Bad Mommy(43)

Her last venture was Fig Coxbury, and also mine. I wished she’d been absent from class that day. Fig was five layers of rotten fruit underneath a smooth, candy exterior. Jolene was too saturated with love to see the rot. I liked the rot. You had to laugh. It’s all you could do.

Figgy Pudding was a fixture in our house. I was fat with anticipation of what would come of all of it. As Jolene always said, you couldn’t put three crazy people into a story and not have their worlds teeter-totter. For right now, she was an obnoxious knick-knack in my home. You could move her from room to room, but she was always there staring at you. Sometimes when I came home, she’d be sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs, whipping quips around the room faster than Jolene’s KitchenAid mixer. Other times, she’d be leaving just as I walked in, either brushing past me with aggression or stopping to chat. Highs and lows, lows and highs. I’d argue it out with my wife. Fig’s mental instability was most prevalent on social media. It was shocking if you paused to look.

“You post a black and white photo, she posts a black and white photo,” I said. “You tie a bandana around your wrist, she ties a bandana around her wrist.”

Jolene was already starting to laugh and I hadn’t even mentioned that out of the five restaurants we’d visited this month, Fig had gone to four of them—less than twenty-four hours after we’d been there. I was even getting a little creeped out, and I dealt with people like this on a regular basis. Scratch that, I dealt with complacent loonies, bored loonies. I’d not had a legit, stalker looney on my couch in a long time. Those people never knew they needed help.

“Come on,” she said. “I could go to anyone’s Instagram and there’d be similar pictures on their feed.”

I shrugged. You couldn’t force someone to see something. “Maybe so,” I said. “But they wouldn’t have your bandana—like the exact one you have, in the exact placement.”

Jolene’s face puckered as she thought. “I have good taste, yo.”

Sometimes I wondered if she took anything seriously, or if life was one big experiment for her.

I knew Fig. I’d been watching her watch us for months now. When you’re a shrink you’re in the habit of diagnosing people as soon as they made eye contact with you. Except Fig rarely made eye contact. She was funny. It was a defense mechanism, but still effective. I mentioned how funny she was to Jolene once and she raised an eyebrow at me.

“When? She never says anything funny to me,” she said.

That’s when I knew for sure that Fig gave different things to different people. For me, she was levity and nostalgia, listening to the stories Jolene told me to shut up about, tossing my humor right back at me. To my wife, she was a sounding board, especially about that fucker, Ryan. Ryan went to college with my wife and had recently reemerged in her social circles, reaching out more than an acquaintance would. I didn’t know how Fig caught wind of him, but she asked Jolene about him every day, wanting to know if he’d texted and what about. She pushed Jolene to talk about his looks, his personality, their background. I watched it all on Jolene’s iPad, which was synced to her cell. I’d bought it for her one Christmas, and the novelty had lasted about a week before it got lost underneath a pile of papers on her desk. She preferred to read real books and everything else she did on her phone or laptop. Lucky me. I got to sit in the front row as my wife texted our neighbor about the boy she wished she’d been interested in over a decade ago. A decade before me. I mostly caught up on their texting on my lunch break. I’d sit at my desk and eat the yogurt Jolene sent, as I scrolled through their texts, Fig’s and Jolene’s, that is. Not Jolene’s and Ryan’s—their texts were boring. He was blandly a gentleman.

Fig: Look at his lips. Great kisser!

Jolene: Could be sloppy.

Fig: Oh my god, just admit it. He’s hot.

I dropped yogurt on my phone and couldn’t see Jolene’s response, but it was already time for my next client.

Moving along…





“So, you’re acknowledging it?”

“No,” she hissed. “I’m not acknowledging anything.” She shot me a look that told me to shut up, so I did. I’d let her see for herself. It was right there lurking along West Barrett Street. I thought about all the Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers’ movies I’d watched. The crazies on your street always had talons and scary faces. West Barrett’s crazy had a manicure and all of my wife’s clothes.

We were standing at the window in the living room, the one that overlooked our strange neighbor’s house. It was cold outside, the window icy to the touch. We’d been having an argument about Fig five minutes earlier at the dinner table. Too many glasses of wine, and I was on edge with the whole lawsuit thing. Jolene was insisting that Fig was misunderstood. I was insisting that Fig was bat shit crazy. I don’t know why it was so important for me to show her what a fake Fig was, but I’d set my glass of wine down and calmly asked her to log her Fitbit steps.