“Dumplin’?” she calls from her bedroom. “Baby, my zipper’s stuck.”
I trudge up the stairs. My mother has fit in her old pageant dress every year since she was crowned. Including the year she gave birth to me. From the way Lucy told it, the house was a Jazzercise fun house, and it was a close call, but she did it.
I’ve seen this dress—a sea-foam-green sequined bodice with a chiffon skirt—so many times that it’s not even pretty anymore.
Since the house is so old, there’s no actual master bedroom upstairs. Just a shared bathroom at the end of the hallway. It’s weird to think that my mom’s and Lucy’s rooms are the same rooms they grew up in their whole lives. I imagine them as teenagers slamming doors in each other’s faces or sneaking back and forth from room to room. I’ve heard so much about their lives together before me, but sometimes I wonder about what they chose not to tell me and it’s those blanks that I like to fill in.
I walk down the hallway and reach for the glass knob and open the bedroom door.
Oh shit.
From the doorway, I can tell that the zipper isn’t the problem. There’s a good one-inch gap between the fabric across my mom’s back.
Sweat dampens her forehead as she waves me closer.
I make a show of pulling on the zipper for a minute or two before saying, “Uh, Mom? I don’t think the zipper is the issue.”
She whirls around and looks over her shoulder so that she can catch her own reflection. “Godammit,” she spits.
Okay, so my mom has maybe said the Lord’s name in vain two times in her entire life. And only once that I can really remember.
“Unzip me.”
The zipper slides down like a sigh of relief.
She sits on the edge of the bed, holding the front of the dress to her chest. “Okay, so I’m gonna have to go on a cleanse and add in some cycling and Pilates classes.” She says Pilates like “Pee-lates,” the twang in her voice becoming more and more pronounced with the added anxiety. “I think Marylou’s got a class I can get into tomorrow night.”
“But I have to go to work,” I say. “I need the car.”
She looks up at me with her eyebrows raised, like, this is a crisis and I do not understand the gravity of the situation. “Well, sweetheart, we’re going to have to make it work. You keep taking the car to school and I’ll have it in the evenings. Most girls your age don’t even have cars. We get what we get. We don’t fret.”
I don’t bother fighting her on it.
I sit in the break room picking on the apple my mom gave me when she dropped me off. I swear, when she pulled into the parking lot, she held her breath, like she might catch some extra calories if she inhaled too deeply near so much trans fat.
I expected to hear from Mitch yesterday. A follow-up call of some sort to make sure we were cool after Halloween. Or maybe, like, a customer service call to rate my satisfaction. But nothing.
I woke up yesterday morning and had to convince myself that he’d actually kissed me. It wasn’t a bad kiss. There wasn’t that heart-stammering feeling I had had with Bo.
Today, though, he was his usual self. With no mention of The Kiss. I started to think that maybe he really was someone else that night, and it was the magic of Halloween. But the guilt and regret I feel is all too real.
Then, at the end of the day, when we walked to the parking lot, he took my hand firmly in his. It was hard not to feel like we hadn’t skipped a step somewhere. I wasn’t about to embark on another relationship that was all action and no definition. Before I left he handed me a small hardback book called Magic for the Young and the Young at Heart. “I remember you saying you needed a talent. For the pageant.”
I shoved the book in my backpack and thanked him.
“There’s a note inside,” he said. “But read it later.”
There’s a knock on the break room door, even though it’s open.
“Hey,” says Bo.