Meg wandered through the big, echoey house and got herself a granola bar from the kitchen, chucking a pair of liquefied bananas into the trash. She was just chasing a couple of fruit flies out of the sink when she heard her mom’s key in the door.
“Hey,” she called, padding through the dark, cluttered dining room and out into the hallway. Meg still couldn’t get used to seeing her mom in the skirts and blouses she wore to work now, like she was dressed up in some kind of costume. Right when she’d first started interviewing, the two of them had gone to the J.Crew Factory Store and she’d bought the same top in four different prints. “How was your day?”
“Oh, you know,” her mom said, dumping her purse on the wooden bench near the doorway and kicking her sensible pumps to the side. A couple of months after Meg’s dad moved out, she’d gotten a job through a friend of a friend as a receptionist at one of those big old Colonial-era mansions that hosted weddings and reunions and the occasional Revolutionary War reenactment, answering the phone and handing out informational brochures and adding people’s addresses to the mailing list. It sounded totally boring, but Meg knew the truth was that her mom was lucky to get hired at all, since until last year she hadn’t worked an outside job since the ’90s. Her dad’s career was managing Hal Collins, the famous folk singer. Her mom’s career was being his wife. “Not as bad as a chicken in my underwear.”
Meg smiled. Not as bad as a chicken in your underwear was an old joke in their family, though she didn’t actually know where it came from. That was one thing she missed about her parents being together—it was like the three of them had had a little civilization with a language all their own, and now there were never enough of them around at once to speak it properly.
They boiled a pot of spaghetti and dumped a jar of tomato sauce on top—neither one of them was going to be winning any cooking competitions any time soon, that was for sure—and carried their bowls past the dust-covered piano in the living room to the sagging couch in the den, her mom stopping by the fridge on the way to pour herself a big glass of white wine. Meg glanced in her direction as she set it down on the coffee table, then looked back at the TV. Both her parents had always been social drinkers, going out to long, boozy dinners in New York with Hal and his band, but lately it felt like her mom was hitting it kind of hard. At least, Meg thought she was. She couldn’t tell if her mom was actually doing it more or if it just seemed that way because she was doing it alone.
They settled down in front of a home renovation show, a cheerful husband and wife knocking down walls and installing brand-new cabinets. Meg couldn’t help glancing down at the grungy Persian rug in the den. Her dad had always been the more fastidious of her parents, and since he’d moved out a certain amount of chaos had started to creep in around the edges of their big, creaky old house, like vines climbing up over a white picket fence. Tumbleweeds of dust and hair drifted into the upstairs corners. The antique handles on the bathroom faucet had come loose. Water glasses collected on every available surface until they finally ran out altogether and had to wander from room to room rounding them up like wayward cattle. Leaning against the side of the sofa were a bunch of weird abstract paintings her mom had bought at an estate sale right after her dad had moved out, saying she was going to make a gallery wall where their wedding photos had hung, but she’d lost enthusiasm for the project halfway through.
“Maybe we should paint in here this summer,” Meg ventured now, licking a smear of tomato sauce off the side of her thumb and squinting at a brownish water stain on the ceiling above the window. There’d been a whole thing with ice dams over the winter, and her parents had gotten into a stalemate over whose job it was to pay for it. In the end, Meg wasn’t sure either one of them actually had.
“Oh, definitely,” her mom agreed now, holding her hand out for Meg’s empty bowl before standing up and heading into the kitchen. “We can go ahead and shiplap the bathroom while we’re at it.”
Well. So much for that idea, Meg guessed. “Whitewash the fireplace, perhaps.”
“Exactly.” Meg heard her setting the dishes in the sink, then a long pause and finally the sound of the fridge opening and closing. “Did you know your father and Lisa are in Palm Springs this weekend?” she asked as she came back into the living room, a fresh glass of wine in one hand and her phone in the other.
“He mentioned it, yeah,” Meg said cautiously. Lisa was her dad’s girlfriend, a lawyer for one of the universities in Philly. She was younger than him—not so young that it was objectively gross, Meg guessed, but young enough that it was her mom’s favorite thing to complain about. “Hal was doing some shows in LA.”
“Well, good for Hal,” her mom said crisply. “And good for Lisa, apparently. She posted all about her luxurious day at the spa on Facebook.”
Meg grimaced. “Mom, why are you looking at her Facebook to begin with?”
“I know,” her mom said immediately, setting her phone on the arm of the sofa and holding her free hand up. “It’s bad of me. It’s toxic behavior.” She took a sip of her wine. “I’m just saying, it would have been nice of him to see if you wanted to go.”
“I have school,” Meg reminded her.
“Oh, like he’s suddenly so attuned to your academic calendar.” Meg’s mom rolled her eyes. “And, you know, not for nothing, but if he’s got the cash to be tacking romantic spa getaways onto his work trips, you’d think possibly he could also be bothered to—”
“Mom,” Meg interrupted quietly. “Come on.”
“I’m stopping,” her mom said now, holding her hand up again, waving it back and forth. “I’m sorry. I’m stopping.”
She was as good as her word, thankfully: her lips were zipped for the rest of the episode, not counting a crack about the ugly mosaic tile the designer picked out for the brand-new backsplash. What she didn’t stop doing was drinking. Meg bit the inside of her cheek as her mom poured herself another glass of wine, and then another. The next time she got up, just as the clients were oohing and aahing over their brand-new master bathroom, Meg heard the telltale pop of a cork as her mom opened a whole other bottle.
She dropped her head back against the couch cushions and stared up at the splotchy ceiling, swallowing down a weird wave of something like panic and reminding herself that nothing happening right now was actually an emergency. She was safe in the house she’d lived in since she was a baby, even if it did look a little grubbier than usual. Her mom was the same as she’d always been. Everything was fine.
Right?
All at once, Meg stood up, eyes darting around the room like she was looking for the closest available exit. Like if she didn’t get out of here soon she might die. “Mom,” she called, wiping her suddenly sweaty hands on her jeans and telling herself to stop being so dumb and dramatic. There was no reason to start some huge fight. “I gotta go to work.”
“Computers are down again,” Lillian reported when Meg turned up for her shift at WeCount, handing her a sheaf of papers held together with a plastic paper clip shaped like a Dalmatian. Lillian was twenty-one and Meg’s supervisor; her girlfriend, Maja, worked at a bakery in Philly, and Lillian was forever leaving boxes of palmiers and fruit tarts on the counter of the tiny kitchenette in the office. “So we’re working from call sheets tonight.”