Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,7
fabulous shoes.”
I smiled weakly.
She was right. As nice as the words were, they bounced off my new hard exterior. I’d have to make peace with my self-hatred, my disappointment in myself for this past year. It was what it was.
“You don’t have to go, you know,” Alexis said, echoing Ryder’s words from this morning, in that same concerned tone.
Ah, if only that were true. I really, really did not want to walk the halls that a teenage David had once walked. Did not want to sit across from a teacher as a single mother. No, as a widow. Despite my expertly applied makeup and Botox, it would be seared into my forehead, that label. Not only that, but my actions this past year. Unbecoming to a member of the Black Mountain event committee—I’d quit that at some point by an email I signed off with profanity.
I no longer participated in our little playdate circle that Jax hadn’t liked in the first place. We’d only done it because David and I thought he needed some socialization beyond his best friend Walt who was an eighty-year-old retired screenwriter who lived across the street. I’d at first thought he was a pedophile or sicko for being content in the company of a child, but it turned out he was just a lonely, rich, old man who’d alienated his family and had no other friends to speak of. He was the grandfather that smoked cigars, spoke without a filter, drank whisky sprinkled with coffee, and talked to my son about old movies.
David had liked him. The three of them would have movie nights over at Walt’s place every Wednesday. Ryder and I would settle in for a Real Housewives marathon. As macho as my son was, he skirted almost every single stereotype about a gay teenager, except when it came to reality television shows. Which, of course, made me infinitely happy because David considered them low brow and refused to be in the room if I was watching them.
Our entire system had worked great. Jax wasn’t exactly happy to go on playdates which involved plastic action figures and ‘mediocre’ games, but he gritted his teeth through it.
Then when he lost his father, I made the decision that my son was going to have to grit his teeth through the rest of his life without his father, so if he didn’t want to play with entitled, snot-nosed kids, he didn’t fucking have to.
I might’ve said something along the lines of that to one of the pushier mothers who wouldn’t take no for an answer. She’d tried to lecture me on the importance of Jax having good social influence now that he didn’t have his father. So, in my eyes, she’d deserved it. In the playdate circle’s eyes, I was blacklisted and totally happy with that.
A variation of the same had happened with the rest of the bitchy moms at Black Mountain Academy except for Marley, my one non mom-group friend. Her boy was around Ryder’s age. She had only moved to Black Mountain from New York just before David died. She ran a successful cosmetics company designed for women of color after she discovered what few options there were. She was brash, fashionable, independent, and was not about to fit into any ‘cool mom group.’ I immediately liked her. We hadn’t been terribly close because I was still acting like that glossy Instagram mom that wasn’t exactly Marley’s kind of person, but she’d heard me call one of the PTA moms a cunt under my breath and she’d decided to like me.
She didn’t send flowers when David died. She sent a basket of booze, every product in her line, and the offer of company—quiet and free from any cliché placations—and no judgement if the offer was not accepted.
I did not accept the offer, but she consistently sent a basket of booze every month, even after the tasteful floral arrangements and fruit baskets from other people had dried up. That said something, that the ‘friends’ I’d had for years stopped sending such things because I didn’t return phone calls or send thank you notes, but the woman I barely knew didn’t.
It told me a lot of things I already knew. That the vast majority of my friends were fake ass bitches. It would’ve been fine, considering I was a fake ass bitch too, but then life had to get all fucking real on me.
“I do have to go,” I told Alexis. “I’ve got to get back