“I’m sorry,” she managed to say.
She got to her feet clumsily. She straightened her shoulders, her head feeling slightly disconnected from the rest of her body.
“Shall we?” she said.
Her mother, that Anglophile, would like that. Penelope glanced over at her, and yes, she was smiling.
AFTER THE DINNER, bloody roast beef although half the girls and even some of the mothers were vegetarians, Penelope leaned against her mother’s car. The sky was purple and black. Her head hurt a little and the taste of the coconut layer cake was making her queasy.
“Well,” her mother said, not looking at Penelope, “I have a good lead. I’m driving to Rhode Island tomorrow.”
“Three hours and seventeen minutes,” Penelope muttered. She had timed how long it would take her mother to bring up yet another lead on the Holy Grail of finding her birth mother.
“What?” her mother said. Her face had gone blank, the way it did when she drank too much. Her eyelids drooped in a way that half an hour ago might have been sexy but now looked kind of sad.
She had been adopted by a rich family in Vermont as a baby, but all of a sudden all she could think of was who her real parents were. Every few weeks, she went off somewhere, chasing some wrong information. At Easter, she’d flown to Colorado, only to learn that the couple who might be her parents had had a boy. It was all so stupid, so long ago. If Penelope’s mother had given her away at birth, Penelope doubted she’d be wasting her middle age looking for her. She’d say, Fuck you very much for abandoning me and move on with her life.
Her mother was telling her about Rhode Island, a Catholic hospital.
“This time I think I’ve found her for real, Pen, Penny, my Penelope,” she said drunkenly. Her mother had lived in England for a year or something a long time ago, and she used this fake accent that drove Penelope crazy. When she drank too much, her fake English accent got even stronger.
Penelope’s leg jumped, up and down, up and down. She wished she’d taken the end of that joint with her so she could sneak into the ladies’ room and have a hit or two, just to calm her down. Just to blot out her mother’s voice.
Across the parking lot, Penelope watched Rainier and her mother bent together at their Volvo. Her stomach flipped over. Rainier was probably getting the LSD right now, and tonight or tomorrow night Penelope was going to have to take it. She sighed. Why did everything have to get complicated?
“I was thinking you could come with me,” her mother was saying. “We could have a nice drive in the morning after breakfast and check out this lead.”
Penelope chewed her lip. Rainier came skipping across the parking lot. As she passed them, she flashed a peace sign. Or maybe a V for Victory?
“I don’t like that girl,” her mother said in a low voice. “She always looks like she’s up to no good.”
“She’s all right,” Penelope said.
She was thinking of that boy again, the one who jumped out that window, and her stomach cramped. She remembered how Rainier had said after they heard, “God! I wonder if I blew him? I hope so. You know, it would be a pity to die without ever doing anything like that.” Penelope had had the same thought, but it had made her sick to think it. Not Rainier. Rainier had laughed.
“So,” her mother said, jingling her keys, impatient to leave, “what do you say?”
Maybe Rainier would wait until tomorrow and if Penelope wasn’t here, or got back super late, she could avoid this whole LSD thing. But a whole day, in the car, with her mother. Which was worse?
“Stop jiggling your leg, Penelope,” her mother said, grabbing Penelope’s knee and holding on tight. Beneath her mother’s hand, Penelope’s leg trembled, wanting to move.
“Stop,” her mother said again. Penelope saw that she had a faint smear of lipstick across her two front teeth. Had it been there this whole time?
Rainier had gone inside now and was miming something to Penelope, something too complicated to mime. It could be: Let’s go smoke a joint. It could be: Let’s go give some lucky boys a blow job they’ll never forget. It could be: Let’s drop this acid now! Penelope turned her gaze away from Rainier. She felt suddenly very tired.
“Sure,” Penelope told her mother.
“Really?” her mother said, so pathetically pleased that Penelope wished she had said no. “That’s great, darling. Shall we have breakfast first?”
Penelope shrugged. “I guess,” she said.
Her mother kissed her on the cheek, her breath all coconutty and sour gin. “All right then,” she said. “Cheeri-o until morning.”
Penelope slipped away from the hug her mother was drunkenly trying to execute. “Cheeri-o!” she muttered heading up the hill toward Figg. “Ta-ta and all that bloody rubbish!”