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She laughs a breathy wine-fueled laugh right above my face.
I grab my wine, take a big swig to catch up.
“You know,” I say, hanging onto the glass. “I don’t want to brag, but I have been told that I look like Gisele Bündchen.”
“Brag away, dear. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.”
“It’s true,” I continue. “Those are the exact words from a drunk homeless man that confronted me outside of a coffee shop in Dallas.”
“Your hometown, right?”
“Right. His exact words were: has anyone ever told you that you look like an ugly Gisele Bündchen.”
Ginger bursts out laughing.
I’m tickled by her boisterous response. I used to be funny, I think. Both intentionally and unintentionally. Now, I just look pissed all the time. I was cursed with a perpetual resting bitch face. A constant downward turned mouth, the pink corners drawn to the floor like magnets. I’ve put a ton of work into changing this unfortunate condition. I’ve tried to train the muscles upward by doing face exercises I found on the internet. But no matter how many repetitions of “kiss and smile” I do, my mouth always turns back downward.
“You have the same hair color as your mother,” she says, ripping me from my thoughts.
I feel my neck stiffen. It’s been a long time since someone brought up my mother in casual conversation.
“Thank you,” I say, noticing the change in my tone.
“I remember when she moved here after Gerald died. She was the talk of the town, having returned after so long.”
My grandfather, Gerald Stone, was a hard man. Cold, callous. Though I didn’t know him well, I don’t think I ever saw him smile. At least not after his wife, my grandmother, passed away in a mysterious house fire. After he passed, my mother inherited his multiple properties, including this house, and decided to move back to her hometown.
I followed shortly after.
“I think it’s wonderful that you decided to stay in Thorncrest after she died. I’m sure it would warm her heart to know you’re keeping her legacy alive in her hometown.”
I am completely dumbstruck by the conversation. I don’t want to talk about my mother, or her death.
Ginger picks up this hesitancy and switches topic, to one only marginally less depressing.
“So have you found a job?” she asks, as she always does since she learned of my lay-off from the Crest County Newspaper six months ago. Sometimes I think she is going to offer me a job, a beautician’s assistant or something. And sometimes, I actually think I would consider accepting it.
“Not yet.” I pause; I know I haven’t put as much effort into hunting for a job as I should. Truth is, I’ve got too much ego to accept just any job available. I’m picky, this girl who doesn’t wash her hair for four days, lives in a pigsty, has spent almost all her inheritance, and sleeps with a hairless cat.
“Remind me what you did there? At the newspaper?”
“My official title was associate editor-slash-journalist. I was responsible for coordinating story planning for our print and online versions and for managing our social media outlets. But really, I did whatever was needed at the moment.”
In a large, bustling city this would be a highly coveted position. In a town of only 2700, a blip in the middle of miles and miles of untamed wilderness, not so much. I enjoyed it, nonetheless.
While in my position as editor-slash-journalist, I did everything from interviewing the Best in Show winner at the annual Crest County livestock contest, to reporting on the 150 varieties of apples sold in the area, to drafting help-wanted ads, and finally, my favorite part of the job, chasing down leads and doing real groundbreaking, investigative work within the county. I, Sylvia Stone, was the lead investigative journalist on two of the most viewed stories in the county: Old Man Merkle’s Tractor Thief, and the Kinky Kids—an unruly group of teens responsible for spray painting gangly penises on the side of the middle school. Yes, I, Sylvia Stone, was on it.
Pay: A whopping fourteen bucks an hour. Now I’m a thirty-nine-year-old woman who makes nothing.
Ginger jerks her chin to the women arguing on the television. “You could always marry a rich man like the housewives,” she winks.
“Maybe after these highlights, I’ll go for it,” I wink back.
The local news cuts into the program. The headline:Local Man Missing.
I grab the remote and turn it up.
“…Crest County Police still have no leads on the missing twenty-eight-year-old man we reported about yesterday. Please take a look at your screen. If you have seen Jesse Taylor—that’s his image on the screen—please call the number listed below…”
