“I think that’s her choice.”
“Don’t tell. Please.” He nuzzled my neck, kissing me below the ear. The goose bumps on the insides of my thighs came back. What did I want from him? More people will watch, I had said. Ryder kissed me on the lips, the way I’d wanted him to all along. I tasted him, a combination of Malibu, cigarettes, and a salt that was likely me, and knew, with an aching bloom of regret, that even if I lost a thousand memories of that time I’d never lose this one. Above us, the sky, a shattered mirror of the lake, and of course, the stars—as distant and unknowable as every single person I’d ever met, even myself.
*
The Hodsons fired my mom in a voicemail. Within three days most of her other Coral Springs clients called and fired her too. “We don’t have work for you here anymore,” they all said. Mom tried getting in touch with Jane Hodson to find out what was going on, but she wouldn’t answer her phone.
“I took beautiful care of that house,” Mom told me, more baffled than upset.
We’d done an okay job of cleaning up—Marlena and I were my mom’s helpers, after all, we knew what we were doing—but we couldn’t fix the missing pool cue, the cigarette burn on the rug in the basement, the ransacked bar. The morning the Bakers called, Mom kicked the kitchen trash can so hard it tipped over, eggshells and coffee grounds spilling onto the linoleum. She slammed the door to her room, leaving the mess behind. “Mom,” I called, after what seemed like a fair amount of time passed. I twisted her doorknob; it was locked. I could spring it with a bobby pin, but decided to leave her alone. Back in the kitchen, I righted the trash can and mopped up the trash, spraying the area with disinfectant and scrubbing it, on my hands and knees, with a washrag. The bar at the Hodsons’ was so vast—how had they noticed those few things missing?
Three days. That’s all it took for word that my mother was a thief to spread from the Hodsons to the rest of her clients. I could see them talking about her while they ate Gouda and crackers on the deck of their sailboats, the lights of Silver Lake twinkling onshore. I told myself that Mom deserved something better than cleaning up after rich people. But when weeks went by and the only other job she could find was one making sandwiches fourteen hours a week in a deli near Burt Lake, a twenty-five-minute drive from home, I wished I could take it back.
Mom never asked me about the Hodsons, and I have no real reason to believe she thought I had anything to do with what happened. But still, I think she knew, somehow, anyway.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said.
By July we, like twenty percent of Michigan’s population—Mom loved that statistic—were on food stamps. I was surprised to find out that they weren’t actually stamps. The food money came in the form of a Bridge Card; essentially a debit card, the backdrop a corny sketch of the Mackinac Bridge at sunset. I had the impression, somehow, that we were not the people that this money was intended for—Mom made it seem like the Bridge Card was just a temporary thing, or even that she’d manipulated the system in some way in order for us to be eligible, as if it were less shameful to conduct a low-level scam than to legitimately qualify for government aid. In my twenties, I struggled with pervasive anxieties about money—that I would lose my job, my apartment, and free-fall into destitution, or wind up back in Michigan. When I mentioned my fears to Mom, she’d correct me, angry. You had everything, she’d say. Remember Christmas? Remember that school? She was right. But it took me a long time to learn things that many in New York seemed to know instinctively: not to spend whatever you have at once, out of fear that if you don’t it will be taken away or simply, magically, vanish; that if you have a job and do it, it can be, to a certain extent, relied upon; that if you find yourself in possession of a large sum, it’s rude to talk about it; that if someone offers to pay for you at a restaurant or a coffee shop, you do not have to apologize repeatedly or immediately pay them back. Whenever I got a raise, or just had extra money, I felt compelled to tell people. Liam was the first person to tell me point-blank that that was off-putting.
Once a month, our Bridge Card balance was reloaded. The atmosphere in our house depended on how close we were to the reload date—the week of, it was easy at home, relaxed, but after two, three weeks, I could feel a tightness in the air again, the fridge getting emptier and emptier, Mom on edge. She hated using the card to buy expensive stuff—strawberries, frozen shrimp, single-serve yogurts—so she sometimes waited in the parking lot and sent me in to check out the groceries. Nobody expected teenagers to be anything other than stupid with money, she said. Once the checkout girl called me out on using a Bridge Card that wasn’t mine—a nasty move, since she’d seen me and Mom before—and Mom had to come in and cut the line, explain, show her ID, while the tourists waiting for their turn looked at us like we were trash, eyeing the brand-name high-fiber cereal on the conveyor belt. Marlena was obsessed with the Bridge Card; the second she turned eighteen, she planned to get one too. To help cut costs, Mom downgraded us to the most basic cable—Jimmy and I were still on Dad’s cell phone plan, otherwise I’m pretty sure we would have lost our phones, too.
Jimmy upped his hours at Kewaunee Plastics. Many of his shifts started in the late afternoon or evening and ended at dawn, and though it hadn’t been confirmed, I suspected he was paying more rent, maybe because he felt guilty about the part he’d played in getting Mom fired. Sometimes he left envelopes on the counter, “MOM” written in Sharpie across the front—I’d peeked inside one once, and counted three twenties, folded up into a little rectangle like a tip for the guy who washes your car.
*
After the party, I saw Jimmy and Marlena making out no fewer than one million times. Whenever Jimmy was around, I was always turning a corner and finding him and Marlena nuzzling each other against a wall or knotted up on the couch or, once, giggling in the bathroom at one in the afternoon, steam creeping under the door. It was disgusting, and whenever I saw it, I felt that old feeling, so familiar from before Marlena and Silver Lake, as if everyone else in the world lived on one planet, Earth, and I was watching them all through a telescope from somewhere light-years away.
“I want to make sure you’re okay,” she said. “We don’t want to make you upset.”
“Why would I be upset?” I asked.
We.
“I really like him,” she told me, drawing a black line along my eyelid, right up against the lashes. I tensed my face, striving for ambivalence. What was weirder? Being happy for them, or this off-key discomfort, this prickling anxiety that everything was about to change?