by Sloan Archer
Margo waved away the apology. “There’s no need to apologize. If anything, I’m the one who feels bad.”
Margo feels bad for me, Vanessa thought. I must be doing worse than I thought.
Still, it did make Vanessa feel better seeing that Margo had not relished putting her foot down. Her words had come from a place of authentic concern and remorse, which Vanessa never would have expected from a woman so surly.
“It’s just—I need to be on my own, is all,” said Margo. “Living this way would have been okay when I was in my twenties, but, frankly, I’m too old for this crap.”
For the second time in a little over a month, Vanessa was asking, “So, when do you want me to move out?”
Margo gave Vanessa a reassuring smile. “I’m not throwing you out on the street right this minute, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not Greg. I’ll give you some time.”
Vanessa nearly burst into tears, her relief so profound. “Thank you so much, Margo. I really appreciate it. How long are you thinking?”
“How about a week—sound good?”
Vanessa’s smile froze on her lips. “Sure, that’s . . . perfect,” was all she could manage to choke out.
Margo patted Vanessa’s shoulder as she got up. “I’m so glad we finally had this talk. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.”
“Me too. It’s time that I get back out on my own.” How I’m going to make that happen, though, is a mystery even to me.
“That’s the spirit,” Margo said with rare cheeriness.. “Okay, I’d better get to work. See you later!”
Vanessa sat staring at the wall for a very long time after Margo left. She focused and unfocused her eyes on the bland plaster finish, finding shapes within the lumps. “Lion . . . Flower pot . . . Fish . . . Cardboard box, like the one I’ll soon be living in.” She put her face in her hands and groaned. “What am I going to do?”
Margo’s earlier mentioning of Greg’s betrayal had done nothing to improve her outlook. Vanessa picked up her cell and, due to the sad if not obsessive habit she’d developed in the last month, checked to see if she might have missed a call from the man (term used loosely) in question. Which, of course, she hadn’t.
Vanessa clanged her phone down on the coffee table harder than necessary and gazed out the window of Margo’s fourth-floor apartment, reflecting on how Greg had not called once since she’d moved out. Probably too busy playing house with the coffee shop girl he’d impregnated. Despite Vanessa’s own resolve to never speak to her lying, cheating ex again, it astounded her that he’d been able to let her go so easily. It was a scary realization, considering that she’d almost married the guy. (In theory, anyway)
Am I really that forgettable? she asked herself now just as she had during other disparaging moments of self-pity, which had been many moments as of late. Shouldn’t Greg, at the very least, feel duty-bound to check that she was not living on the streets? Shouldn’t he need to know that she had not been utterly destroyed by his betrayal? Then again, it wasn’t as if Greg had done right by her when they were together, so why should she expect any great miracles now that they’d split?
But enough about Greg. He was in the past, where he’d now and forever remain. To hell with Greg and his knocked-up mistress—it was time to worry about herself. To stop holding her breath in anticipation of a call that would never take place. To get real about her lack of job and home, her diminishing savings.
It was time to make that phone call she’d been avoiding.
But, before she did, she needed a little boost.
Delaying the inevitable, Vanessa went into the kitchen to make herself a cappuccino. Margo had all types of fancy gadgets, but the pour over coffee maker was among Vanessa’s favorites; that red-headed barista tart may have helped ruin her life, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t still love her coffee. Vanessa took her time with the process, steaming her milk in yet another elaborate contraption while the grounds filtered. She closed her eyes and inhaled the gorgeous smells that enveloped the kitchen, chanting a series of positive thoughts to quiet her tense mind.
What she was really doing was stalling.
Vanessa wiped her damp palms down the front of her once dark grey cotton pajamas, which had softened with age and faded to the color of cement. She noticed a hole near the bottom hem and some pilling along the knees. And you’re surprised that Greg cheated on you, slouching around in this getup. Vanessa scowled away her negativity and went to change into some real clothes—despite her dismissal of the nagging voice, loafing around in pajamas did make her feel downtrodden—and then finished up in the kitchen.
