Chapter 10
A VERY SOMEHOW FELL BACK asleep and was jolted awake by the deafening sound of her phone ringing. Her pulse quickened as she grabbed her phone off her nightstand. Please be Morgan, she thought. Please, please, please be Morgan.
But it wasn’t. It was her mother. Who seemed to have forgotten that she’d called her daughter a “baby murderer” for believing that forcing a woman into motherhood was dystopian. At least her dad wasn’t emailing her articles from.info websites about Hillary Clinton’s child pornography ring anymore.
Avery stabbed the green phone symbol with her finger, too exhausted to deal with her mom’s inevitable second, third, and fourth subsequent calls if she couldn’t reach Avery the first time. Mom was always a worrier, but her propensity for panic increased tenfold after Avery’s breakup.
“Hello?” Avery’s voice was thick with sleep.
“Hi, Avery.” Mom sounded completely normal, like they were just going to brush their fight about abortion under the rug. Fine. It didn’t matter. Wouldn’t be the last argument about politics she’d have with her conservative parents. “How are you? You don’t sound good.”
Avery rubbed her eyes and flicked away a yellow piece of crust. “I was sleeping.”
“It’s a little late to be sleeping, Avery.”
Avery checked the time. It was only noon. She could’ve slept for another twelve years. “I had a late night.”
“Why?” Suspicion crept into Mom’s voice. “What were you doing?”
Avery put her mom on speaker and rested her aching head on her pillow with her phone face up beside her. She closed her eyes. “I was at Morgan’s engagement party. It ran late.”
Mom acknowledged this with a hmph sound. After a few beats of silence, she said, “Can I ask, were you drinking?”
Something was up. Avery could feel it, the way her mother’s questions were more like interrogations than attempts at making conversation. It was classic Jackie Russo.
“Yes?” Avery wasn’t sure what was happening. “It’s a wedding event. There was obviously alcohol.”
Mom cleared her throat. “Your blas é tone worries me, Avery Marie. This morning we got a five-hundred dollar medical bill for a hospital visit. Daddy nearly had a stroke. Care to explain yourself, or do you want me to tell you everything I already know?”
Avery sat up abruptly and covered her face with her hands. Fucking fuck. Had she seriously forgotten that she was still under her parents’ health insurance when Pete took her to the hospital?
“I’m so sorry,” Avery said stupidly, anxiously. “I forgot you’d be getting a bill. I should’ve warned you.”
“You’re damn right you should’ve. What the hell happened?”
Avery chewed on her lip. She lay back down and pulled the covers snug over her body. “Nothing. I fell and needed to get stitches.”
“Really? Stitches?” The sarcasm bit hard. Mom did not believe Avery for one second. “So the stomach pump and IV drip we were billed for was because of a fall ?”
Avery massaged her temples as she gathered her thoughts, trying to come up with a way to talk about what happened without sending her mother to an early grave.
Once, after Avery shattered her iPhone screen, her mom freaked out because she thought a glass shard was going to come loose and slice Avery’s finger off.
The fact that Avery drank so much during a night out that she wound up in the hospital would launch Jackie into another dimension of panic.
Avery drew in a lungful of air and prepared for the worst. “Okay, yeah, that’s not what happened. I … drank too much.”
Mom gasped. “Tell me what that means, Avery. Now. What were you doing ?”
Avery buried her face in her pillow, wishing she could suffocate herself with it.
Her parents had no idea she’d started drinking this much.
They weren’t naive enough to think she wouldn’t drink in college, but they certainly had never thought she’d be the type to pass out from drinking.
To be fair, Avery hadn’t thought she would be either.
Their ignorance wasn’t exactly their fault, though. After graduation, Avery didn’t tell them anything about her breakup beyond the cursory update that she was single now but it was fine. They hadn’t asked any more questions, and she had not provided any more answers.
“I was out with Morgan and I just drank too much!” Avery shouted. “That’s it! It was no big deal.”
But it was a big deal and she knew it. Avery had always imagined herself responsibly enjoying a drink with her future husband the way her parents did their happy hours on Fridays after work, as a relaxing end-of-the-week ritual complete with a charcuterie board.
Not in the desperate way she drank now. To forget.
