Chapter 4 Larissa
LARISSA
I talked to a lawyer,” I said, putting two ibuprofen in Mom’s good hand.
“When?” She threw back the pills and swallowed them with her diet cola.
“Yesterday. It would cost more money to hire her than I would get suing him for it.”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t surprise me. He’s such a son of a bitch he’d just appeal it anyway even if you did get a judgment.”
I went to grab my laundry from my room.
“What are you gonna do, then?” she called down the hall.
I shrugged. “Keep working with the credit card companies?” I said. “Hope they take over, clear my balance? I’m probably going to end up paying it all off myself,” I mumbled, carrying my clothes out to the living room.
“You could file for bankruptcy.”
“And ruin my credit for the next seven years? I won’t be able to rent an apartment, buy a house, buy a car. If I work my ass off, I could clear it in twelve months. It’ll suck, but at least I’ll salvage my future.”
She sighed. “Oh, hon, I’m so sorry he did this.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, dumping my basket on the coffee table. “I could have paid for credit alerts, but I didn’t want to spend the money.”
“Wouldn’t have helped anyway. He charged it up so fast. I’ll give you what I can when I start working again.”
“Thanks.”
She fished her cigarettes from under my clothes pile. “In the meantime, you need to be somewhere with a bar. The tips are so much better.”
“Mom, I cannot stand drunks,” I said, folding a pair of my work pants. “And I’m tired of working until the sun’s gone. If I have to work twelve hours a day, at least they should be the twelve hours I prefer.”
“I guess so,” she said while she got up for the patio.
She stood where she always did when she wanted to talk to me while she smoked. With the doorframe between her shoulder blades, the slider close to her chest, one hand in the apartment, her smoking hand outside.
“How’s it going with Mike?” she asked, clicking her lighter on.
“Good.”
“He reminds me of my high school boyfriend—did I ever tell you about Brady?” She blew smoke out. “God, I wish I would have married that man instead. He’s a real estate agent now. We coulda been living someplace nice.”
“I wish you would have married him too,” I muttered, balling socks.
“Yeah, well, hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. Anyway. Mike is a good one. Nice ass too.”
I gave her a look. “Mom.”
“What? Enjoy it now. They only get softer the older they get, and I’m not just talkin’ about the muscles.” She blew smoke outside. “Chris isn’t half bad either.”
“Yeah, he was nice.”
He really was. He’d been letting me text him medication questions since Mom’s surgery last week. He never did come to get any books though. I’d offered them twice.
I still had to return his hoodie. I guess I could just give it to Mike, but then I’d have to admit why I had it, which was embarrassing. Maybe I should just leave it over at Mike’s place? Or in his truck? Drop it in the same spot I found it?
“You know, with your looks, you could get a doctor or something,” Mom said, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray she kept on the upside-down paint bucket on the patio. “You should get a job at that bar by the hospital. Lots of surgeons in there. Someone who can get you out of a place like this.”
“I don’t want a guy to get me out of anything,” I said. “I’ll get myself out.”
“Oh yeah? That why you let Mike pay for the car?” She pursed her lips like she got me.
I shot her a look. “Do you think I like that Mike had to pay for the car? I had a plan for that, remember? My tax return?”
She took another pull on her cigarette instead of answering me.
“I told him not to, and he went down to the shop and paid for it anyway,” I said. “Believe me, I didn’t want him to. I still feel bad about it and I’m paying him back.”
“Eh, let him pay.” She waved me off. “Probably makes him feel good. And don’t it feel nice to let someone take care of you?”
It did feel nice.
I tended not to trust it though. Especially from men.
“So when you two making it official?” she asked.
“It is official,” I said, folding a towel.
She arched an eyebrow. “Reeeeally. So you do like him that much.”
I shrugged. “I don’t want to date anyone else and neither does he. We’ll see where it goes. If it goes anywhere.”
She nodded, gazing out onto the junkpile behind our building. There was a graveyard of old pool chairs that someone had stacked and left there to rot not ten feet outside our sliding glass door. It looked like an art exhibit for black mold.
I hated it here.
I watched Mom, standing there smoking. She looked… old. And not in an age way—she looked old in a worn-out kind of way.
I did not want to end up like she had. The idea terrified me.
I think that’s why I took the job at Donna’s.
The restaurant where I’d been working had wanted to move me from the lunch shift to the bar.
It would have been more money, it was technically a promotion, but for me it felt like inching closer to the late-night bar shift Mom worked at Buckaroo Bill’s.
Like when I finally got there some cage door would slam behind me and I’d be trapped there forever.
Waiting on tables was not going to be my career.
It was just a way to pay my bills until I could get out.
I’d taken the job at Donna’s in a panic, like maybe it would slow the progression of me turning into my mother.
The reality was I probably would turn into my mother anyway. She’d turned into hers. I think the only thing I had going for me was the self-awareness of the path I was on, which was either going to help me or make it that much more depressing when I couldn’t get off it.
Someone knocked on the door. I set my clothes down and looked through the peephole. Lexi.
I unbolted the lock and raked the chain across the door. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey. You know your street is low-key terrifying, right?” she said, coming in.
I shut the door. “It is not.”
“There’s bullet holes in your mailbox,” she said, plopping her purse on the kitchen counter. “Hey, Mrs. S.”
Mom waved and leaned over to stub her cigarette in the ashtray.
“Where have you been, hon?” Mom asked, coming inside.
“Busy. You?”