She returned to the sofa, steaming cappuccino in hand, dreading the call she had no other choice but to complete.
CHAPTER FIVE
“We’re sorry. You have reached a number that is disconnected or is no longer in service . . .”
One more time.
“We’re sorry. You have reached . . .”
And another.
Sighing, Vanessa disconnected. After five tries, she was now convinced that the number she’d programed into her phone months ago was not suffering at the hands of a bad cellular connection. She wasn’t too astounded that her mother’s number had been cut off, and in fact would have been more surprised if it were still functioning. Maintaining an active phoneline was a skillset Marissa Paul hadn’t quite been able to master during her fifty-four years of living. That, along with the other annoying-but-unavoidable duties of adulthood, like grocery shopping and paying taxes.
Vanessa’s plan was simple enough. She’d hide out at her mother’s two-bedroom apartment in Rylone, Maine, for a couple months, all the while continuing her New York job and apartment search over the Internet. Doing this would serve a dual purpose: She’d have a quiet place to lick her wounds while also avoiding humiliating encounters with former coworkers—or, worse, Greg and his soon-to-be wife—when she was so painfully down on her luck.
If she could find a way to reach her estranged mother.
Maybe, Vanessa ventured, it was a sign that she should quit now. Maybe it would be better if she remained in New York, gave up on the whole idea of hiding out in godforsaken Rylone, land of deep-fried everything and pawn shops on every corner. Maybe the situation with her mother was a boat that would be best kept un-rocked.
That was a lot of maybes. Vanessa immediately dismissed them all. She’d gone over the possibilities again and again and, no matter how many different angles she worked, she had to face three very important facts:
1) She still had no job after a solid month of searching.
2) Margo wanted her out in a week.
3) She did not want to live in a cardboard box.
Her stay in Rylone would only be temporary, Vanessa reminded herself once more. Just long enough to get back on her feet. Suppressing the anxiety percolating inside her, she scrolled through her phone to find the number of a person she wanted to speak to even less than her mother: her mother’s latest and not-so-greatest romantic conquest, Kyle. She’d kept his number in her phone only as a failsafe. If experience had taught her anything, it was that it was always best to be prepared for catastrophe when dealing with her mother.
Kyle picked up on the fourth ring, charming as ever. “Yah, what?” His breathing was labored, as if he’d had to run to answer the phone. No wonder he sounded pissed. The man was lazier than a sack of rocks.
“Hi, Kyle.” On her side of the line, Vanessa could hear him cracking sunflower seeds in his teeth and spitting out the shells. It had disgusted her back when she’d met him in the flesh, especially after she’d sat in his car and saw the gobs of black spittle crusted down the driver’s-side windows. “It’s Vanessa.”
“Who?”
“Vanessa Paul.”
“Who?”
“Marissa’s daughter.”
Kyle snorted. Vanessa kept silent, expecting him to offer up something, anything, more. He only filled her ears with his chawing.
> “I’m looking for my mom.”
“Yah, you and everyone else. If only wishes came true.” There was an unkindness in Kyle’s voice that made Vanessa uneasy. Apropos of nothing, he added nastily, “But shit in one hand and wish in the other, and see which hand fills up fastest.”
How lovely.
Had she been searching for anyone other than her mother, Vanessa would have thought that Kyle was putting her on. But, it was yet another thing she’d learned from experience, that the sky was the limit when it came to the actions of Marissa Paul. “You two aren’t together anymore?”
“Mannnnnn, where you been, girl?” he asked, Vanessa assumed, rhetorically, since it was doubtful that Kyle would be interested in hearing about her whereabouts. Or anything else that pertained to her life, for that matter.