“No big deal?” Mom was shrieking now. “Avery, you went to the hospital! For alcohol poisoning! Is everything okay with you? Do we need to come to Manhattan?”
“No!” Avery sputtered and shook her head, as though erasing the word from the air. “I—I mean, yes, everything’s okay! That was my first and only hospital visit.”
“Something awful could’ve happened to you! How did you even get to the hospital? Was Morgan with you?”
Avery hesitated. Her mom would not like this answer. “No. A guy took me.”
“A guy? Who?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Do you ?”
“Kind of …”
Mom groaned. “That’s great. That’s really great.” Her scorn was palpable, vibrating like a tuning fork through the phone speaker. “How do you know he didn’t take advantage of you when you were drunk? You need to be careful out there.”
Avery stared at her wrist, watching her blood pump thick and spider-like through her veins. Pete would never do that to her. She didn’t know how she knew that, exactly, after everything she’d been through. But she was certain. He made her feel safe. Cared for.
Mom’s reply was also the exact kind of well-intentioned yet misguided thinking that made Avery never want to speak about what happened to anyone, and especially not her conservative parents. Her mom thought she was being protective. She had no idea she was part of the problem.
“He didn’t, Mom,” Avery said. “Everything’s fine.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re all right, but you’re still paying for this. If you think we have an extra five hundred dollars just waiting around, you are very mistaken.”
Avery grabbed hold of her phone, held it flush against her ear. Five hundred dollars was more than what she had in her checking account. “Mom, I can’t afford that. I’ve been trying to set aside money for all the maid of honor stuff I need to do for Morgan.”
“I don’t care. You need to take responsibility for your actions.” Mom sighed. “You’re worrying me. I think I need you under my roof a little bit. Daddy had to go to the city for work this morning. Maybe he can pick you up and bring you home for the rest of the weekend.”
Avery whined. “But Mom , I—”
“Nope, it’s settled. You’re coming home.”
Avery used to love being at her parents’ house, but now she hated it.
She hadn’t been able to get out of there fast enough after graduation.
She felt so resentful of their lives, of the fact that all they seemed to do was mosey around Costco and buy new mums for the yard and watch HGTV and still, somehow, be happy.
Call it jealousy if you want. Plus they treated her like she was a rebellious sixteen-year-old if she dared to leave the house, prying for unnecessary details about her whereabouts.
Where did they think she was going to go?
It was the suburbs. The worst she could do was get high with some teens at the mall.
And she hadn’t even done that when she was younger and the opportunity was presented to her.
Though she had to admit that she could use a break from her life in the city.
Being in Morgan and Charlie’s wedding was eroding her already weakened self-esteem, and she didn’t mind the opportunity to smell some trees and enter the portal of her childhood, a time before everything in her life went to shit.
A time when she thought she could have all the trappings of simple and normal joys.
“Fine,” Avery muttered. “Whatever.”
Mom sighed, the kind of sigh that precedes a change in tone.
“I knew you shouldn’t have moved to the city so early.
” Her voice was soft and distant, like she was talking more to herself than to Avery.
“You should’ve lived at home for longer.
You weren’t yourself after your breakup. And those grades …”
“Mom, they were Cs. It’s not like I failed.” Avery had felt awful about those Cs. Though she wished getting a C was the worst thing that happened senior year.
“That’s failing to me. You had straight As nearly all of college. And then, well …”
Avery could feel the sadness in her mother’s voice. But Mom didn’t say more. She knew better.
“Anyway,” Mom continued. “Daddy will text you on his way over.”
The line went dead.
Avery pulled herself out of bed and threw a random assortment of clothes into a backpack before her dad arrived to pick her up.
She climbed into his car and gave him a terse, guilty hello, and then he drove away from her apartment in silence.
She wondered if he was being quiet because Mom had told him not to say anything.
Dad wasn’t usually the type to spark emotional heart-to-hearts anyway, but Avery would’ve figured he’d have some opinion over the hospital bill.
Though perhaps Mom thought Avery was too pitiful to get yelled at twice in one day, over the same thing.
Avery almost would rather have gotten yelled at again.
It was better than being treated like she was too weak to handle a simple conversation.