I have been baking. Cupcakes with messages in them, if you want to know. Like fortune cookies, but cupcakes.
When against all odds Noah comes back to me, he will be so surprised to bite into a chocolate cupcake and see the message: YOU ARE NOW WITH THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE.
Maybe this could be a business. Cupcakes with Messages. I’ll have to come up with a better name, of course, but first I have to figure out how you can tuck pieces of paper into cupcake batter without getting them all wet. I’ve been puzzling over this for days, and so far nothing seems to be working.
My mother puts her hand over her mouth. Her eyes fill with tears as she and I both take in the full horror of my situation. My father pulls me into his arms and hugs me. I start to cry.
“We’ve been trying and trying to reach you,” he says in a muffled voice. “Why don’t you answer your phone? We’ve been calling you for days and days. We were out of our minds. Your mother finally said we should book a flight and rent a car and see for ourselves what’s going on.”
“I wanted to call the police,” my mother says. “How could you do this to us?”
“I am so, so sorry,” I say. But really—has it actually been that long? I might have lost some track of time.
They come into the apartment warily, like they might be entering a crime scene. Suddenly everything looks awful: the sun shining on the countertop where I spilled eggs and cream and flour. And the little slips of paper everywhere, with their simplistic sayings on them, look stupid and childish. Out of the corner of my eye I see that my mother has picked up one off the floor that reads: WHO CARES WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK? BE YOU!
She hands it to my father and stares at me with round, tragic eyes. “Marnie? Honey? What is going on?”
“It’s . . . an idea . . . a business idea . . .”
“A business idea?” My father is all over business ideas. He looks at the slip of paper and then at me and then back at the slip of paper. It has chocolate smeared all over it.
“Throw that away, Millie,” he says in a low voice.
The trash can is overflowing, and the window has streaks of dust. The sink is filled with soup cans and spoons and a cardboard coffee cup that has something green floating in it. I was studying it earlier, that green mold. Mold is life, after all. And now that I look around, seeing the place through their eyes, I also notice that there’s a red high heel in the middle of the floor and the picture of Noah and me at Lake Tahoe smashed on the floor by the heater. (Yes, I smashed the picture with the high heel, so what? It was a satisfying symbolic moment.)
I go over and try to scoop up as much as possible of the detritus of my life, to hide it from them. But I can’t hide it at all, and now that Natalie has told them that I’ve lost my job, they also can see that I haven’t gone out and replaced it. Soon they’ll point out to me that when MacGraws lose jobs, that’s when they double down; they start making calls, sending out flurries of résumés and curricula vitae. That’s when a MacGraw gets into gear.
“So what happened to your phone?” my mother wants to know.
I look around. Where is my phone, anyway? How could I have neglected it? Oh, yes. The phone. Well, the truth is I must have forgotten the charger at work the day I left, and I honestly have never thought of it again until this moment. No wonder nobody has called me. I talked to Sylvie and Natalie last week, and then never bothered to recharge it. I have been so—so lame. Maybe I am having what they used to call a nervous breakdown. I don’t really know what one of those is, but that does not mean that I’m not having one.
“Oh, honey,” my mother says. I expect her to say the things she wouldn’t have been able to avoid saying back when I was in junior high: stand up straight, comb your hair, and why didn’t you do these dishes? It’s even scarier that she says none of that. Instead, she tightens the purse strings of her lips and sets herself to work making things conform to the standards set by civilization.
My father, clearly the designated hugger, comes over once again and holds on to me, and says, “You need some care.” They must be really worried if he’s not going to ask why I didn’t get another job yet, or why I was so awful as to get myself fired, or what I think I’m going to do next.
Nobody says anything that would be upsetting.
I close my eyes in gratitude. My parents are here, and I can stop running from whatever has me, because they are going to take care of me now so I don’t have to adult myself anymore.
They pack up my things, donate the furniture, clean the apartment, make the necessary phone calls, sell my old car to a guy down the street.
And just like that, it’s over.
They are going to take me back home, back to the mother ship, for repairs.
TEN
MARNIE
When you fall apart and move back home, nursing a big heartbreak, everyone tiptoes around you, until one day they bombard you with all the opinions they’ve been keeping to themselves.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: I actually don’t mind their opinions. I am back in suburban Jacksonville where I belong, back in the 1960s pastel-yellow ranch house on the cul-de-sac where I grew up, two blocks from a black-water creek in one direction and the low-slung pink brick elementary school in the other. Old oak trees, dripping with Spanish moss, stand guard among the palm trees, the same as they always did. Nothing truly bad could ever happen to you here—that is, if you have the good sense to come in during the daily thunderstorm that arrives around 5:00 p.m.
My father is sure that I need to find another job, but he is patient and willing to help me. He says I need something with security! Health benefits! A pension! He talks to Rand Carson, my old boss at the Crab & Clam House when I was a teenager (I was chief clam girl, I’ll have you know)—and when I make a face and tell my dad, “Not the fried clams again!” he says I am in line for a much more senior position: dining room manager. I can boss the clam kids around while somebody else pays my health insurance premiums.
My mother has another life in mind for me altogether, as her sidekick. She declares happily that we are “joined at the hip” as we make the rounds of her social life and errands: to the pool, to the store, to the library, to the gym, to lunch with her friends, and then we do the whole circuit all over again the next day. I am the prodigal daughter, welcomed back into the neighborhood, complimented for how I’ve grown up, for my nice smile. And it’s true; I smile brightly at all the people my mother knows, which is nearly everyone in town. The neighbors who are outside watering their lawns need to run over just to get a look at me, as does Rita, the cashier at the Winn-Dixie, and Drena, who has styled my mother’s hair since forever at the Do or Dye Salon on Hyde Park Avenue. They all look at me with slightly pitying expressions on their faces. So they know the whole story. Of course they do, but they understand.