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That night after work, Sienna calls.
“You’ll never believe it,” she says, squealing, her voice giddy and high so that I all but see her smile through the phone.
“What?” I ask. I’m in her bedroom, straightening up for her, which I sometimes do when she’s with Ben. Nat is in the living room now. She had dinner waiting for me when I came home from work, which was nice for a change, to have someone cook for me. We sat at the small kitchen table and ate and talked about how, when she has enough money saved, I’ll help her look for an apartment though, in the back of my head, I wondered what was to stop Declan from finding her there.
“Dad got Dear Evan Hansen tickets!” Sienna screams into the phone now. “Fifth row!”
I flatten, air coming out of me like from a balloon. Of course he did, I think. I thought about doing that too, but the cost for tickets is outrageous, and if I was going to get them, it was going to be for Christmas or her birthday and not just an ordinary day.
“When is the show?” I ask.
Sienna screams, “Tomorrow night!” into the phone and then says, “Can you believe it, Mom? This is so fire. I can’t wait to tell Gianna and Nico.”
“Wait up,” I say. “Tomorrow night? Tomorrow is Sunday, Sienna. You come home tomorrow afternoon.”
“I know,” she says. “Dad told me to call and see if I can spend another night with him so that we can go. He said he’ll drive me to school Monday morning. You don’t need to do anything. Pleeeease, Mom,” she begs. “It’s just one night and I’ll be home Monday.”
“Okay,” I say after a second, because what choice do I have? Sienna would hate me if I said no to Dear Evan Hansen. She’d never forgive me. It’s one of those Broadway in Chicago shows and is only here for a few weeks. She won’t get a chance like this again. Ben knows this. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that he managed to snag tickets for a Sunday evening, or maybe it was designed to pit Sienna against me, to keep her from me and to get under my skin.
“You’re the best,” she says as I move into her closet to collect her dirty clothes from the hamper.
“Just remember that the next time you want to do something and I say no.”
“I will,” she says, and then, “By the way, Dad has a girlfriend,” she lets drop as I pull clothes out of her hamper. She says it so very casually—Dad has a girlfriend—like she’s telling me she has math homework or a chemistry test to study for. I back away from the closet, lowering myself to the edge of her bed to catch my breath. I’m quiet for a minute, processing her words, and because of it, I think, she says, “You can’t be all butthurt about it, Mom. You’re the one who divorced him.”
I wince. It’s reasons like this I hate letting Sienna spend time with Ben, not that I have a choice. He puts ideas in her head. He brainwashes her. He wins her over with things like Dear Evan Hansen tickets and then sways her in his favor, because that’s the kind of thing Ben would say, how I divorced him. I did, but it’s not the whole story.
“You know I hate that word,” I say.
“What word?” she asks.
“Butthurt.”
I can practically see Sienna roll her eyes at me through the phone. “Are you mad?” she asks after a second.
“No,” I tell her, “but just please stop saying it.”
“Not about butthurt, Mom. About his girlfriend?”
“Oh. No,” I lie, moving back to the closet because it’s a distraction. “It’s fine.” Ben should have told me about his girlfriend himself and let me process it without Sienna on the other end of the line. I ask, “Is she going with you tomorrow night?” I picture that. Ben, Sienna and said girlfriend at the gorgeous Nederlander Theatre, posing for a requisite picture together beneath the marquee on Randolph Street.
But Sienna says, “No. He only got two tickets and he wants to take me.”
I bite my tongue. How sweet.
“What’s she like?” I ask.
Sienna says, “I dunno. Fine, I guess.”
“Is she there now?”
“No. I forgot to tell you, but I met her last time I was here.”
“Oh,” I say, but what I really want to ask is: Is she pretty? Is she prettier than me?
All of a sudden I have so many questions—How did they meet? How long have they been dating?—but I button my lip. It’s none of my business.
I tell Sienna about Nat, about my old high school friend, who will be staying with us for a week until she can find her own apartment. A week is optimistic, but I don’t say that to Sienna. Nat wouldn’t be able to find, apply for and be approved for an apartment in that time, and I don’t know that she has the money to do so. It might be more like two weeks or a month. It’s not ideal to have a houseguest in our little apartment for a month, but we’ll make do.
