Chapter 3
“Hey, Mom,” I said, answering my phone while changing lanes.
Her voice rang out over my car’s speakers. “Hey, honey. How are you?”
“I’m good. Just on my way home from work.
How are you and Dad? Any food roulette this week?
” My parents were pretty technologically savvy, but they were helping to “work out the glitches” of a food-ordering app one of their friends had developed.
Once the week before they’d ended up with a feast to feed twenty, and the second time they’d ordered a cake instead of the burgers they had been trying for. The app had a lot of glitches.
She laughed. “No surprises this week.”
“Because you haven’t used it?”
“Possibly… What about you?” she asked. “Still dating your yoga studio guy? I loved your meet-cute story.”
So maybe I talked about meet-cutes too much if my mom knew the term and everything. “No, actually. He turned out to be a flat-earther.”
She laughed. When I didn’t join her, she said, “Wait, are you serious?”
“Unfortunately, very.”
“I’m sorry, I know how much you want to find love. Fingers crossed that your guy is waiting for you at the nearest train station or chicken farm. Have you checked the chicken farms?”
I chuckled. “Maybe I should. But in the meantime, I’m back on the apps.”
“You’re swiping for dates?”
“Unfortunately,” I said.
“Is that Maggie!” my older sister called out. She was the only person who called me Maggie. Had since I was little. “I was just going to call her.” The sound of the phone changing hands was followed by my sister’s voice. “Hi.”
Audrey had the perfect life. The perfect real estate investor husband, the perfect five-year-old twin boys, the perfect house, the perfect wardrobe.
I (along with approximately five hundred thousand viewers a week) knew this because she had a popular YouTube channel all about her life called Success from the Inside Out.
She had always been a go-getter. Where I spent my elementary years on the playground, she ran for and was nominated student body president.
Where I spent my high school years writing movie scripts starring my latest crush, she spent hers organizing food drives and heading a remodeling committee for the cafeteria.
In college, I was more social than studious, while she double-majored in interior design and business.
If she was running up a mountain, I was telling her I’d take the long, scenic way around it.
She was good at standing out. I was good at blending in.
We didn’t spend a lot of time walking the same path, but she was always giving me advice, always pushing me, always telling me how to walk my path better.
Without her personality to go along with it, however, her plan wasn’t working.
“Hi,” I said with a smile. I hadn’t seen her in a couple weeks, but we talked all the time. Despite our differences, we were very close. “Are you stocking Mom’s fridge?” My sister only lived a couple miles from our parents and she often swung by after a grocery run with fresh fruits and veggies.
“Yes, without me, these two would be dead already.”
“I’m fifty-seven, not a hundred and seven,” Mom said from the background.
“I’m helping you make it to a hundred and seven,” Audrey returned. Back to me she said, “The twins have a T-ball game this Saturday. Nine o’clock. Can you come?”
“Isn’t that a bit late for them?” I asked.
“Funny. Nine in the morning.”
“I know, I know. I have a brunch with friends but maybe I can come for the first part.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to watch my nephews chase around a ball for an hour on a Saturday morning.
I loved seeing them. It was just that they lived about an hour away, depending on traffic.
I would not make it back by eleven. The last game I went to, between traffic and parking and the game itself, had taken five hours out of my day. Five!
“I’ll text you the address,” she said.
“The boys were more interested in the orange slices after the last game than me, Audrey. Do they even care if I’m there?”
“Of course they do! And I want to see you too.”
“Me too!” Mom called.
“I’ll try.” What I meant by that was I’d seen which argument would win that morning—the guilty side or the screw it side.
“I have to run,” she said. “Samuel just spilled some juice on Mom’s carpet. See you Saturday!”
I pictured the phone being shoved back to Mom as my sister rushed off to save the carpet.
My mom laughed as she came back on the line.
“Is your carpet going to live?” I asked.
“It was a tiny drop. But you know your sister.”
“I do.”
“How is work?” Mom asked.
A car to my right lay on their horn and made me jump. It shouldn’t have. I’d been driving in Los Angeles traffic for years now; horns were like white noise.
“You’re hands-free?” She’d obviously heard the horn as well.
“Yes,” I said. “And things are good. I talked to Rob today about dropping the junior from my title.” Talked was a strong word, but I’d mentioned it and he hadn’t shut me down.
