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She paused before meeting my eyes.
“What do you want for yourself, Beatrice?” she asked.
I glared at her before angrily stomping away.
Later that night, when Emily and I were lying in our beds, I noticed she was no longer wearing earrings.
“That bitch figured out my trick,” Emily told me.
She hadn’t, actually, but I wasn’t going to tell Emily that. Dr. Larsenhadfigured mine out though, and ED was beginning to wonder if he’d met his match.
CHAPTER10
IGRASP THE STEERINGwheel tightly to stop my hands from shaking, not just because of what Joan told me about Mom and the New York surfer guy, but because of what it made me remember.
A couple of months before Mom died, around the same time she and Dad had that fight, she had a visitor. She told me the man was her second cousin once removed, with whom she’d grown up in a suburb outside Chicago.
Dad was working late that night, so he didn’t meet the guy when he arrived to pick Mom up. Beforehand, she had pulled out all the stops to look as good as possible—makeup, perfume, and blew out her hair, curling it at the bottom.
I only vaguely remember meeting the guy, but I remember how Mom lit up when she first saw him standing in front of our door. They hugged, and when they walked away, I watched her thread her arm in his, laughing as he spoke, before they got into a VW with a surfboard on top.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time—this was her relative, after all. But now, after visiting Better Horizons, Mom’s “cousin” sounds a lot like the guy Joan described.
When Mom returned home from that dinner, Dad was back from work, but Mom’s visitor didn’t drop her off. Shereturned in a taxi. And when she stepped inside our living room, her eyelids were puffy like she’d been crying and there was black mascara streaked all over her cheeks.
When I asked her why she was upset, she started crying again and said that her second cousin had told her his mom, her first cousin, was dying. I was surprised to see her so sad because she’d never spoken much about her cousins in Chicago.
But I was even more surprised by Dad’s reaction, who kept his distance from her as she sobbed.
I finally went up to him and whispered, “Why aren’t you comforting her?”
“There’s nothing I can do to change the situation,” he said flatly.
If Mom’s visitor was the New York surfer guy Joan said Mom was seeing while she worked at Better Horizons, was she really crying that night because he’d broken up with her? Did Dad know about them, or did he believe Mom’s lie that this man was her second cousin?
“How do you stop the butterflies from going into your stomach?” Sarah asks Eddie and me that night while slurping a spaghetti noodle into her mouth, coloring her lips red in tomato sauce. She has a spelling quiz tomorrow that she’s nervous about.
“When I was in school, I’d think about my teacher only wearing underwear,” Eddie says.
She giggles and turns to me. “Did you do that too, Beans?”
“I don’t remember,” I say. “What usually works for me is taking a couple of deep breaths through my nose and letting them out through my mouth.”
“That’s probably a better idea,” Eddie says to Sarah. “You’re lucky. You’re getting free advice from a professional psychologist.”
“Are you sleeping over tonight?” Sarah asks me.
Her question surprises me, because I’ve never slept over on a weeknight.
“Oh, um …”
“Will you help me practice my spelling words?” she says.
Eddie smiles. “I’ll clean up the table, and you two can get to it.”
I guess he’s decided for me.
The clock reads 3:03AM. I ended up sleeping over at Eddie’s, but I haven’t been doing much sleeping. I’ve been tossing and turning all night in Eddie’s bed. My ankle is still sore from chasing Cristina out of my office, but that’s not what’s keeping me up.
