All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  She pauses while the dogs take turns marking their territory on a newly painted fence, leaving stains across the white surface. Having done their duty, the dogs then trot forward amiably, led by Dusty. They seem to have fallen into a manageable polyrhythmic pace. The birds chirp overhead. Margaret loops Dusty’s and Sadie’s leashes over her right forearm while she flexes her right hand to get the blood circulating in her palm again.

  A gray squirrel chooses that exact moment to dart across their path, and before Margaret can get a good grip on the leashes, Dusty looks up. His nose flares. His ears swivel forward. He snuffles twice, emits a hair-raising howl, and then lunges toward the squirrel. Margaret’s right arm is yanked from its socket and she stumbles forward, dragged along by the baying hound. She braces her feet and yanks backward. Dusty lunges again, leveraging one hundred pounds of torque against her. Mr. Pibb, in her left hand, decides to join in the fun and starts struggling against the leash. The leashes looped over her forearm slip. Margaret is jerked forward again and stumbles; the toe of her flip-flop catches against the asphalt and the plastic toepiece is yanked from its anchor. The shoe breaks in half. Her now-bare foot scrapes against the road and she screams in pain, letting go of the leashes in her right hand altogether to grab at the throbbing appendage.

  Smelling freedom, Dusty bolts. He gallops across the road, the leash trailing behind him on the ground, and chases the squirrel straight up an oak tree. Sadie tears off in the opposite direction, her short legs taking her as fast as they can back around the corner toward the Gossetts’ house. From her left hand, the still-jailed Mr. Pibb and Skipper bark at Dusty. Margaret hops on one foot, watching Sadie disappear down the street, trailing her pink leash behind her. Across the street, Dusty has his paws halfway up the tree trunk and his head thrown back as he bays forlornly at the upper reaches of the oak. The squirrel, safely out of reach, chatters tauntingly.

  Swearing to herself, Margaret turns left to chase Sadie, who has disappeared around the corner, then decides that she should grab the bigger dog first, since Sadie won’t get as far as fast. Sadie’s yipping fades away into the distance. The broken flip-flop dangling off her foot, she hops across the street to grab Dusty’s leash, trailing Mr. Pibb and Skipper behind her. It takes every ounce of her strength to haul the bloodhound down from the tree. She then rips the flip-flops off her feet and jogs barefoot down the asphalt after Sadie with the objecting dogs behind her.

  She turns the corner just in time to hear the screech of tires and see a cloud of dirt rising from the road. Out of the dust, Sadie comes sailing through the air in a balletic arc, turning slowly through an elegant spiral. Margaret squinches her eyes closed and opens them again as the schnauzer lands with a sickening thunk in a stand of calla lilies, just twenty feet from the Gossetts’ front yard. A young woman in a pantsuit jumps out of an Audi TT, now idling in the middle of the street, and runs to stand over the inert body of the schnauzer.

  The woman looks at Margaret, tears in her eyes. “The dog…it just came out of nowhere. My God, is it dead?”

  Margaret runs forward, dragging the three dogs behind her. She crouches over Sadie, touches her fur, smells burnt rubber. The dog is breathing, but her front legs are bloody and jutting out at a decidedly unnatural angle. Margaret strokes the dog‘s head. Dusty snuffles at Sadie’s body, and Margaret yanks him back.

  “She’s alive, I think,” says Margaret.

  An ear-piercing shriek breaks through the panting of dogs and women. Margaret stands up to see Noreen Gossett in the front yard of her house, running toward them. A purse has been abandoned in the middle of the lawn; her linen trousers ride up from the effort of her sprint. “Sadie!” she screams. “OH MY GOD what happened to my princess! What did you do to my dog?!”

  margaret trudges up the front walk to the miller home an hour later, having seen the hysterical Noreen Gossett and Sadie off to the animal hospital and returned the three remaining dogs to their respective homes. The ninety dollars in her pocket can’t take the sting out of Noreen Gossett’s parting words: “I am shocked—shocked!—by your incompetence and total lack of responsibility! I’d expect more from a woman your age!”