“That’s great, honey. See, you don’t need to move to New York. You can find success right here in the publishing industry.”
I hadn’t found success at all yet, but this was one of the other main reasons I hadn’t started my career in New York in the first place—my family, my friends, everything was here, thousands of miles away.
I knew I could be a literary agent anywhere, but the heart of publishing was still in New York and that’s where I knew I’d eventually need to go if I wanted to build a strong foundation. “Maybe,” I said.
“Do you really call your boss Rob?”
“What?” I started to say, but then realized what she was asking.
“What else would I call him?” My heart picked up speed as if this was the final clue she needed to discover that I was more familiar with my boss than I should’ve been.
She would be so disappointed in me, and I wasn’t sure I could handle Mom Disappointment right now.
I was already on a roll of disappointing myself.
“Mr. Bishop,” she said.
“We work in a small office. There are just three agents and two assistants right now and we’re familiar with each other. It would be weird to be so formal.”
“When your dad and I got married, I called his mom Mrs. Hart for years.” Yes, my last name was Hart. Another reason, Sloane assured me, that I was so enamored with romance.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “She made me call her Grandmother. That should say everything.”
Mom laughed. “True.”
“You can call my boss Mr. Bishop anytime you want, Mom,” I said.
“I’m older than him. I would call him Robert.”
I gave a barking laugh.
“When would I ever talk to your boss to call him anything?”
Never. The answer was never, and I would keep it that way.
“Oh! Dad is organizing things in your old room,” she said.
I was grateful for the subject change. “He’s thinking about turning it into an office.
” My old room had gone through several iterations since I’d left.
It had been a workout room with a stationary bike, a craft room, with rolls of ribbons and stacks of material.
Now they would add a desk and a computer to the room, it seemed, but my twin bed would still exist, along with the bike that never left the craft room and the ribbons that would never leave the office.
“You can get rid of all of it, Mom. I don’t mind. It’s your house. What things of mine do you still have, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Probably some old handwritten scripts. Remember when you wrote those?”
I let out a breathy laugh as a memory of me sitting on the floor beneath my desk so my mom wouldn’t catch me, headlamp on so I could see, writing late into the night.
Another memory, just as vivid, quickly followed: Audrey, in the light of day, flipping through the handwritten pages and telling me she’d researched the odds of getting a script made into a movie and they were devastatingly low.
“And that’s for the very best scripts,” she had said.
Even as a child, my sister always had a mind for business.
“Nope, don’t remember that at all,” I told my mom now.
“Well, it was a long time ago.”
“It really does feel like ages ago.” I took my exit off the freeway toward my apartment.
“You were so creative back then.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“No, no, I’m sorry. You’re still very creative,” she said, as only a mom could.
“I’m just teasing you, Mom. I was creative.” On the total wrong path, but creative.
“Are you okay?” she asked after a couple beats of silence.
“I’m fine. Why?”
“It’s just lately you seem so…”
She could’ve filled in the end of her sentence with any number of words—unmotivated, preoccupied, adrift—and been right.
“Unhappy,” was how she actually finished the sentence. A word that hadn’t even come into my mind.
I pressed my brakes as I took the turn into my neighborhood. “I’m not.”
“Maybe you need some goals. When I’m feeling down, I challenge myself to a new twenty-one-day habit.”
“I’m not feeling down, but I’ll keep that in mind. And like I said, I am sort of embarking on a new twenty-one-day habit in the dating world.” That’s probably about how long it would take before the apps provided me either bliss or misery. Either outcome would prompt me to delete them.
“How so?” she asked.
“I call the apps finding a needle in a haystack. The hay is the people I have to work through to find the needle which will probably end up stabbing me in the eye once I grab hold of it.”
“Sounds like you need to get off the apps,” Mom said.
I laughed. “You’re telling me. But I haven’t given up.
You know everything takes me twice as long to accomplish than the average person.
And, Mom, I’m fine, very fulfilled.” Sure, not at work and not at all with my love life or my health goals…
but I had really great friends and family. And that was something.
“If you don’t come to the T-ball game, at least come see us this weekend. We’ll order some food and watch a movie.”
“As long as we don’t use your glitch-filled app.” Great, my life sounded so pathetic that my mom felt like it needed to be filled with rom-coms and sugar in order for me to find joy again. How could I show her that I wasn’t someone to pity when I felt so pitiful?