girls from Zumba rose to go to the bathroom. Orla and her mother stayed behind.
Gayle drew her credit card out of the leather billfold with a flourish. “They’re getting a divorce,” she said. “Maybe you should reach out.”
Orla blushed, feeling caught. “Why would I reach out?” she said.
Her mother rolled her eyes. “Not to Danny. To Catherine. To offer your condolences.” She shook her head. “I never got why you turned so cold to her. Maybe if you’d kept her in your life, you wouldn’t be...”
The waiter refilled their waters, unnecessarily.
“I wouldn’t be what?” Orla felt her heart closing up. They were going to waste time that could be put to use parsing the details of this divorce revelation—Was Gayle sure? Who told her? When?—on Orla’s entanglement with Floss. This confrontation had been brewing for months, Orla knew, as Gayle’s texts and emails grew terser. Even before Orla got fired, her mother stopped posting her work on Facebook.
“You wouldn’t be—Well, what do you call what you’re doing?” Gayle leaned forward. “I saw the clips of you on TV. You looked so unpleasant.” Her mother’s friends were beginning to file out of the restroom, negotiating their way back to the table. “I thought,” Gayle said, “you wanted to be a writer.”
“Is that what you thought I was before?” Orla squashed the paper sleeve from her straw beneath her thumb. “Because honestly, what I’m doing is pretty much the same as my old job. Now I’m just on the other side.”
Gayle opened her purse and began rearranging it. She was in charge of the tickets, and Orla knew that Gayle would not fully relax until each Zumba girl had been seated in the theater. “Being part of what Floss is doing,” Orla went on, “meeting the people I’m meeting—trust me, Mom, that’s the fastest way for me to get to be a writer.”
Gayle looked up then. She zipped her purse shut. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I’ve been telling you since you were ten years old, Orla,” she said quietly, like she was trying not to embarrass her. “It’s not good to be a follower.”
“I’m not,” Orla said. The second word came out just as she did when she was ten: a squeaking, two-syllable opera. “Look, Mom, I’m sorry, but you don’t get what it’s like, handling all this.”
“When I was your age,” Gayle said slowly, “I already had you. And a job at State Farm.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Orla said. “You don’t get how things work in the real world.”
Gayle blinked then, revealing a face Orla had never seen on her mother: damaged, blown back, her skin utterly smooth, like a calm before a storm. Her mouth began to tremble.
“Is that right?” she said. “You think you’re so great, up here, where everybody understands you. And they do! That’s the joke of it, if you ask me.” She pulled her chair in to let one of the women pass, and Orla startled as the leg scraped the floor. “You really believe it,” Gayle hissed. “That whatever you’re doing is more important than what people do everywhere else. Just because you’re doing it in a city where, when we come to visit you, we see rats eating on park benches and people shitting on the subway!”
“That was one time,” Orla said, though the shitting had been twice.
“Let me tell you something,” Gayle said, leaning in. “I’m more interesting at home in my kitchen than you’ll ever be in this city.”
She jerked backward as soon as she said it, as if she had slapped Orla. But she didn’t apologize; she didn’t say another word. The girls from Zumba took over the space around them, rounding up their bags, arguing loudly over who had seen Jersey Boys first.
Orla still took them to the theater. She knew her mother wanted her to, even if they were no longer able to look at each other. Now she understood why her parents always peered at her with worry in their eyes: despite never having said it, they thought she was doing nothing. This, what she was doing at this moment, was what Gayle believed to be the sum return on their investment in her: she knew her way around Manhattan. She knew to look to the still-new tower to go south, and how to find the Hudson as soon as she climbed aboveground. Phones could do as much these days, but there was a certain pride in knowing how to do it on