but to lightly tap the base of her neck. She was wearing a hunter green long-sleeved shirt and an aggressively plaid vest. Orla’s father wore beaten khakis, the black sneakers he passed off as dress shoes, and an old suit shirt with a drooping collar. When his dress shirts wore out, instead of getting rid of them, Jerry demoted them to casualwear.
“You should have seen us getting down here,” Gayle sighed, smoothing back her dyed-cranberry bangs. “We sure stuck out.”
“You mean because it’s eighty degrees out?” Orla said, eyeing the vest. But she knew what Gayle meant. Orla came from Mifflin, Pennsylvania, a town smack between New York and Philadelphia—growing up, she had gone to the zoos in both cities on field trips. Mifflin had been nothing but fields strung together by farms until the 1980s, when families like Orla’s descended, slapping up vinyl siding everywhere. Their neighborhood had sidewalks and young trees and a superfluous name, embossed on a concrete block at the turn-in: Hidden Ponds. (The one semiboyfriend Orla had ever brought home from the city had stood in her driveway, looking at all the short grass and macadam, and said, “They hid those ponds pretty well.”) Still, Orla’s parents pretended they had nothing to do with suburban sprawl. They did imitations of people who worked the earth. Gayle stomped around in rain boots all year and wore clothes she ordered from a catalog that had a mallard on the front. Her father puttered and fussed over their half-acre lawn and four tomato plants as if it was his job. “Frost tonight,” Orla could recall Jerry, a CPA, saying wistfully throughout her childhood, as if they might not eat. Gayle would call Orla in from the yard for dinner by ringing a large bell she had nailed to a beam near the back door. “6:00 p.m., supper’s on!” she’d shout. The kids in the adjacent yards would freeze, kickballs in hand, and blink at Orla. “Why does she do that?” one of them asked Orla once as they tugged at a tangle of Barbies. “So I know what time it is,” Orla said. The girl pointed at the CoreStates Bank on the other side of the cypresses at the back of the development. The bank’s tall sign blinked 6:01 at them in red. “The rest of us just use that,” she said.
After depositing the chicken breasts in Orla’s fridge, Gayle looked around the apartment, surveying the flattened boxes piled at the door. “What’s all this?” she said.
Orla handed each of them a glass of water. Her dad pulled out his hankie, dipped it in, and wiped his balding head. “I don’t know,” Orla said. “They’re my roommate’s.” In her room, Floss was soundless, not even her phone daring to chime.
Gayle lifted the flap on one of the boxes, trying to read the label.
“Mom,” Orla hissed. “I said they’re not mine.”
“Just checking,” Gayle said. “If you had a shopping addiction, you’d tell us, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, Mom,” Orla said.
“Because you remember the year Aunt Diane gave us all those strange gifts? Your dad got the turkey fryer?”
“I liked that,” Jerry said tonelessly.
“And you got those black pearl earrings,” Gayle said severely to Orla, “but they weren’t real pearls.”
“I don’t have a shopping addiction, Mom.” Orla began the strenuous mental exercise of trying to come up with a restaurant that was inexpensive, close enough to walk to, and stocked with normal bread baskets, not focaccia or olive loaf or anything that might make her mother say, derisively, “Ooh la la.”
“Because it’s in our blood. That’s all I’m saying.” Gayle sniffed.
* * *
Ten minutes later: “Ooh la la,” Gayle said as the waitress set down the bread basket.
Orla sighed. “But it’s just rolls.”
Gayle pointed at the dish next to the basket, which, instead of wrapped pats of butter, held a pool of oil and herbs for dipping.
“How’s the job?” Jerry said to Orla. “Working on anything interesting?” Jerry had no idea what Orla wrote about, and they both preferred it that way. He could keep telling his coworkers that Orla was “a culture writer” if he didn’t see things like “How to Copy This Socialite Goddess’s Distressed Booty Jean Shorts in Just 13 Steps.”
Gayle, who liked to share Orla’s posts on Facebook, flapped her napkin at him. “Jerry, that’s girl stuff,” she said, like Orla’s job was a box of tampons. “She doesn’t want to talk about that with you.” Gayle pinched a piece of bread between her thumb and forefinger. “Anyway,”