“Good,” Mom said. “Dating someone.”
I stopped to look at her. “Who are you dating?”
“Phil.”
“Phil who?”
She ignored me.
“Flannel Phil?” I asked. “I thought he borrowed money from you that he didn’t pay back.”
She sprayed herself with raspberry body splash. “He paid me back.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago?” She wasn’t making eye contact.
I gave her a look. “Mom…”
“What?”
“Flannel Phil,” I deadpanned. “The guy at the bar who gets so wasted you have to call his son to come get him twice a month.”
“So?” She went to the kitchen and grabbed another diet cola from the fridge. “It’s responsible he don’t drive when he’s like that.”
“It would be if he was the one sober enough to call for the ride.”
She dropped onto the sofa. “They aren’t exactly lining up, Larissa. You’re gonna get married one day and leave me. I don’t want to end up alone. I want a man. I’m sick of breaking down my own boxes. I want someone to dig out my damn car when it snows.”
“But Phil? Mom. Know your worth.”
Lexi sucked air through her teeth. “I don’t know. Sometimes you gotta have a flash sale, you know what I’m sayin’?”
I shot her a glare. “Lexi!”
She shrugged unapologetically.
I turned back to my mother. “Mom, you’re not doing yourself any favors by dating another Dad.”
She waved her can around. “He’s wining and dining me.
I’m letting him take me to the casino, he’s paying.
I don’t see the harm. And he did give me that money, it just took him a few weeks.
He had a deal coming through. He just needed to wait for the check.
” She took a swallow of her soda. “There’s no such thing as the perfect man.
They all got something, believe me. You have to accept the good with the bad. ”
“I do not intend to do that. I’m not dealing with anyone’s bad,” I said, going back to balling socks.
“Okay. Well, good for you. I hope you don’t.”
“Want me to meet him?” Lexi asked. “I’m an excellent judge of character. I can spot a narcissist from a thousand yards away—unless I’m attracted to him, then I’m legally blind.”
I made an amused sound.
“Yes, you can meet him,” Mom said. “Go right ahead. I think he’s great.” She kicked her feet up on the coffee table and turned on the TV. “Oh, shit,” she muttered. “Did we forget to pay the cable?”
I twisted to look at the screen. There was a notification letting us know we didn’t have a subscription to this streaming service.
“We weren’t paying for cable, remember? You were using that guy’s password,” I said.
“Oh, that’s right. He must have booted us out. Ask Mike if you can have his.”
“I’m not asking him that. It’s embarrassing.”
“Ask Chris, then.”
“An even harder no. Why don’t you ask Phil?” I batted my eyes at her.
She set her can down, picked up her phone, and started texting.
A minute later a reply pinged through. “Got it.” She shimmied her shoulders victoriously while she keyed in the login.
“What should we watch? Oh, they got that new Josh Brolin one. He gets me going—I think Phil looks a little like him, whatdaya think?”
I scoffed quietly. No.
My cell phone vibrated. It was Chris.
I sent it to your mom, but in case you lose it, here’s the password.
I stared at the message, horrified. “Mom!”
She looked over at me innocently. “What?”
“You texted Chris for his login?”
She shrugged. “He was happy to help. Obviously.”
My cheeks burned.
“You know, not everybody needs to know how broke we are,” I said, slamming the basket onto the carpet and clotheslining everything into it.
“How is sticking it to a multibillion-dollar company Letting Everybody Know How Broke We Are?” she said, putting the last part in quotes.
“You could have at least texted Mike,” I said, picking up my basket and stalking to my room.
“I only have Chris’s number,” she called after me. “You’re overreacting!”
I stopped and spun around. “Wait. Why do you have Chris’s number?”
“I got it from your phone. I had a question, and you were in the shower.”
“What kind of question…” I said slowly.
She shrugged. “I was constipated from the Oxy they gave me.”
I looked at her in horror. “You couldn’t google that? Mom!”
“What? He’s a pharmacist. Like he’s never gotten that text before—”
“Oh my God.” I wanted to die. “I have known him for five seconds,” I said.
“Well, you were asking him questions—”
“I was asking him if you could have a Motrin and Aleve together because we only had one of each. I wasn’t asking him about your impacted bowel.”
She shrugged again. “What’s the big deal? You don’t text your friends for help?”
“He’s not my friend!”
I threw up my hand and went to my room.
I dropped my basket in my closet, sat on my bed, put my face into my palms, and tried to breathe through the mortification.
I knew she was right—some of this was me being sensitive. But some of it was something else.
Mike and his friends were different from me and Mom and Lexi.
They weren’t the kind of people we usually hung around.
They were the kind of people that people like us waited on.
Xavier’s a veterinarian with two practices, Jesse’s a wealth manager with a degree from Cornell, his girlfriend Becca’s a lawyer.
Mike lives in the guesthouse behind Donna and Tony’s mansion in Edina.
You could fit ten of my apartments into Mike’s place.
I was barely comfortable just being around them, let alone asking them for charity.
Not even small things. Maybe from Mike, but definitely not from Chris, who I’d only hung out with once and who didn’t even come get the free books I was offering him.
We had a polite, acquaintance-level relationship, not a Can I Use Your Streaming Service one.
Mom had no shame. So I had it for the both of us.
I looked at the message he sent, my face hot.
“Larissa, come watch TV with us. Stop actin’ ridiculous,” Mom called.
I blew a breath through my nose. Then I typed Thanks and shut my door.