She hopes this next child is a girl.
She buckles him into his car seat and starts the engine, but then she just sits there in the quiet, wondering how long it will take him to start screaming. She watches a black family set up for a birthday party. There are so many of them. There are balloons and hats and an older guy manning the grill and banners and children running about. A couple of the smallest children walk tentatively up to a girl with her dog. The girl smiles and they pet the dog and then they’re all smiling and petting the dog. Laura wants to join them. She thinks of her own family, how they have spread out: both of her sisters in Texas—one east, the other west—her brother in Tennessee, their mother dead. Their father lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he moved to get away from them all, to not have to deal with them, though there was never much to deal with, she thought. Nothing so terrible. Her brother said he has a new family now, but she doesn’t know anything about that. She wonders if he likes his new family or if he’ll move someplace else soon and start over again with brand-new people, people who will seem so promising in the beginning. There was nothing so terrible, she thinks again, putting the car into reverse. There was nothing so terrible at all.
FIRST CLASS
We flew first class. We were drinking Perrier while the other passengers boarded. I looked at them and thought, peasants, as they bunched together with their overlarge carry-ons, bumping into each other and apologizing. Whenever Shelly and I went anywhere, it was always first class. We stayed in the best hotels. We ate in the best restaurants and she always paid. I had been hesitant about the arrangement at first. I’d offered to pick up tabs, pay my own way, but for Christmas she sent me a pale blue box from Tiffany’s with a note that said All my bitches have this necklace. It was the nicest piece of jewelry I owned, a small diamond X.
Shelly won millions in the lottery; at the time, it had been one of the largest wins in history, though she’d had to split it with four of her coworkers (the press labeled them “the Super 8 Five”). Because she’d never had money before, she didn’t know what to do with her wealth except spend it. She bought houses and cars and plane tickets and spent a lot of time ordering things online. She loved Costco and Target, which made her think of herself as unaffected. She didn’t keep up with the other women but sometimes she Googled them to see if they were dead—one was dead, had died in a single-car accident a year to the date after the win.
It was the curse of the lottery, she’d told me on numerous occasions. Within seven years, 70 percent of winners were broke; there were stories of home invasions, murders, and suicides, and Shelly liked to follow them all. She thought she might write a book about it someday, a book that told her story, maybe even get in touch with the remaining members of the Super 8 Five.
This was the only thing I knew for sure about rich people: once the money was yours, it didn’t matter that you hadn’t earned it, had done nothing to deserve it; it didn’t matter where it came from.
“We have to get you some new clothes,” she said. “I’m tired of looking at that dress.” When she tugged the hem, I noticed a wart on my knee. It had started out as a cut from shaving—I was sure of it—but I hadn’t noticed the transition from cut-to-wart take place.
“I like this dress,” I said, crossing my legs. “It’s my favorite.”
“I’m going to put you in a skirt. You never wear skirts. How come you never wear skirts?” And then she asked whether we should order mimosas or Bloody Marys. She liked for us to drink the same thing at the same time, though I always drank twice as fast and three times as much. She liked for me to do things when I was drinking, things she would never do.
When the flight attendant came by, I ordered a greyhound.
“Me too,” she said, and I knew I’d displeased her.
Our relationship was affected in every way by her money; it was also affected by her looks, though she claimed she’d never felt beautiful because she’d grown up with acne and bad teeth, things that had long ago been remedied. Her adolescent sufferings made me want to connect with her, made me think we might eventually like each other in the way we claimed to in our emails and on postcards.
She offered me half a pill and I swallowed it without asking what it was: a benzo, I assumed. She put the other half back in her case, an opalescent gold-rimmed shell with a delicate clasp.
I touched the shell and said, “So pretty.”
She tucked it back into her makeup bag and nestled her purse between us. She gave me so much and so freely that I was a little annoyed when she didn’t give me everything I wanted. This was another problem with rich people: the more they gave you, the more you felt you were owed. It didn’t make any sense—I knew she didn’t owe me anything and yet I really felt like she should give it to me. And though she was generous to a fault, if I finished a bag of her Cheetos or smoked too many of her cigarettes, she was annoyed. One time I took her magazines down to the beach without asking and she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day.
She clutched my hand and closed her eyes. She hated takeoffs, which was most often when things went wrong, she told me, takeoffs and landings, as if this were knowledge particular to her. She pictured the plane exploding: boom, nothingness—you wouldn’t even have time to come to Jesus. I took the opportunity to stare at her profile, her lips moving, cheeks flushed. Did she get filler in her lines? How did her skin stay so smooth and unlined even though she was a thirty-eight-year-old fair-skinned blonde? My other blond friends had begun to wrinkle in their mid-twenties, were sad when they got pregnant and had to forgo their Botox regimens.