I could tell by the weight of his footsteps when he came in that he’d had a bad day or at the very least, an exhausting one. He kicked off his boots forcefully and grew quiet — collecting himself before he faced me. I closed the book on my lap and stood.

“Hey hun,” he called from the entryway.  

He offered me a weak smile as he entered the living room and I mirrored one back.

“Tough day?”

“Oh, you know, the same bullshit.”

“I was going to order us Chinese, if that sounds OK to you?”

He nodded his head but was no longer listening.

“I’m going to go wrap up some work in the office,” he said, staring down at his phone. He slipped into the side room, closing the door behind him.

I closed my eyes, resolving to push past my disappointment and walked over to our record player. I scanned the spines until my eyes landed on The Cranberries record we always used to put on in our early days of dating. I flipped it to the B side and dropped the needle. The intro of “Linger” filled our apartment.

​I remembered dancing to this song with him, back when our love was new and my heart ached wondering if he felt for me the way I did for him. I told myself that dancing to that song was a good sign—it would be cruel to hold me and sway with me the way he did to those lyrics if his heart didn't desire to wrap itself around mine.

We were far past those early days of guessing and anticipation, of sitting at home on my bed, thinking of him and questioning if he too thought of our future. The uncertainty of it all had felt so miserable then. But now, standing alone in the living room we had decorated together, had lived in for years, I longed for that surge of feeling. I wanted more than anything to feel the weight of his hands on my hips as he pulled me closer, pulled me in.

I had just packed my car and was downing my last sip of cold brew, when my mom placed her hand on my shoulder.

“Honey, before you leave could you quickly check the box I left in your room? I want to take it to Goodwill this week but want to make sure there’s nothing in there you want to keep first.”

I forced back a groan and gave her a tight smile while I glanced at my watch. I’d wanted to hit the road an hour ago to beat traffic and she’d already insisted I couldn’t leave without something in my stomach.

“You should have mentioned this last night when I wasn’t in a rush to leave, but yeah sure, I can take a look.”

“Well, I didn’t think of it last night and besides I don’t know why you’re in such a rush anyway. You can always call me if you hit traffic and are bored.”

It was an unsatisfactory answer but getting into it would only delay my drive further. I sighed and trudged up the stairs to my bedroom, scanning the floor.

“I don’t see it,” I yelled down.

“Try the closet.”

Sure enough, a cardboard box was neatly tucked into my closet beside my dresser, the overlapping panels bulging where she had stuffed it to the brim.

I pulled it out and began flipping through the items—old sweaters and tees from high school, my track uniform, a dress my mom had bought me that I’d never worn. I was about to push the box back into the closet when something caught my eye—a pastel blue peeking through the sea of black, grey and nuetral tones. Sarah Beth’s sweater.

I carefully pulled it out and despite the twinge of pain I felt, I smiled as I held it for the first time in years, feeling the threads between my fingers. It was soft in the way she was soft. Light in the way she was light. I could still see it draped around her shoulders that night on the bleachers after the football game. My heart had jumped when she’d leaned forward, laughing and placed her hand on my leg.

I fell quickly and I fell hard. Sarah Beth never let me tell anyone that we were dating. Her father was a deacon at the church, and she joked about how she’d be estranged like her mother’s sister if she ever came out.

“I guess we’ll just have to run away together,” she’d teased when I asked her what that meant for us, dismissing the question as she leaned in for a kiss.

To our parents, we were best friends, but I suspect my mother knew and hers was suspicious. Her mom would purse her lips every time I entered, as if she was always holding in something she wanted to say.  

 We’d close ourselves off from the world in my bedroom under the guise of studying. She would nestle herself in the nook of my arm and we’d talk about our future as I stroked her long blond hair. “We could adopt two kids,” she said. “One boy and one girl. And we’d definitely have dogs.”

“I kinda want a cat too,” I told her. “I like that you have to earn your keep with cats. They don’t love just anyone; you have to work for it.”

“Why would you want to work for a pet’s love,” she said, flipping onto her stomach to look me in the eyes. “Isn’t the best part of having a dog that it loves you so easily?”

A month before graduation, she broke up with me and I didn’t see it coming. To her, we had been playing house—I was a sweet idea but beyond the realm of reality.

