Chapter 19 #3
I was supposed to finally get access to my multi-million dollar trust fund this year, six months after turning twenty-five—that was the arrangement my father set up.
A test of maturity, he called it. A way to make sure I was “responsible enough” to handle that kind of money.
The first installment was supposed to hit my account right after Christmas, but after leaving Daniel at the altar and effectively lighting the family reputation on fire—I’m fairly certain my father is currently paying a team of lawyers to find a loophole the size of California.
So, there’s a very real possibility I am actually poor. Not “bohemian-chic-I-can-always-go-home” poor. But “counting-pennies-to-pay-for-my-detergent-at-the-Laundromat” poor.
And yet, as I look at the water stain on the ceiling that has gradually come to resemble Winston Churchill, a strange, solid peace settles in my chest. If I have to be poor, let it be here.
In this apartment that smells perpetually of burnt toast or the questionable meat from the cart on Broadway we probably should stop trusting, with the radiator that sings show tunes in the winter. Let my tribe be this one.
These are my people.
Not the whispering phantoms of the gala circuit.
Not Daniel’s friends, who viewed me as the acceptable, decorative finale to his collection.
But sweet, sweet Marcus, who makes jokes about my tragic bangs and my tragic-er love life, even though he would fiercely protect me from anyone or anything.
And Cori, who shares her pickles and her love with equal generosity, whose hand on my hair feels more like home than any house I’ve ever lived in.
“Okay,” I say, swiping the back of my hand under my nose. It’s not a graceful sound. “Alright. I’m done crying.”
“Praise be,” Marcus says, dropping his plastic fork. “My sympathy reserves are a finite resource. I was down to the dregs.”
“You have no sympathy reserves, Marky Mark.”
“I have a thimbleful. And you just drank it all up.”
Cori’s hand finds mine, her thumb smoothing over my knuckles. “You’re okay, though?”
“Yeah,” I say. And for a fractured, beautiful second, I am.
I’m not, of course. The fear about Leo is a live wire in my sternum.
The future is a cliff edge shrouded in fog.
But here, in this overpriced, undersized box, I feel something I can’t really name.
It’s like…harbor. A safe haven. A temporary anchorage in a wild sea.
The sense that if I wreck myself, these two will be on the shore, ready and waiting to pick me back up.
“So,” Cori prompts, her head tilting. “The Leo problem. What’re you going to do about it?”
“I’m open to ideas. I was considering writing my feelings in a haiku and slipping it under his door.”
“Bold,” Marcus nods. “Or you could, and this is radical, use your words. Like a grown woman.”
“Your faith in me is touching.”
And right then, someone knocks on the door. Not the friendly knock of a neighbor. This is percussive. Authoritative. A sound that owns the wood it strikes.
We go still, a diorama of guilt.
“Is there any chance that’s pizza?” Marcus whispers, though we didn’t order any.
“At ten PM on a Thursday?” Cori whispers back.
It comes again. Bang. Bang. Bang.
“I’ll get it,” I say, untangling my legs.
“What if it’s the police?” Marcus’s eyes are wide. “Or your scorned fiancé with a guitar serenade?”
“Daniel doesn’t know how to play the guitar!”
“A man scorned learns quickly.”
I pad to the door, the floorboards cold under my socks. I lean in, my eye to the peephole and the world narrows to a fishbowl distortion of the hallway. In its center, standing with the poised impatience of a queen whose carriage has broken down in a dubious neighborhood, is my mother.
She is, inexplicably, perfectly put together.
It’s as if she’s been beamed from her sunroom, bypassing the indignity of commercial air travel altogether.
A silk scarf is at her throat and a single, perfect leather weekend bag at her feet—Louis Vuitton, the hard-sided one that implies she is visiting, not staying.
I almost wish it was the police instead.
I open the door and my brain just…shorts out. No words will come. My mouth opens a little, but there’s nothing. This is probably why I haven’t called in almost three months—because every time I think about it, my mind goes blank like this, a white noise of panic and guilt.
Her eyes—the exact same shade of hazel as mine, but colder, like polished stone—do a slow, agonizingly thorough descent down my body.
I can almost hear the internal tally of my failures as she takes in Marcus’s ancient NYU sweatshirt—pilfered from the lost-and-found pile by the couch with a salsa stain near the hem—and my rattiest flannel pajama pants that have a tiny hole in the knee.
I’m barefoot, my toes curling against the cold, peeling linoleum of the entryway.
My mother closes her eyes for one brief, pained second, as if seeking divine patience.
I try to make my mouth work. “Mo—”
“Do not,” she says, her voice a cool, sharp blade. “Do not say one word, Annemarie.”
I swallow hard, the familiar sting of my full name hitting me like a slap in the face.
She looks past me into the apartment, her nose wrinkling as if the air itself is repulsive—which, to be fair, between the trash that needs to go out, the mystery meat and Marcus’s lingering incense, it probably is.
“I cannot believe,” she says, her tone vibrating with a repressed, high-octane fury, “that my daughter has dragged me out to this godforsaken bohemian flophouse to retrieve her.”
I try to swallow the lump in my throat, but she’s already moving on.
“You will be at The Carlyle at five o’clock sharp tomorrow evening. Not five-oh-one. Not five-ten. Five. Your father and Daniel will be waiting, and their patience is significantly thinner than mine.”
“Daniel is here?” I manage to squeak out, my voice sounding like it belongs to a much smaller, much more intimidated version of myself.
“I said no speaking,” she snaps. Her eyes flash to my hair—my so-called tragic bangs.
A small tremor of genuine horror crosses her face.
“You will be showered. You will be composed. You will not make this any harder than you’ve already made it for all of us.
And for the love of everything holy, you will not look…
like this. I’ve left a garment bag at the front desk for you.
Wear it. Fix…whatever is happening with your forehead. ”
She gives the apartment one last, withering glance, and turns on her heel. She sharply tosses back, “Five o’clock, Annemarie. Do not make me come back here again.”
Before I can even catch my breath, she’s stomping off toward the stairs, her posture ramrod straight, her shoulders set. Every clack of her heels against the hallway floor sounds like a gavel hitting a bench. Clack. Clack. Clack. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
The harbor, it seems, was only a temporary port after all. The real storm has just walked in, wearing a pair of Jimmy Choos.