  Margaret is inclined to agree. How could someone so smart be so stupid? Those idiotic flip-flops—why had she insisted on wearing them? And the dog—she thinks of it, bleeding on the asphalt, her fault entirely, and is sick with guilt and remorse. The episode curls her stomach, somehow even more shaming than the demise of her magazine. Credit card debt aside, she sees herself, suddenly, in a repulsive light: a failure, slipping rapidly into obscurity, incapable of contributing in even the most menial way to society. She had been so close to making it, and now it’s all gone. Is this it? she thinks, as she picks her way, barefoot, through the gravel driveway. Did I reach the end of my potential so soon? Perhaps some people are meant to be great, and others aren’t; and it has nothing to do with luck, or with working hard, but with innate ability. Perhaps all this time she was really meant more for mediocrity—an inadequate dog walker, an irrelevant intellectual, a dismal editor—and she just tried to achieve more than she was capable of. The problem with being told you are going to change the world, she suddenly realizes, is that anything less is certain to feel like a disappointment.

  She enters the house through the front door. From the backyard, she hears her mother calling, “Margaret? Is that you?”

  “Hi, Mom,” she calls out. Standing in the kitchen, she considers her options. What are the odds that Noreen Gossett will call Janice and tell her about Margaret’s morning? It’s a possibility, of course, but perhaps a slim one? Really, she’d rather take her chances on Noreen keeping her mouth shut than tell her mother what just took place and have to confess everything. Besides, it was just a dog, and a very old and unpleasant dog at that; and it’s not like the dog was killed, and she’s already apologized. Any rational person would concur that it’s not that big of a deal. It’s hardly even a decision, really.

  At the sink, she pours herself a glass of water and drinks half of it down in one breath, as if in the process of satisfying her thirst she might also somehow drown her sorrows. Through the kitchen window, she can see her mother working in the vegetable garden. Janice wears green rubber Wellingtons and a denim work shirt embroidered with pictures of gardening tools, her hair tucked up with an elastic. Margaret watches her with a mix of envy and bitterness: How can her mother look so placid when her life is falling apart? How can she be so functional? Why can’t Margaret summon the same serenity?

  The phone rings, and from the garden her mother lifts her head and gazes toward the house. “Margaret!” she calls. “Will you get that?”

  Margaret tucks the phone receiver under her ear as she refills her water glass. “Hello?”

  The phone blasts electric static at her, and then a woman’s voice comes through. “Is this Margaret Miller?” she asks. “This is Master-Card, calling for Margaret Miller?”

  How did they find her? The floor seems to give under her, and her Jell-O legs threaten to topple her over. “I’m sorry, but you have the wrong number,” she says, dropping her voice several octaves so that the woman won’t recognize it. You are pathetic, she thinks to herself.

  “We were told by a Bartholomew Johnson that Margaret Miller is staying there.”

  “I’m sorry, but there is no one named Miller here. He must have given you a wrong number,” Margaret says quickly.

  “Sorry for bothering you, ma’am,” the woman says, but Margaret quickly hangs up, cutting her off. Bart. Of course they would have tracked him down after she went missing—he had cosigned on her MasterCard. She recalls the message she left on his cell phone with horror, and realizes the magnitude of her mistake.

  “Who was it?” her mother calls from the garden.

  Margaret can’t find the voice to shout a reply. Breathing deeply, she tries to slow down her furiously beating heart and fails miserably. How long will her lie keep them away? Not long; certainly, not long enough for
her to devise a new plan for coming up with the money. I am fucked, she thinks. Totally fucked.

  As she puts the water glass back down, her hands shake. Doesn’t her father always keep a bottle of whiskey in his liquor cabinet in the study? She turns and stumbles toward the back of the house, thinking that what she needs to clear her mind is a good, stiff drink—maybe three—but as she passes through the hallway she comes to a halt in front of the side table. The FedEx packet is still sitting there, untouched. She stares at the orange-and-purple envelope, fat with portent, dense with disappointment and betrayal, and, without even consciously deciding to do it, tears it open.