We held each other and cried until it was finally time for her to leave. I pulled her sweater out of my top drawer and went to hand it to her. Even though my dad only kept the AC at 65, she always complained about being cold.  
​
“Keep it,” she said, gently pushing it back toward me. I held it tight against my chest and let myself keep crying as I watched her walk out of my room.

I was elbow deep in dishes, carefully scrubbing away some rice that had burned at the bottom of a pot when my husband brought it up.

“Jeffery called.”

My body clenched. I hadn’t heard him say his brother’s name in years. I turned off the water and turned to him. He sat down the plate he was drying.

“Did you pick up?”

He shook his head no. Emotions swelled up like vomit, but I pushed them down.

“My mom called though. He’s trying to make amends, but I told her that was out of the question.”

I turned back toward the sink, picking up the pot and scrubbing harder, putting more weight into the sponge.

“Good.”

“She said he’s clean now. Went to some kind of treatment center.”

I sighed, “Baby, I really don’t want to talk about him.”

He let out a long breath as if he’d been holding it. “She invited him to Christmas.”

“What?” I turned too quickly, knocking a wine glass over with my elbow, its delicate frame smashing against the marble countertop.

“Fuck!”

My hands shook as I turned toward the shards of glass and began picking them up. “Fuck!” I exclaimed even more loudly as a piece sliced through my finger.

“Here, let me.”

I wrapped a paper towel around my bleeding finger, watching a red circle grow like a ripple in the lake. My eyes began to tear as I clenched my hand into a fist.

“Well, we aren’t going then. We can just do Christmas with my family.”

“Yeah, yeah of course.”

“How could she do this,” my voice rose, no longer able to choke my emotions down as I felt myself back in the hospital room. The beeping monitor, the smell of disinfectant, the stream of doctors with interchangeable faces who seemed only capable of sharing bad news.

“We can get a second opinion,” Frederick had whispered to me as I cried into his shoulder from my seat in the hospital chair. But months later, the specialist we saw five states away told us the same thing: Geneveve would never walk again.

It was just one night, it would be fine, we had reasoned. Jeffrey had assured us he couldn’t wait to spend time with his “favorite niece.”

But it wasn’t fine.

No one knew Jeff had been drinking again. He’d covered it up, drinking non-alcoholic beers at family dinners and talking about how life changing his AA meetings had been. But on that night seven years ago, he’d run out of beer and placed Geneveve into the car seat we’d carefully buckled into the back of his Toyota.

As he neared the liquor store, he didn’t notice that the light before him was red or the approaching car that would soon smash into his niece’s side.

I sat on his bed, waiting for him to come back, a knot forming in my chest. Hook ups were very hit or miss for me and tonight the stakes felt high. He was nice enough, attractive, but I could never quite tell if the dinner-side banter would translate into bedroom chemistry. By the time I knew the answer, it often felt too late to turn back. 

"I often fake my orgasms," I told my therapist two weeks ago. 

"Let's unpack that," she'd said. Armed with her pep talk, tonight felt like the tipping point. If I feigned my pleasure again it would be a reluctant admission that I prioritize the ego of strangers over my own desires and needs. "You don't owe men anything," she'd told me. 

I looked about his room as I waited for him and noticed a spray bottle by his mirror marked "Ant and Roach Killer." My skin crawled as I imagined a cockroach crawling across the very mattress where I sat.

He appeared in the doorway with two drinks in hand. 

"I didn't know if you liked olives so I only made one dirty."

"Dirty is great," I said. 

He handed me a glass and I watched as the olive banged against the large block of ice floating at its center. 

“In this one, you can see who the real photographer is. My sad attempt at taking David’s portrait beside his of me.” She laughed forcibly and put her hand on my back to guide me past the photos and toward the living room.

I laughed politely, but didn’t humor her by denying it. His photo of her was much better. He was backlit, at a questionable angle and somehow the magnificence of the falls behind him felt muted in comparison to his photo of her. His photo was a melding of movements: her hair as she turned, the glare of the sun blending into the blond of her curls, steam from the falls encroaching at the corners of the shot.

She would never admit it, but I could tell that she hated the photos, framed side by side—concrete evidence of his talent and her failure.

I’d known Susan growing up and success had come easy to her. A top student and star tennis player, she balanced clubs, volunteer work, sports and grades with ease. “Wise beyond her years,” my father had remarked after meeting her over dinner. She had dazzled him with her knowledge of current events. My mother and I were more likely to pick up People Magazine than the New York Times, a preference he’d scorned us for many times.