The first and only time Vanessa had met Kyle, he’d lost all interest in getting to know her once she’d made it abundantly clear that she had not come to Rylone to give her mother a large sum of cash. He had, in fact, called Vanessa an “uppity bitch” at her refusal to open her wallet to prove that she was not carrying around hundreds of dollars of cash inside it. Kyle, in all the infinite financial wisdom he’d gained serving as the town’s drunk mechanic, felt it necessary to follow up the insult by declaring that it didn’t take a genius to see that anyone who could afford to pay her mother’s rent in lump sums every six months was obviously loaded—probably a millionaire, even. Later that same visit, Vanessa returned from the bathroom to discover Kyle and her mother rummaging through her handbag.
It was the last time she’d spoken to either of them.
“I’ll take that as a no, then,” Vanessa prompted Kyle after an awkward silence had passed.
“You can take that as a hell no,” he said nastily. “No, we ain’t together no more.”
Vanessa was starting to have a bad feeling, but then she remembered who she was dealing with. Marissa wasn’t exactly the long-term type. If there was anything she loathed, it was the feeling of being tied down, whether that be in a job or a relationship. Vanessa’s knee-jerk reaction was to ask Kyle what had caused the breakup, but she could already guess as much. Marissa had gotten bored, felt suffocated. Yet another reason why motherhood had never suited her much.
“Okay, but is she alright—my mother?”
“Guess that’s something you’d know, if you’d called more often,” he said with infuriating self-righteousness.
Vanessa squeezed her hand into a fist on her lap, fighting to keep her temper in check. As if he’s one to lecture me, she thought, rolling her eyes. She was not going to waste any of her breath arguing the reasons why she stopped contacting her mother months ago. Kyle’s opinion meant laughably little, a sentiment she was sure he shared about her on his end.
Said Kyle, “Look, girlie, I’m up to my ass in repairs today, so if you don’t mind?”
Yah, I heard all about how you do repairs at your shop, she thought. Which is to say not at all, since you tend to invent problems that never existed. Or, if you do make a repair, you’ll charge for premium parts but use secondhand bits and pieces.
This, Vanessa knew as fact. Kyle had known her for all of ten minutes before he bragged to her over lunch about how many customers he’d gotten away with screwing over, as if it was their fault for trusting his word. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, over dessert he regaled her with a tale about how he’d beaten a man at a house party with a saw chain after the man in question had called him a con artist. He was right, but I wasn’t going to let him say nothing ‘bout it to other people. Got my reputation to uphold.
Reputation.
Yah. Right.
Though Marissa had not mastered the vast responsibilities of adulthood, she did reign champion in one domain, which was having an inherent talent for selecting questionable mates. Kyle was just one loser in a long series of many, Vanessa’s deadbeat father, Benny, among them. Though Vanessa had to give her mother credit in this regard: Kyle was employed. Most of them weren’t.
“Sorry, just one more question, if you don’t mind. I’ll make it quick,” Vanessa said as politely as possible through gritted teeth. Kyle was the spiteful type to withhold information for the simple reason that he could, so being snippy would not help her cause. Also, he just might get it in his head to extort money out of her in exchange for the information she needed. Which would be very bad, given that she had so little to spare.
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “Go on.” Kyle was a very important man—if not the most important man in all of Rylone—and he damn well wanted her to know it.
“Do you have any idea where she is?”
Vanessa understood the futility of such a question, since the most accurate answer could be both anywhere and nowhere. Over the years, Vanessa had hunted down her mother in endless locales: sleazy no-tell motels, state-funded rehabilitation facilities, a broken-down caravan parked at an abandoned industrial park that she’d been living in for weeks with a random winner she’d picked up at a bar. Most often, she could be found at the home of a friend of a friend, where she’d squatted until they finally had enough of her mooching.
So, really, nothing Kyle could say about Marissa’s whereabouts could possibly shock her.
Or so she’d thought.
“Try Benji’s,” he spat with a tone of disgust.
