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I smiled. The point of his remark wasn’t the grilled beef or his knowledge of Moscow restaurants: he was planting the flag that he spoke a little Russian.
“Well, if I ever get to Moscow or Phnom Penh and can’t find a cab driver to show me the ‘secret’ sights, I now know whom to call,” I told him.
He stared at me with an intensity that surprised me. My snarky little diss had left him piqued. He had a temper, it seemed. But then he gathered himself and nodded, grinning with his lips shut tight. He kissed my sister on the cheek and said to her and Marisa, “I’ll see you tonight. I’ll pick you two up and bring you to the house.”
“That would be great,” said Betsy.
“When do you start bitcoining—or whatever the right verb is?” I asked Frankie.
“We’re not Bitcoin.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been with Futurium a while now, but I only started out here this month. Betsy starts next week.”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Administrative assistant,” she answered. “But Marisa here is my real priority.”
“When do you begin school?” I asked her. It was a lame question, right up there with asking a kid about her backpack.
“The anniversary of your death,” she said matter-of-factly. “Princess Diana’s, that is. Wednesday, August thirty-first.”
* * *
Marisa had gone to the Italian section of the buffet and come back with fettuccini Alfredo and garlic bread. Betsy had gone Chinese, choosing spring rolls and General Tso’s chicken. I considered shaming them for their portions and bringing back to our booth a salad, but it takes work to be a bitch, so I dialed it down and grabbed a veggie burger and fries. (Often that was my purge cuisine of choice. But not that day.) At one point when Marisa was deciding on her pasta, I’d had a moment alone with Betsy and said, “That skirt? Really?”
My sister shrugged. “We dressed worse when we were that age.”
“Like hell we did.”
“Worse for Vermont than that skirt is for Vegas. Look, she wanted to get dressed up because she was meeting her celebrity aunt. You choose your battles with a headstrong thirteen-year-old. Now that we’re here, we’ll buy some more appropriate clothes.”
I let it go both because Marisa was about to rejoin us and because you can’t win an argument with a grown woman who mistakes a bandeau for a skirt, and allows her charge to wear it as such.
“So,” I asked Marisa after she was settled in against the orange Naugahyde, “where were you living before you and Betsy…”
“Hooked up? Not like that,” the girl said.
“I wasn’t going there.”
“Before Betsy adopted me,” she said, “I had foster parents in Essex Junction. But I was just a cash cow for them, and when Nancy—that was the mom—finally got pregnant and had the baby they always wanted, they were kind of done with me. I’ll admit, I was surprised. I thought they were going to keep me around as the kid’s babysitter and live-in nanny. What’s that French word, Betsy?”
“Au pair,” said my sister.
“Yeah, that. I mean, I was free labor. Wait, I was better than free labor: I was labor the state paid for. But, no, once they had Foster—that’s what they named their kid, which felt like a weird dig at the actual foster kid under their roof—I was excess baggage. Still, it was a good year and a half. They were cool. Mostly left me alone.”
“How many foster homes have you been in?”
“Seven, I think. Counting when Betsy was just fostering me. The longest was the Shepards and the shortest was the Wilburs.”
“Were the Wilburs the family in Essex Junction?”
“Oh, no. A year and half isn’t bad. The Wilburs’ was, like, a month. I was eight. They had two foster kids older than me—Iguess one was my age now—and the dad was having sex with them. Gross, right? So, when the mom got wind, she went to social services and had us all yanked out of there. You can google the story. It was pretty sick, and not in a good way. Sick as in gross.” She shared this morsel without drama or affectation. It was as if she were telling me the plot of a TV series she was streaming. “I mean, they had us out of there like lightning. I threw whatever I could in this plastic backpack, and, boom, we were out the door.”
“Betsy’s and my mum had an old canvas backpack,” I said, trying to find a more suitable conversation for lunch. “It had straps and buckles. Serious Army Navy clothing store vibe, but I think it was L.L. Bean. Whatever happened to it?” I asked my sister. I recalled it fondly.
“Not a clue. But, you’re right: it was L.L. Bean.”
