13. Jenna
Jenna
By the time I get out at Flushing–Main Street, the gloss of my Chicago life is already sloughing off. In Queens, lipstick is a tactic, exposed skin gets a risk-reward calculation, and you don’t run into the past—you trip over it at the bodega and hope it isn’t drunk by noon.
I cross to the bus line, turning up my collar against the wind, and I’m about to text my sister that I’m here when my phone buzzes with a message.
Layla:
OUTDOOR MOVIE NIGHT AT MILLENNIUM PARK. Tonight, 8pm. Blankets, snacks, contraband thermoses. WHO IS IN?
Serena:
In. I’ll bring the wine and the deniability.
Audrey:
Logan and I are in. I’m bringing repellent. This week’s mosquito numbers are upsetting.
Nora:
Is the movie family friendly? Because if no, we’ll have to see if the nanny is free.
I watch the yeses stack up, and my chest does the thing it always does when this chat goes off—that tight, over-full feeling, like a room where too many people are being kind to you at once.
I never asked to be in this chat. They’ve spent almost two years reading my no as fear, dragging me back in until being seen feels somewhere between a warm bath and a security breach.
I type what I always type—why am I back in this chat—and my thumb is over the send button when the next message lands.
Dominic:
Important question. What’s the movie? I refuse to cry in a public park for anything less than a classic.
And it happens before I can stop it: a flash of him, sideways on the hotel bed in the dark, arguing with the screen, my head on his bare chest—
I miss him. One night after I stood on a sidewalk and told him to sign the papers, I’m missing him in a bus line in Queens, and I hate it. I hate it the way you hate a song you can’t stop humming.
I delete the unsent line, open the group settings, and put my thumb over Leave Group, which is generally how I handle these feelings when they arise—stuff them down, silence them, pretend they never happened at all.
A private text slides down over the screen before I can commit.
DO NOT ANSWER:
If you want to be there tonight and you’d rather I wasn’t, I’ll sit this one out. No questions, no sulking. They’re your people too, Jen.
I stare at it while the bus comes and goes.
Why would he do that? Why would he hand them over?
The group he’s belonged to since before I existed to any of them—he’d skip a night with his best friends so I could sit on a blanket without navigating him, because .
. . why? Because he thinks that wanting him to sign the annulment papers means I don’t want him around?
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Jesus, Dominic.”
I back out of the settings. I type into the group with my throat tight:
Me:
I’d love to, but I have a family thing this weekend. Raincheck?
Layla:
RAINCHECK. She said RAINCHECK. Screenshotted, notarized, framed. You’re coming to the next one, Jenna!
Me:
We’ll see . . .
The private thread buzzes again.
DO NOT ANSWER:
Family thing. You’re in Queens?
I type back a quick reply.
Me:
Mom’s birthday.
DO NOT ANSWER:
You OK?
I stare at his question. During our late-night chats in Tokyo, I revealed just enough about my family to Dominic that he knows it’s difficult terrain. I almost didn’t mean for him to see it—those midnight overshares hung at the edge of sleep deprivation—but of course, he remembers every detail.
Me:
I’m fine. Enjoy the movie tonight.
I immediately drop my phone in my bag and hop on the next bus.
The house is the same as always. Aluminum siding the color of weak coffee, the Virgin Mary in the front window with her faded blue robe, the third porch step that gives a half-inch and has been “on the list” since I was in the first grade.
I stand on the sidewalk with my overnight bag and my good coat and I feel it happen the way it always happens—Chicago Jenna evaporating, molecule by molecule, until what’s left on this pavement is a tall girl from 164th Street who never did learn how to fit in.
Hailey opens the door the moment the stoop wobbles—the unofficial doorbell.
“It’s 12:01,” my sister says, taking in the coat, the bag, the blowout that survived four and a half hours of travel. “Ma’s getting hungry—it’s past lunchtime, you know?”
She rolls her eyes and I suppress a smile.
“A whole minute after midday? Whatever will we do?”
Hailey laughs and pulls me into a hug. “You look too good to be coming back to this place, Nenna,” she says, using the name that’s stuck since she was little and couldn’t pronounce her J’s.
And she means it as a compliment because she’s proud of all I’ve accomplished.
But it still gives me a pang in the center of my stomach because I know my success in Chicago means she’s the one left here dealing with our parents and their . . . personalities.
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.” She steps back to let me in.
She’s got Ma’s dark eyes and our father’s easy way of leaning in a door frame like it was built as scenery for her.
There’s flour on her T-shirt, and she looks like home in a way that makes me miss it a little.