We’d been something like friends then, but I always had the feeling I was a stand-in, acceptable company until she got out of our small town.

She bagged scholarship after scholarship and as her acceptance letters rolled in, so too did my rejection letters. She eventually landed on a pre-law program at University of Chicago and there was a buzzing among the mothers about what she might make of her life. “What a smart girl. I bet she could start her own firm.”

Susan and I lost touch after graduation, but I was kept aware of her whereabouts through unsolicited updates from my mother. She joined a sorority; she met a guy. She wanted to go to law school. But she never did.

“Poor thing just had a full-fledged mental breakdown,” my mom exclaimed on the phone one day. She always shared the local gossip with me after her weekly lunch with Brenda, who had a son my age. “He’s still single,” she would often remind me.
I was half listening as I put groceries in my cart for the lasagna.

“I guess she just couldn’t get the LSAT scores she needed,” she said.

“Mmm,” I responded intermittently.  

“You know though, the breakdown was bound to happen. She was always so tightly wound. And her mother! Always putting pressure on her, even as a child. You’d made one tiny mistake at your fourth-grade piano recital, and I swear, Patty was so smug! Bragging about the difficulty of Susan’s piece and how she’d nailed her performance. ‘But you know, Mary really gave it her best.’ Ugh, I could have hit her.”

She rattled on about how she always encouraged us to make mistakes and how Patty had been too hard on her daughter.

“But anyway, all that to say, I want you to reach out to her.” I stopped looking at the label of the half and half cream I’d been staring at.

“Wait, what do you mean?”

“Oh, come on, Mary. You’ve known her such a long time and she just moved back here. Don’t you think a friendly face will help her at a time like this?”

I exhaled. I loved my mother’s altruistic spirit until it she got me involved in her do-good schemes.

“We haven’t spoken in four years,” I reminded her as I put back the Organic Valley cream in favor of the generic store brand.

“Well, I still think it would mean a lot to her.”

That conversation was ten years ago. Over coffees and glasses of wine, we eventually rekindled our friendship, growing closer than ever.

She’d married the man she’d met in college, David, and though he moved to Bloomington to be with her, his blooming career as a writer and director often meant he was away working in LA. He’d invite her to galas and award shows and while she joined him on occasion, I think she found the experience rather humiliating. She’d attended his last premiere with him and when she reluctantly joined him on the red carpet, a photographer yelled, “OK, can we get one without the girl please? One of just David, yes.”

He’d become something of a minor celebrity in the indie film community after his debut feature was picked up by distributers at Sundance. There was even award season buzz around it after the young starlet at the film’s center was nominated for best actress, but ultimately Meryl Streep swept the category.

As we stepped into the living room guests milled about, picking on the cheese plates, deviled eggs, meatballs and other hors d’oeuvres we’d prepared in the hours preceding the event.

A man in jeans and a blazer approached us, his mouth still full after stuffing in a phyllo cup.

“This is lovely, Susan,” he said between bites. “Did you make this?”

“I did, but I had some help,” she said, nodding in my direction.

“Mary,” I said, reaching out my hand.

“Jonathan. Nice to meet you.” He turned back toward Susan. “You must be so proud of David. I mean, I’ve known for years he’d make it big, but I didn’t know he’d make it this big.”

“Oh, of course I am.”
​
As Susan continued to make her rounds, I found a seat in the corner and watched. She played the role of doting wife well, gushing about his newest film when asked and quietly nodding by his side as he explained new projects in the pipeline. She’d accepted her place in life, even if reluctantly—in her mind she would always be relegated to a supporting role, coming just short of being cast as the lead.

I checked my phone again, my blue messages staring back at me.

emily!!
please respond. did you leave?

I locked my phone and placed it face up on the bar so I would see if she responded.

She always did this when we were out together. The moment she felt a man’s eyes on her, I disappeared from her periphery. Waiters, bar tenders, men who slid next to us as we grabbed a drink. It seemed she never tired of being the object of a strangers’ affections.

Usually, I didn’t mind. I was content melting into the background, observing the scene in front of me, front row to a private play.

Man, dark hair, blue blazer, enters stage right.

HIM: “What are you drinking?”

HER: “Well, I was drinking Chardonnay, but you might be able to persuade me to have what you’re having.”

New characters, same outcome. She knew her lines. She hit her marks. And I’d give her my standing ovation as I waited outside and watched her duck into a cab, a hand on the small of her back.

