There was nothing to be done now. Kim had made every overture to appease Lisa: phone calls, flowers, cookies, e-mails. . . . What was next? Skywriting? An apology blimp? Lisa wanted to be angry; she wanted someone to blame. Kim would give her that. She would tolerate Lisa’s cold silence, even her slanderous accusations. Kim’s friend Debs had relayed Lisa’s comments after their Wednesday-morning session at SoulCycle. Debs had a daughter, Morgan, who was Hannah and Ronni’s age, but Morgan had left Hillcrest to attend a gifted program at another school (Kim had her doubts about Morgan’s qualifications). Debs’s son was a year younger than Aidan but they played on the same elite soccer team. The third in their regular spin-class-followed-by-lattes date was Sheila, a children’s book illustrator who had a son the same age as the girls. He ran with the tech/nerd clique so he was persona non grata to Hannah and her friends.
“I ran into Lisa outside the bank,” Debs had said, picking at her post-workout treat—a cinnamon bun with cream cheese frosting that would require at least five spin classes to burn off. “There was no way I could avoid her, so I asked how Ronni was.”
Kim had tried for a blasé tone, but her voice came out strained. “What did she say?”
“She said that Ronni is struggling. She’s in pain. She’s depressed.”
“God, it’s so awful,” Sheila chimed in. Sheila was something of a bleeding heart.
Debs continued, “We chatted about Ronni’s therapy for a bit, and then Lisa said, ‘Be thankful Morgan’s not friends with perfect little Hannah. She could end up maimed.’?”
Kim had winced but remained calm. A terrible tragedy had happened in her home; that much she would admit. But Jeff and Kim were not legally culpable. They were excellent parents. Their daughter was a good kid who had made a poor choice. Could the same really be said about Ronni?
“Ronni’s always been a little big for her britches,” Debs offered, and even Sheila had to agree. Ronni had always seemed on the precipice of some kind of downfall: teen pregnancy, a drug problem, an eating disorder—what did one expect with the unconventional upbringing she’d had?
“When the girls were little, Lisa and I used to chat over wine,” Kim volunteered, sipping her Americano misto. “She didn’t give me any specifics, but she alluded to all sorts of stuff in her past: drug problems, abusive relationships, an online-shopping addiction. . . . Lisa has so many issues that Ronni was destined to fall through the cracks, the poor thing.” Her companions had echoed the sentiment.
But still, the party was a wake-up call for Kim. Despite her parenting manuals, classes, and seminars, somehow, she had dropped the motherhood ball. Her daughter was rebelling against something. Or nothing. Was her drinking simply a rite of passage? Or had Hannah picked up on the tension in her parents’ marriage? Had she somehow sensed Kim’s flirtation with adultery? When Kim thought about what could have happened had she and Tony not been intercepted by the world’s best fifth-grade teacher, she felt nauseated. Kim had to put that relationship, whatever it was, behind her. She would commit to her family with a renewed focus.
Before her eyebrow-threading appointment, she called her sister, Corrine, mother of the drunken, pants-wetting nephew. If anyone would understand Hannah’s brush with alcohol it was Corrine. The sisters weren’t close, emotionally or geographically. Corrine had stayed in Oregon, a forty-minute drive from their parents’ home. She lived in a modest house with her second husband, a policeman. Corrine worked in administration at an old-folks’ home; she was into gardening and canning her own beans and writing angry letters to politicians about fracking. Kim had to admire her sister’s earnestness, though she didn’t quite get it.
“It’s perfectly normal to experiment with drugs and alcohol,” Kim’s older sibling assured her. “It’s where you go from here that matters.”
“I’ve been looking into wilderness leadership programs,” Kim said. “If we send Hannah away for the summer, she’ll develop self-reliance and self-esteem. She needs to realize how much potential she has and that it can’t be squandered with these kind of mistakes.”
“She might view it as punishment, though. With Jeremy, we dialogued it out. There were a lot of tears and a lot of hugs . . . but his relationship with substances is really healthy now.”
Trust Corrine to recommend hugs as a solution to teen drinking. A girl had lost her eye! But Corrine didn’t know this. Kim wasn’t about to admit the gravity of the situation to her free-spirit sister. “I just think that, if Hannah’s away for a while, some of these unhealthy friendships will fall away.”
“We chose not to blame Jeremy’s friends. We wanted him to really look at his own motivations and actions.”
“I should run. I have an appointment.”
“Me, too. It’s zucchini-jam day.”
Kim hung up, feeling irritated. Corrine often had this effect on her. Her sister was like an annoying bug that she wanted to swat away—a holier-than-thou mosquito or a sanctimonious wasp. She was always so content. Why? Corrine had grown up in the same shitty house, in the same shitty town that Kim had. Like Kim, Corrine had watched their father bounce from one blue-collar job to the next, until he was inevitably fired for sleeping off another hangover or sneaking out early for happy hour. And Corrine had been there when their mother started eating.
It was just a few “treats” at first. Their mom would come home from her clerical job at a construction company with a box of ice cream and a pie. She’d hand the girls a chocolate bar as compensation, then take the desserts to her room and polish them off. By the time Kim had graduated high school, her mom had eaten her way past three hundred pounds. She couldn’t attend Kim’s graduation—her knees—but Kim didn’t want her there. She was embarrassed of her. When diabetes took her mom out at fifty-seven, Kim had experienced the appropriate sense of loss—but it was combined with a shameful feeling of relief.
Kim had vowed she’d have a different kind of life. Her kids would want for nothing and they’d never be ashamed of their home or their parents. She’d worked hard to rise out of the muck, while Corrine seemed utterly complacent to wallow in it. Her sister’s life wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that great, either. She knew Corrine’s husband drank—what cop doesn’t, right?—and obviously her son had picked up his stepfather’s habit. And yet, Corrine was so happy. Despite her middling existence, she always made Kim feel inferior. It didn’t make sense.
The doorbell distracted Kim from her musings. She moved to the door and opened it to a skinny, pierced, twentysomething with scraggly facial hair. “Kim Sanders?”
“Yes?” The kid was too young and dirty to be a colleague of Jeff’s. And too old and druggie-looking to be a friend of Hannah’s. She hoped.