“She’s been cooking since seven. Doesn’t trust me to get it right.
She made the manicotti. So whatever you were planning to not-eat this weekend, cancel it. ”
The kitchen smells like tomato and basil and scorched sugar, the radio on the counter doing doo-wop at conversation-defeating volume, and my mother at the stove in the good apron, smaller than she was at Christmas.
“Happy birthday, Ma.”
“Jenna!” She holds my face in two damp hands and looks at me the way she looks at produce she suspects was priced dishonestly. “You look tired. They don’t let you sleep at that company?”
“I sleep fine, Ma.”
“Sure you do.” She pats my cheek twice. For half a second, I’m seven years old again and she’s checking my forehead for fever with the back of her hand.
Then she turns back to the pot and drinks straight from the cooking wine.
Hailey and I exchange a glance and I mouth, she’s drinking? Hailey shrugs, helpless.
We’re four minutes into the manicotti when it starts.
“So.” Ma doesn’t look up from her plate, which is how I know she probably started drinking in the a.m. “Is there a man?”
Hailey’s fork goes still. Across the table, her eyes flick to mine—incoming—and I perform the lie I’ve been rehearsing since LaGuardia.
“No, Ma. There’s no man.”
“Good.” She says it like a judge passing sentence, and then, warming to her life’s great subject: “GOOD. You know why? Men are good for nothing. Nothing! They eat your years like it’s a buffet and leave the plate for you to wash.
Look at your father. Charming as a game show host, that man, everybody’s best friend—ask the whole block, they’ll tell you, Teddy, what a guy.
You know who didn’t get the guy? The woman ironing the shirts he wore to see about his business.
” The word does a lot of work. It always has.
“Twenty years I gave that man my figure and my good knees, and for what? Smart girl, staying alone. Career women have it right. Nobody steals your best years and then fucks off to find something ‘better.’” She scoffs then drinks more wine.
“Speaking of careers,” I say, trying to steer the conversation away from Dad. “I got to fly out to Tokyo a couple of weeks ago.”
“That’s amazing,” Hailey starts. “I’d love to go to Japan.”
“Japan?” Ma huffs. “Why would anyone ever want to go there? All the way on the other side of the world. For what? Fish?”
“Sushi isn’t the only Japanese cultural export,” I say.
“She went for work, Ma,” Hailey says, shooting me an apologetic look. “Big international deal. Fancy.”
“Fancy.” My mother stabs at the manicotti like it insulted her. “Everything is fancy with you now. Fancy coat. Fancy job. Fancy trips. You know what fancy gets you? Tired. Look at your face.”
“My face is fine.”
“It’s swollen.”
“I’m just fat, Ma,” I sigh, setting down my fork.
“I think she looks great,” Hailey says. “Success suits her. I’d love to jet set around the world for work.”
“She looks tired,” Ma says, because why waste a thesis when a refrain will do. Then she points her fork at me. “And don’t think I don’t know what happens on these trips. Hotels. Bars. Men in suits with ideas.” She turns her fork to Hailey. “Probably why you want to go.”
Hailey’s mouth falls open. “Um . . .”
“And you should go.” Ma sloshes more wine into her glass.
“Yeah. I think you should. Leave. Just like your father—act like you love me to my face and then abandon me in my hour of need. Go and whore around the whole planet and leave me here to rot alone. See if I care.” She glugs down the last of her glass and stomps her way upstairs, slamming her bedroom door behind her.
Hailey looks at me. “Well . . . that was fun. Welcome home.”
I laugh so I don’t cry.
Hailey reaches for the wine bottle, finds it empty, and lifts it in a little toast to the ceiling. “To family. The gift that keeps filing claims against your nervous system.”
“I’ll go get another bottle,” I say automatically.
“No.” She puts the bottle back on the table. “Absolutely not. If you bring another bottle into this house, she’ll come downstairs for round two and start accusing the mailman of stealing her youth.”
“He did always linger at the gate.”
“That was because you were sixteen and terrifying and once told him his cologne was a hate crime.”
“It was.”
Hailey laughs, but it doesn’t last. The kitchen settles around us, the radio still cheerful in the corner, which feels out of place. Somewhere upstairs, a drawer opens and shuts with the force of a woman who wants an audience for her suffering but will accept furniture.
I pick up my fork again because the manicotti is excellent, because my mother’s food has always been the one reliable fixture in our lives.
“Do you know what happened?” I ask. “I thought she quit the drink.”
“She did. Kind of.” Hailey sighs and looks toward the counter. “When she was at the store this morning, she found out Dad’s moving in with someone.”