Page 13 of Back for Seconds

Mimi had been gracious enough to move in with me once my ex had left, bringing with her some much-needed furniture. We had the necessities: a big, pink sateen couch; a foot massager-slash-bath that was really quite relaxing—once you managed to get over the fact you were shoving your feet in wet electricity; and a bookshelf.

He’d left that along with a stack of useless books with titles like Solve Problems Like a Man, The Asshole’s Guide to Assholes, and Work Smart, You Fuck: Ten Bulletproof Life Hacks for Being an Absolute Task Machine.

Thanks!

He had not been kind enough to leave the kitchen table. Sure, I’d hated the clunky wooden thing, but I did still need some place to eat my meals.

Oh, who was I kidding? Brian left, and I started eating in bed.

Mimi had splurged on a big, manly TV a few weeks ago, on Black Friday. It now sat on the hardwood floor, naked and alone. My walls were bare, painted an allegedly neutral shade of millennial greige. There was nothing neutral about it to me; I found it infuriating. It was a color that said, a very nice and normal married couple lives here and soon they will have a nice and normal little baby who shall be named Matthew or, perhaps, Averleigh. Every time I looked at it, I was reminded of what I’d lost—or maybe what I’d never actually had.

I made my morning espresso, blocking out the sparse chaos around me. Even though it was a Saturday, I planned on working. Mom and I would meet for breakfast, then I’d come home, put on a clean pair of pajamas, and slide back into bed with my laptop. There was some tricky SQL I had been picking away at for months. That would keep me busy until the sunset, right? A lot of my team had already logged off for the holiday season, and I’d eagerly offered to take over their workload, wrapping up all the little projects and putting out whatever fires cropped up over the next two weeks at QuantumKinnex.

I padded back down the hallway to my bedroom, past the master suite that was once where I shared a bed with my ex. Now, it was Mimi’s room and permanently looked like someone had detonated a SHEIN delivery truck. In my bedroom, I was safe. He’d taken our cursed marital mattress but left me the white wrought iron bed frame. I’d replaced the gray and white duvet cover with a pink paisley quilt and big, fluffy Euro pillows. I’d painted the walls a shade of dusty pink and hung up all the artwork that had once felt too feminine for a shared, coed space. My Matisse prints, portraits of naked women with unruly pubic hair, screen prints of mermaids lounging on rocks with their tits in the wind decorated the walls filling the room with a familiar energy.

Here, I felt like myself—or rather, a version of myself that predated everything. The thirteen-year-old girl who could perfectly impersonate Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, who maintained a holographic sticker collection, who fantasized about kissing Leela from Futurama. That June ruled. She knew everything; she feared nothing.

This one corner of the house, of my life, I’d somehow gotten a handle on.

I flopped down onto my bed and gave my phone yet another unconscious glance. The notifications were still rolling in from my now uber-viral Joey reply video, no doubt pinging him in the same irritating way. For the last six months I’d made some lukewarm attempts at posting midsized fashion content. All of those videos had flopped. But one video piggybacking off a shirtless, long-haired hottie? Now the comments and likes were incessant.

This damn app had to go. Delete.

Then I pulled on a chenille sweater and headed out to meet my mom for breakfast.

***

Sunday brunch on the boardwalk was crazy, no matter the season. And the new batch of sexy, urbane options that had cropped up along the planks over the last five years hadn’t done anything to help our desperate need for French toast and bacon on short notice. There’d been a time when you could decide you wanted pancakes and consume an entire short stack in the span of thirty minutes. Now, I was expected to engage in hand-to-hand combat with transplants and their flock of goldendoodles for a booth at the Pier Point Diner.

Mom met me at the far end of the boardwalk, looking alert and windswept in a brand-new houndstooth poncho and pastel pink Ugg boots, two boiling hot black coffees in hand, looking as sweet and little as a porcelain Christmas ornament. I pressed my lips to her pink cheek and resisted the urge to pull her into a crushing hug.

“You abandoned me,” she said, gingerly handing off the steaming hot paper cup. “I was fighting for my life at that party, Junebug. Fighting for my damn life.” Mom had this soft, sweet voice. It was like being chastised by Thumbelina.

“I had to get out.” I took my coffee and slurped the sloshed droplets out of the plastic lid. Wawa coffee. Delicious. “It was just one disaster after another in there.”

“Well, wait till you hear what I’m about to tell ya. You think you know disaster?” She scoffed, linking her arm through mine. We took the steps down off the boardwalk and moseyed toward the string of motels that sat snuggly on the street beside the boards. They looked faded and dusty with their neon signs turned off, against the bright blue winter sky—some worse for the wear than others.

Mom yanked me right, angling us to cross the busy road. “After you took off like Road Runner, Vida Corleoni shows up with this big, huge bag. Joanne’s pissed because she thinks Vida’s trying to one-up her—like that time she brought her baby to Joanne’s baby shower. Have I told you that story?”

“About one thousand times.”

“Good! Anyway! Turns out it’s a bag of dildos, June. Dildos. This woman is fifteen thousand dollars in debt and up to her eyeballs in fake wieners.” Then the light turned green, and we ran across the street.

“Oh my god! How the hell did that happen?!”

“Facebook advertisement!” Mom screamed over the whirr of traffic.

“What did everyone do?! How did everyone react?! I need every single detail.”

“We screamed! Oh, it was horrible. They all started buzzing. I thought Dolores was going to have a coronary.”

“Jesus!” I cut my eyes sideways to her. “Do we think this has overtaken the double divorce?”

She sighed, rolling her sapphire-blue eyes. “Probably not, honey. Though, the fact that she actually brought all of the wieners really does helps. She passed one around. Made me touch it. It had veins.”

I snickered as she shivered against my side in disgust. “So no one noticed that Joey and I were gone?”

“Bernie most definitely noticed.”