THE CASHIER HAD handed her declined card back to her with a barely disguised smirk, a smirk that said, You are just pretending to be a person who has it together, and Sabrina didn’t blame Leticia, really, because she probably would have done the same thing in her position. But—fuck! This was the card that she had continued to pay on time…hadn’t she? Now safely far enough away from Chop’t that she was in no danger of Katya coming after her, Sabrina took out her phone and went to the Capital One website and typed in her username (sabrinablum) and password (amelia!owen!). Password incorrect, the site spat back at her, and she realized she was shaking and had mistyped her children’s names. She turned down Twenty-Second Street, a block away from the office, ducked into the foyer of a building, and typed in her password again. Immediately a screen came up that said, Your account has been locked. Please call us immediately. “Shit,” she said at a volume that she thought was under her breath, but the security guard, an older, heavyset man whose pockmarked face could have been the Before photo in a Proactiv commercial, glanced up from his copy of the Post. “You looking for someone in this building?” he said in an accent that evoked the guys behind the counter at the pizza place in Coney Island that she and Dan used to go to when they’d first started dating. It seemed ironically exotic to take the D train all the way to the end of the line and ride the rickety roller coaster, and they always ended their dates at Totonno’s. But they hadn’t been to Coney Island in years, and last she’d heard, Totonno’s had been destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.
“Uh, no, sorry, I had the wrong address,” she said, and he made an indecipherable grunt-like noise and went back to his newspaper. She hadn’t seen anyone actually reading a newspaper in a while, come to think of it. When she first started working in magazines, it seemed as though every other person on the subway was holding a New York Times carefully folded so exactly one-quarter of the page could be read at a time, and she would try to subtly peer over people’s shoulders to read. Now she looked over people’s shoulders to see what game they were playing or what article they had saved for later or what totally casual just wanted to say last night was fun–type texts they were composing.
She walked out of the building slowly. Why had Katya wanted to talk to her so badly? She seemed really interested in Isabel and Mack’s relationship, that was for sure. But…what business was it of Katya’s? Sabrina was the one who should have been scandalized, seeing a dick pic from the founder of her company sent to her manager, but she felt strangely calm about it—almost as though, on some level, she’d been expecting it. Wasn’t this how people behaved now? Everyone was always talking about “hookup culture”—well, here it was, in the flesh. So to speak.
But now, the memory of the party had been eclipsed by a thousand other piddling annoyances of daily life, of finding Owen’s shoes and Amelia’s hair ties and trying to figure out what the hell she was going to make for snack day at Owen’s school, which, fuck, was coming up next week, and she had to come up with something that was nut-free and low in sugar. Ugh. And now, if the Capital One card really was turned off, she was officially out of credit cards to use. She ran through a mental list of bills that would come out of their joint checking account on the first of the month: mortgage, Amelia’s school tuition, her grad school loans. They would have enough to cover those as soon as Dan’s paycheck went in. And then she could quietly siphon off a few hundred dollars to pay a couple of the cards, maybe get them turned back on.
Last night, after Owen and Amelia went to sleep and Dan still wasn’t home, she’d sent off a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of old underwear. Jim from Florida got the pair that she’d actually been wearing that day. He was a repeat customer, and he was willing to pay extra for the guarantee that “Skye,” the college student, had actually been wearing them while she went about her day. There was no way for him to confirm this, of course, save for her note that she had been thinking about him while she wrote a paper in the library at school, but she felt she needed to be strangely scrupulous about this particular detail. She might have a fake identity, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie about whether she’d actually worn the panties or not all day. And she made him pay extra for this privilege: eighty dollars for one pair of pink lace boy shorts from the Gap. She took them off, sealed them in a plastic bag, and wrote on the bag in permanent marker: xoxo, Skye. Sabrina put the bag in a padded envelope, wrote Jim’s address on it in what she imagined was a college student’s handwriting, and put the return address as the PO box in Manhattan she’d opened last week. And there was a new customer in St. Louis who had requested that she send him a pair of underwear that she’d worn during hot yoga. Gross, but she wasn’t in a position to argue.