  She rifles through the sheaf of papers, absorbing their gist quickly. Her father is requesting an amicable, no-fault divorce, due to “irreconcilable differences.” Janice gets the house. He will give Janice custody of Lizzie (Margaret is momentarily wounded that she isn’t mentioned but then remembers that she is an adult and, therefore, in no one’s custody but her own) with child support of $4,000 a month. Trusts will be set up in the children’s names, which they will receive when they become adults at age thirty-five. Thirty-five?! Margaret stops, abruptly, at this figure, furious. She is not sure what bothers her more, the idea that her father apparently doesn’t believe that she’s an adult and responsible enough to handle money or the fact that the money she needs is so close and yet, as always, so very far away.

  She flips ahead. A savings account will be split between her parents, along with assorted mutual funds and investments. Janice will keep her SUV. He’s offering an additional $6,000 monthly alimony. Margaret spends a minute doing some mental math—$10,000 times 12 is only $120,000, a sum that might seem princely to her right now but probably won’t even begin to cover her mother’s Neiman’s bills—before she realizes what’s she’s missed. There is no mention of the almost half a billion dollars in stock that her father recently made with the IPO. She flips through the pages again, scanning for a mention of stocks, before locating it at the bottom of chapter 02. “Due to previous agreement between petitioner and respondent, petitioner’s assets from stock ownership in Applied Pharmaceuticals are exempt from these proceedings, and will continue to remain solely in his name.”

  She’s not quite sure she understands what this means, so she reads it again, then flips back and forth through the document to make sure. The legal jargon can’t disguise what’s going on: Her father intends to deny her mother every single cent of the fortune he just made with the IPO. The panic and frustration Margaret has subsumed for the last few weeks suddenly alchemize and begin to bubble over as a completely new emotion: anger. She is furious, furious with her father, with her mother, with Bart and the bill collectors at MasterCard and with the entire horrible, shallow, greedy, unsympathetic, principle-free world that takes cruel advantage of the honest and heaps rewards on the undeserving.

  “Mom!” Margaret yells.

  Janice’s voice echoes back. “I’m still in the back!”

  She finds Janice in the vegetable garden surrounded by piles of weeds, which appear to be organized by type—a pile of chickweed here, a pile of bermuda grass there, a pile of nettles, and another of dandelions. Each pile is neatly stacked in a pyramid, roots at one end, stems at the other. Margaret stops and stares. Janice glances up at her but doesn’t stop digging. “Someone named Carly called earlier. She said to call her back as soon as possible. Was that one of your friends from Los Angeles? She said you had her number,” says Janice. She stabs at the dirt with a trowel. “I can’t believe the gardener hasn’t done this. I should fire him. No wonder my zucchini are looking so anemic.”

  “Why on earth are you organizing the weeds?” asks Margaret.

  Janice looks down at the piles. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. I thought it would be useful to know what weed’s been growing the most.” She looks up at Margaret and smiles nervously, like a child caught picking his nose. “Your toe is bleeding. Did you hurt your foot? I told you not to go for a walk in those shoddy shoes!”

  Fury rises like a red-hot balloon. Her husband is out there, sleeping with her best friend and scheming to cheat her out of every cent he can, and Janice is casually stacking weeds like nothing has happened? Margaret chokes on her anger. “Did you sign legal documents?”

  It takes Janice a minute to respond. She pauses with her trowel in midair, and her face contorts, as if she’s struggling to come to the surface of a deep, murky pond. “Legal documents? What kind of legal documents?”

  “Something that Dad had you sign about money? And Applied Pharmaceuticals?”

  Janice thinks for a minute. “Well,” she begins, and there’s an agitation in her face. “There’s…we signed some financial documents a year or so back. To protect our assets. After your father started at Applied Pharmaceuticals. It was a risky endeavor, and we made some investments in the start-up, and he wanted to make sure that if the company was sued I would be legally protected. Why on earth do you want to know this? I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

  “Didn’t you have a lawyer look at them?”

  “Well, of course,” she says. “Your father’s lawyer put them together.”