But tonight, it was different. I’d told her I’d had a bad week. Was it too much to ask that she cast aside the gaze of another to see the person sitting directly in front of her for one night?

i'm leaving

I sent the text, finished my drink.

​Exit stage right.

Sienna glanced down at her arms with frustration. Her whole body had broken out in a rash three days before and it would take weeks for it to fully clear up. She had known better than pick at the spots but had been unable to help herself. What were already eye sores were now real sores, a few of them scabbed over from her incessant picking. Her predicament was made worse by the fact that it hindered her from getting what she really wanted—to get laid.

Getting laid was no easy task even when her skin was clear, but now, looking like a child with chickenpox, the feat felt insurmountable.

She knew the rash wasn’t contagious. It was something she’d dealt with since she was seven, rearing its head at the most inopportune times, like when she wore a strapless dress for a piano recital or the time she decided to host a pool party for her birthday. She opened the app and contemplated canceling, but she’d already rescheduled on him two weeks ago.

She scrolled through their discussion: the flirting and banter felt promising. She swiped over to his profile and zoomed in on his top photo. The tattoos, battered tee and old camera draped around his neck screamed Bushwick bisexual in a way that made her mouth water. He could absolutely ruin her life and she would let him. Bagging such a man though, could it be done in her current state?

At least it’s winter, she countered to herself. She could wear a turtleneck and concealer and take him back to her place. With the lights off, he would undress her and be so blinded by the beauty of her naked body that he wouldn’t even notice she was more speckled than an egg. She’d sweat off her concealer, sure, but it wouldn’t matter as they lay splayed across her mattress. The sex would have been so good, he’d be panting and looking at the ceiling, not at her face.  

She bit her lip. “still on for tn?” She quickly pressed send before she could overthink it and stuffed her phone in her pocket. No backing out now.

She sank onto her bed, taking notice of her vibrating headboard. Going back to her place wasn’t ideal, but it was the only way she could ensure full control of the lights. Sienna’s roommate, Ari, constantly played their music too loud, the bass rattling the wall the two shared. She’d tried bringing it up to them but was met with dismissal. They needed to hold space for their creative process, they’d told her. Even if that process meant blasting EDM music from their bedroom until 2am, apparently.

She sat up and looked at Cheeto, who was giving himself a thorough bath, lapping at his leg loudly. She’d impulsively adopted him shortly after graduation and when closed out of her room, he would cry as if he was being impaled until she opened the door. The wails were a definite mood killer, so she often opted for the bone-in-room option, meaning her dates were subjected to Cheeto gnawing and crunching for the entirety of the hook up.

The odds were certainly stacked against her, but she checked her phone once more.
​
“def on”

The sun bore down on my shoulders as I squinted out across the pool. I exhaled and wiped sweat off my forehead as I watched Simon break out in a sprint.

His bare feet padded across the concrete leaving a watery trail as he accelerated toward the snack shop, no doubt to charge a grilled cheese and French fries to his parents’ tab.

There was no point yelling at him now as he was already nearing the pool gates. But my skin bristled with anger. Not once had he listened to my pleas, scolds and yells when I tried to discipline him this summer. And not once had his mother stepped in to aid in curbing his unruly behavior.

She sat now, lounging with the other country club mothers with their chairs turned toward each other in a circle, oblivious to the pool, to their children, or anything else happening in the world.

I glanced at my watch and blew the whistle. Rest break.

I steadied myself as I climbed down the latter and grabbed the leaf skimmer leaned against my chair. Mary Ella would probably come down to check on things soon and would have a stroke if she saw the leaves floating by the circle of mothers.

I walked over to them, ready to give a friendly nod if one of them made eye contact with me, but they were too engrossed in conversation to notice my approach. Thank god, I thought as I reached the skimmer toward the nearest leaf. Forced congeniality was not my strong suit.

They were carrying on about Samantha’s daughter’s new beau—“Vanderbilt and studying to be a doctor, can you believe it?”—when Debra shushed the group.

“Oh god, here she comes,” she whispered loudly, peering over her tortoise shell sunglasses at the entrance. I glanced subtly in that direction, trying to not give away that I was eaves dropping.

It was Ramona and her son, Diego, new members of the club. Ramona paused at the gate to wait for Diego, reaching out her hand. He quickened his pace to reach her, and they entered hand in hand, choosing two chairs across the pool from the other mothers. She laid out her towel and then his, tussling his hair as he sat next to her.
 