“Her landlord?” That was exactly where her mother was supposed to be, so why did he sound so—
“Yah, uh-huh, her landlord.” Kyle paused to expel a gob of shells. “What a cliché.”
What a cliché. If Vanessa were in a better mood, she would have had to bite her tongue to stop herself from bursting out laughing. Kyle, during the same charming lunch that he’d copped to fraud as well as pummeling a man with a saw chain, had used cliché with inexplicable flourish. Vanessa figured he’d learned the term from one of those word-of-the-day calendars, though he must not have read the definition too carefully, since he never presented it in the correct context. Not once in the five or six times that he’d used it. Would it be cliché if we sat by the window? This meatloaf tastes a little cliché. I like being a mechanic, but sometimes it can be a little cliché, you know what I mean?
No, she did not know what he meant. Not at all.
“I’m not following. Why is Benji cliché?” She was done messing around with the moron.
“No, not Benji,” Kyle said with the exaggerated patience of a man being forced to explain world history to an infant. “Marissa and Benji—how they’re, you know, shacking up.”
“Shacking up . . . Wait. Are you saying that Mom and Benji are—”
“Bumping uglies. Doing the ditty. Making whoop—”
“Yah, okay, I got it.” Benji the landlord. What the hell was going on? “Are you sure?”
“Am I sure? Felt pretty damn sure when I walked in on the two of them going at it like rabbits.”
Oh, yuck.
Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. “Oh, okay, then.” Vanessa rarely found herself short of a tetchy retort when dealing with an idiot of Kyle’s magnitude, but the unfolding of recent events had thrown her off her game. “So . . . Sorry about that.”
“Yah.”
Click.
Vanessa closed her eyes and rubbed the taught spot between her eyebrows. It had been so peaceful for all those blissful months, not having to deal with her mother’s drama.
Prior to the incident with the handbag, Greg had frequently told Vanessa that she was crazy for continuing to associate with her mother, since every time she dealt with the woman she’d either end up in tears or in a hideous predicament. He’d say that Marissa Paul was a tornado unto herself—that, if Vanessa had any sense, she would write her off completely and start claiming that she was an orphan.
That was, of course, easy for Greg to say. He’d been brought up in a cozy New Haven mansion with four overachieving siblings and both parents present. Greg’s childhood had been stable and indulgent, if not sheltered. To him, a mother and father were equally a sou
rce of comfort and protection; however, should one ever disappoint, he always had the luxury of falling back on the other.
Mr. and Mrs. Dashner were the type of mother and father who made entire parties out of events like decorating the Christmas tree. Proper to the point of aggressiveness, they wore pearls (her) and tweed (him) at the dinner table. Every. Single. Night. They gave their children—all wildly successful as adults, that went without saying—expensive engraved watches to celebrate the milestones in life: college graduations, first jobs, the birth of children. They had vacation homes—yes, plural—that they visited once a year if that, dwellings that were far nicer than what the average American lived in fulltime. The Dashner’s also gave lots of charity money to battered women’s shelters and soup kitchens, though they, personally, had and probably would never associate with anyone who’d required such establishments.
Greg, wholesome in his upbringing, had been disturbed when he’d started to notice that Vanessa sometimes confused names in her stories about childhood, so great had the number of Marissa’s boyfriends been. He’d been rendered downright speechless after Vanessa casually told him one day that, between the ages of eight and eleven, she’d called 911 no less than six times for fear that her mother was overdosing—that, on the last call, she’d simply opened the door to the ambulance people, pointed toward the bedroom, and said, “Back there.”
Given his background, it was only natural that Greg should have difficulty understanding why Vanessa felt an inherent obligation to look after Marissa, the only biological parent she had ever known. Marissa, the mother who’d conducted herself more like the child, often leaving her young daughter the responsibility of ensuring that the bills had been paid on time and that there was food in the cupboards. Vanessa could hardly understand the compulsion herself—old habits die hard, she figured.