Bad Mommy(37)

Leaving now. Don’t worry. Money on the way.





Amanda and Hollis lived on Bainbridge Island, a thirty-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. She’d invited me to visit “anytime,” so on Friday morning I gave her a call to ask if they were free for the weekend. I couldn’t take the oppression.

“Yeah, of course. Come on over,” she said, breathlessly into the phone. It sounded like she was working out. “I’ll grab some wine and we can hang out here for the night.”

I got her address and went to pack a small overnight bag, throwing my laptop in at the last minute. I was shaking when I climbed into my car and set off for the ferry.

Barbra didn’t seem like enough today. I played songs that reminded me of Darius, a list I’d been compiling ever since we met, and I tried not to think of them in France together. It wasn’t fair, not just that she was with him instead of me, but the fact that she had everything: money, travel, clothes, the admiration of hundreds, if not thousands of women. She didn’t deserve any of it. I’d seen the real her, unlike her thousands of fans. I was privy to those private moments of human ugliness. If they could just catch a glimpse of the real Jolene Avery, they’d not praise her with quite as much volume. Sure, she wrote good words. I myself had been a victim of her words—eating them up like they were the absolute truth. I’d even reposted quotes from her book to my Instagram page, deeply moved by her third eye into the human psyche. On more than one occasion, I’d found myself fantasizing about how I’d let everyone into the secret: she was human just like the rest of us, and I wanted to be the one to expose that truth. I heard the ferry’s horn and realized with a start that we were pulling into the dock. I needed to pee and I had an overwhelming urge to text Darius and ask him how things were going. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone to see if either of them had posted something new to Instagram. It wasn’t healthy for me to keep looking, and besides, it was all a farce anyway. He’d told me how absolutely miserable he was, so anything either one of them posted was a complete social media lie. I bought a coffee in a little shop on Main Street and carried it down to the docks to look at the boats. I didn’t even want a coffee, I just needed something to distract me. My brain was in overdrive, flashing images of Darius and Jolene on their perfect vacation until I wanted to scream from the torture of it. My heart was racing so fast I had to sit down on the dock to catch my breath. It was then I noticed the silver spoon lying next to me. Clean and new like it had just come out of the wash. When I picked it up it was weightless, a plastic spoon made to look expensive.

“Oh my god,” I whispered, turning it over in my hand to examine it. It was a sign. I felt something warm on my cheek, and when I reached up to touch my face I realized I was crying. I held the spoon to my chest, tears leaking from my eyes. “A sign,” I heard myself saying over and over.

The story Darius sent me, he’d written it for his English class in high school. I’d printed it out and read it over and over, his words rich even at a young age, falling off the paper and into my heart. I’d looked for meaning or significance in his story of the spoon. In the end, I’d decided that the spoon symbolized his happiness, how the boy in his book found it by chance and carried it around with him during a tumultuous time in his life. I walked back to my car with the spoon clutched in my hand, determined to keep living, sure nothing so far had happened by chance.

Amanda was waiting for me by the door when I pulled up to their two-story, her curly hair catching the breeze as it dove past her. I thought about how hair had started this whole journey, and smiled. I missed Mercy, but I shoved the feeling to the back of my mind as I grabbed my overnight bag and walked up the cobbled drive. I had been wrong about Amanda. She may have initially approached me with caution, but she’d since opened up, making sure to include me any time we were all together.

“Hey crazy,” she said, without smiling. If it were anyone else I’d question if they were delivering a disguised jab my way, but Amanda called me crazy in an endearing way. I’d learned that she rarely smiled and had an air of world-weariness about her that only dropped away after she’d had a few drinks. Jolene told me once that Amanda loved more intensely than anyone she’d ever met, so she was careful about who she gave her love away to.

Their house had expansive glass windows that faced a spectacular water view. She set me up at the dining table with a glass of sweet Moscato that she knew I liked and started making dinner while we chatted from across the room. I was dying to tell her about the spoon, and finally, I just blurted it out.