to give Marnie more ammunition against me. “I love this song.”
I hate this song.
Marnie sits up, clearing her throat. Her favorite song is blasting, but she isn’t dancing or singing along anymore. It makes me think, for a moment, that she’d forgotten I was back here.
Retrieving my phone from my bag, I check my Instaface feed for the tenth time today in hopes the McMullens’ profile will instantly be restored, but no dice.
They’re probably gearing up for dinner about now, and within the coming hour, Graham will pull in the drive and the kids will pile into his arms. I’ve seen it through their windows time and time again. They clobber him, scaling up his arms and legs and nearly knocking him over. It makes me smile every time.
I used to get a tiny electric ping in the center of my stomach whenever I’d see there was a new image. It was like a little fix every time. Every little mundane detail of their perfect little life lit my soul in a way I could hardly put into words.
It was all feels. Nothing but feels.
Closing out of Instaface, I pull up my photos, flipping to a screenshot from last week of Grace licking a beater covered in mashed potatoes. Below it, the caption reads, “Dinner time! Behind the scenes with my little sous chef!” Sebastian and Rosie, the McMullens’ middle child, are in the background waiting patiently for their turns. Grace is grinning ear to ear, staring up at Daphne with the kind of love and adoration that both melts and breaks my heart.
Seeing Grace so happy, so nurtured, so loved, and watching her live the kind of childhood I only ever dreamed of is all I could ask for in this life.
I’ll find a way back to her, to my baby.
A mother always does.
Fifty-One
Autumn
I find Daphne’s cell phone number on some pay-per-result online directory during the drive home from the city. My entire body is humming and buzzing with a vibrant shade of hope, and I have to force myself not to smile in case Ben notices my bizarre mood shift.
First thing tomorrow, I’ll buy a burner phone and some pre-paid minutes, use the star-six-seven feature to block my number, and call once the kids are out of school. If I could hear her voice, and theirs in the background, that would be better than sheer nothingness.
Darkening my screen, I exit the backseat and climb up front as Marnie waves goodbye–to Ben. She saunters up the sidewalk to her colonial townhome on the north side of town, stumbling slightly thanks to the expensive bottle of red wine she enjoyed with her steak dinner. Ben waits, watching as she fumbles for her keys, and then he shifts into reverse the second she disappears behind the front door. I’m not sure he knows, but his parents bought this place for Marnie
straight out of college, hoping, at least I assume, that unloading this kind of responsibility on her might spark a little ambition.
I fail to see their logic, but I digress.
Ben has no idea. Or if he does know, he’s never once complained. Over the past two years, I’ve come to learn that Ben mostly worries about himself. He minds his own. He doesn’t notice that he could probably use a new car. He doesn’t concern himself with obtaining the latest model iGadget or the most stylish wardrobe despite the fact that his handsome income could afford him anything his simple heart desires.
Ben is securely and contently in his own little world.
“You okay?” Ben slips his hand into mine as he backs out of Marnie’s driveway. “You’ve been quiet all night.”
I darken my screen and slip my phone into my bag, turning and offering a reassuring, sleepy smile.
“Of course,” I say.
Ben slaps the steering wheel, a move that catches me off guard and sends my heart temporarily into my throat.
“What?” I ask.
“You know what I just realized?” he asks. “We forgot to give Marnie her gift.”
Damn it.
“Maybe you can drop it off tomorrow?” he asks, brows lifted.
I’d love nothing more.
“Sure,” I say. I’ll get right on that as soon as I buy my new phone.
He gives my hand a thankful squeeze.
Somewhere on the other side of town, Grace McMullen is snuggled beneath warm covers, her belly full from dinner, a sleepy smile on her face. Closing my eyes, I send her my love the way I do every night.
“Are you happy?” Ben’s question causes my eyes to flick open, and headlights from an oncoming car send a sharp sting to them.
“What are you talking about?”
“You were so quiet tonight. It’s like you cut yourself off from the conversation. And really, Autumn, you’ve been distant these last couple of months.” He slows to a stop at a yellow light, turning his attention my way. “Every since you lost your job, it’s like you’re pulling into this shell, and I don’t know how to get you out of it. You don’t talk as much as you used to. You walk around in a daze. You’re forgetful, and you never used to be forgetful. Are you depressed? Do you want to talk to someone?”