  “Well, congratulations, Mom,” says Margaret. “It looks like Dad is about to screw you out of every cent he can. You can kiss the IPO money good-bye.”

  Janice’s face turns the color of nonfat milk. “What are you talking about?”

  “I read the divorce papers. Which you, apparently, weren’t interested in doing.” She waves the fistful of documents at her mother. A creamy sheet of legal stationery drifts down to the dirt, and Margaret kicks at it, trying to pin it under her foot. It is lifted by the breeze and flutters off to land in the pool.

  She expects Janice to jump up in a fury, but Janice only probes at the soil with her trowel, carefully unearthing a thistle. Margaret is baffled—it’s so unlike her mother, the queen of control, to allow life to slide past her. How could her mother let her father just walk all over her like this? Why doesn’t she take steps to save herself? The brisk housewifely efficiency that has been driving Margaret nuts since she got home now appears as what it is: a mask for a deeper denial, perhaps even chronic depression. Her anger begins to deflate; what replaces it is a bilious sort of guilt. Why is she yelling at her own victimized mother? They may have had their issues, but certainly this moment should transcend that.

  “Divorce papers?” Janice echoes faintly. “Is that what was in the FedEx?”

  “Yes, Mom,” she says in a softer voice. She is surprised by her mother’s unlikely cluelessness; she seems so out of it. “I read them.”

  “Oh,” says Janice, her face registering dismay. “I don’t remember giving you permission to do that.”

  “Well, it’s been sitting out all week. I thought it looked important, so I opened it. Here—look for yourself.” She holds the papers out to her mother. “In the asset allocation section. He says he doesn’t have to share the IPO money.”

  Janice leafs through the papers. She picks them up, puts them down, and rubs her hands on the front of her gardening khakis. “I’ve been meaning to open that,” Janice says. “But I kept putting it off.”

  “So? And?”

  Janice sighs, a deep, bone-shaking sigh. “Oh, Margaret, I just don’t know,” she says. She takes off her sunglasses and rubs at her eyes with the back of her wrist. When she looks up at Margaret, Margaret realizes that there are deep black hollows of exhaustion under her mother’s eyes. Her pupils are tiny pinpricks in the sun. “I just can’t focus on the big picture right now.”

  “You need to get a really, really good lawyer, really, really fast.”

  Janice squeezes her eyes closed; she rocks just slightly, back and forth, back and forth, swaying like a baby that has only just learned how to sit up on its own. She suddenly looks quite helpless, and Margaret is overcome by an unexpected wave of sadness. Isn’t this what she always wanted? For her mother to lose it for once, to crack the implacable surface and reveal that
the person underneath isn’t as perfect as everyone seems to think she is? But now that she has this helpless Janice before her, Margaret just feels terrible. Janice certainly doesn’t deserve this. No one deserves this.

  “I know. I know. I know,” Janice says. “A lawyer. Luella Anderton—she got divorced last year. Call her and ask who her lawyer was.”

  “You want me to call her? Don’t you want to call her?” Margaret asks.

  Janice shakes her head. “No, you do it.” She opens her eyes and looks at Margaret with a terror that makes Margaret’s heart stop. “Please? You do it. I can’t talk to anyone like this. They’ll ask…questions.”

  Margaret looks at her mother, finding it hard to believe that the figure before her is Janice Miller, tennis champion, social secretary of the Forest Heights Country Club, indomitable mother of two, wife (soon to be former, but still) of an impending Fortune 500 CEO. Her mother looks as fragile as cut crystal; someone needs to step in and do something, before Janice shatters into tiny fragments. And then Margaret realizes, with a flash of revelation, that Janice seems to thinks that she is the only person who can help her. Her mother is asking her for help. Her? Does her mother actually still believe in a capable, productive Margaret? It seems that she does. Margaret is frozen in place by both fear and exhilaration, as the burden of her mother’s future lands, unexpectedly, on her shoulders.

  A long second passes. “Of course,” says Margaret, and pats her mother on the shoulder before she steps back. “Don’t worry, I can take care of it. I can help. I’ll take care of everything, Mom.”