She closed her eyes and reached forward, grasping my hand. “Are you okay? Of all the stories for you to get.”
“I’ve got to be honest, it’s not great,” I said. I regretted telling her. Already, I felt worse. “I’m hoping it might be therapeutic.”
Stella raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure about that?”
“No, but every time I think about passing it off, I feel worse. Much worse.”
Stella frowned, considering. “Then you should stay on it.” She turned toward Elizabeth’s desk and began plucking the dull pencils out of her cup, too, leaning over to use the electric sharpener. I watched her jam in each pencil until it was ground to a bright point. I was pretty sure she’d start sharpening her fingers if I didn’t get her to stop. I reached forward and tugged the remaining pencils from her grasp. “Stella, what’s going on?”
“Shit, is it that obvious?” she said, her voice cracking. Then she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob.
“God, Stella.” She was not a woman who cried. “What’s wrong?”
“Jesus, I’m sorry. I don’t even know where that came from,” she said with a teary, manic laugh. She sniffled and sat upright, wiping her eyes. “Aidan got into some fight yesterday at school. An actual fight, with his fists.” Aidan was big on threats; he wasn’t usually big on making good on them. “And then I had this absurd run-in with Cole’s mother, Barbara, at drop-off this morning.”
Barbara was someone I avoided. She was the supermom to end all supermoms, and after a year and a half of profound maternal subsufficiency, I was fighting hard just to be a decent one.
“About what?”
“I told her Will didn’t like going to other people’s houses. And Barbara said in that judgmental-bitch way of hers: ‘Well, that’s just not normal.’ Like she’s some almighty arbiter of psychological stability.”
“That is kind of mean,” I offered tentatively. Because it wasn’t the nicest thing for Barbara to say, to be sure, but Stella was also overreacting.
Stella wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Christ, what does a girl have to do to get a damn tissue around here?”
“Oh, sorry.” I grabbed a box off Elizabeth’s desk.
Stella snatched a handful of tissues, wiped her face, then pressed her lips together. “This is what teenagers do—turn you into a sobbing lunatic But what the hell does Barbara know about normal?”
“Nothing,” I said, and that much was true. “People are only wound that tight when they’re about to fly into a million pieces.”
“See, I knew you would make me feel better,” Stella said with a smile. She wiped at her eyes as she stood, then pulled me into a hug. “Now I’ll leave you alone so you can go win that Pulitzer.”
I parked just off the lower end of the green near the old stone city hall. To the right, in a smaller but equally quaint colonial building, was the police station. I stood on the edge of the square, staring at it, unable to get myself to move. It had been a long time since I’d been inside a police station.
But the Butler, Pennsylvania, police department had once been like a second home. It was the place where I’d had my first soda, an orange Crush, sitting barefoot in my faded unicorn nightgown at the desk of a friendly, chubby police officer named Max while two other officers interviewed my mom.
They’d found us walking along Route 68 in the middle of the night, trying to find my father. He was off—as he was so often in the months before he filed for divorce when I was ten—with Geraldine, his then girlfriend, now wife of twenty-five years. Her house was two miles away, and my father had taken our only car.
“You can’t stop us from taking a walk,” my mom shouted to the officers before they were out of their car. Her voice already had that familiar tremble. Soon it would rise and explode into a million furious pieces. “There’s nothing criminal about a walk.” She might have convinced them had it not been for my nightgown and bare feet.
“She do this a lot, your mom?” Officer Max asked me that night.
My mother did most of the things a mom was supposed to do. She went to her job every day as an administrator at the Butler Department of Buildings, and she collected her decent paycheck. She paid the mortgage and kept our house in good living order. She cooked my dinner and sent me to school with money for lunch. But she was enraged by all of it.
After my father divorced her, the true work of my mother’s life became hating him. Making sure he knew it took up most of her time (and therefore mine) right up until she died of a heart attack while pulling weeds in our backyard the summer before my sophomore year in college. By then my dad had three-year-old twins with Geraldine, but he dutifully took up the mantle of sole surviving parent, at least financially. He also called on birthdays and invited me for holidays with an “I’m sure you already have plans” casualness. I hardly ever did, but I never went. Instead, I lived on as the orphan I had always really been. Right up until I met Justin.
“Does my mom do what?” I’d asked Officer Max that night, because there had seemed infinite possibilities.
“Take you out in the middle of the night looking for your dad?”
“No,” I’d said, staring down at my hands. “It was a one-time thing.”
That was a lie. Not my first about my mother and not my last. Because I was only nine, and already I knew there was one worse thing than having my mother. And that was having no mother at all.