Debra smoothed out her blue and white striped one piece shaking her head. “I’m not judging, I just can’t imagine wearing something like that in front of my children.” The mothers all murmured in agreement in their tasteful one pieces and tankinis. None of them would be caught dead in a leopard print bikini. "It's just not motherly."

"And you know, if Peter brought home a woman with tattoos like hers, I wouldn't stand for it," Susan joined in. "It's a clear sign that someone is impulsive and a poor decision maker. It would tell me everything I needed to know about that woman's ability to be a good mother." 

I contained the urge to scoff, thinking of the cross I'd seen tattooed across Peter's bicep when he practiced for dive team in the mornings. 

The woman continued chatting in hushed tones about Ramona — they'd made their disdain for her joining clear from day one.  

She was boisterous, loud and often spoke in Spanish with the staff at the pool. The space she felt comfortable taking up seemed to grate on the nerves of the other mothers. Rumors had even circulated that she might be gay after she brought Chloe Caldwell’s “Women” to read by the pool one day. No one had ever seen her husband, so reason stood that the book was given to her by a female lover.

But for all the vitriol I’d heard spewed in her direction, I couldn’t help but admire her. She was everything I’d been taught not to be, and her quiet, confident rebellion stoked a fire within me. And though the other mothers seemed to label her as unfit, she was the most affectionate mother I had ever seen.

Simon had pushed Diego down one day, his knee scraped and bloodied on the concrete. Ramona held him and wiped his tears as I cleaned the wound, and I found myself transfixed as she stroked his hair and kissed him on the top of his head. I’d never seen such tenderness from the other mothers before.

When Sarah opened the package from her mother, there was a letter addressed to her and a book—“Finding Happiness Through God.” She smiled at the sentiment before tucking it under her bed, next to other devotionals and religious texts her mother had been sending her for years.

She could hardly recognize the girl her mother still seemed to believe she was — a doe-eyed 16-year old who was part of her church’s youth band, an active member in several Christian clubs and someone who prayed that the Lord would send her a man of God. That version of her thought for certain that by this age she'd be married with 2-3 children. She'd walk hand-in-hand with her husband into church every morning, their children trailing behind in dresses, khakis and button down shirts.  

She hadn’t told her mother how much she’d changed in the years since leaving home. It had been years since she stepped into a sanctuary, yet her mother would still ask her if she’d tried meeting a nice man at church, Your years are creeping up on you, you know.

She didn’t resent her mother, but she did resent the space that made her believe her value lied in remaining clean.

For years she’d hated herself. She’d said no, but she felt stained, dirty after being sexually assaulted in college. She should have been stronger. Her shorts should have been longer. She should have had less to drink.

She’d gone to church the day after the assault. She’d cried in the parking lot and cried on her knees while the lights were dimmed and a band played a worship song she’d heard a hundred times before. A woman beside her placed a hand on her shoulder and it only made her feel dirtier, unworthy of existing in the space.

She wanted nothing to do with a place that made her hate herself so much for something her therapist consistently told her was not her fault.

When my dad died this past April, we hadn’t spoken in six years. But I could still smell the tobacco that hung on his clothes and breath. I could still hear the Johnny Cash record he played at night, dutifully lifting the needle every time it started skipping on “Cocaine Blues.” I could still see his cup on the table beside him, the glass stained with tobacco spit and the inside littered with sunflower seed shells. I could still feel him ruffling my hair, an act I despised when I was younger, having to fix it again in the mirror every time I left the house. But I longed for nothing more than to feel that now.

Things took a turn when I was eight and my uncle Jaime died in a motorcycle accident. His brother was his best friend.

Two years later, my mom kicked him out of the house after he almost burned it down. The curtains were draped over the space heater he’d turned on and he was too stoned to notice until flames flicked against the ceiling of their bedroom. I’ve only seen my dad cry twice. Once after Jaime’s death and once as he begged her to let him stay.

I was waiting tables at Dennys when Dad started asking me for money. A few months later, I sobbed in the passenger seat of my mom’s beat up Toyota, furious at her, when she told me she was filing a restraining order. He’d broken into our house when we visited grandma the week before.
​
I wouldn’t look her in the eye, but she rubbed my shoulder as my body shook. “We can’t fix him,” she told me.