Everyone wanted Marlow’s family out. Marlow was turned away, the next week, at school. Parents stood in a line in the parking lot, keeping her from the doors. “Jealous nobodies!” Floss shrieked at them, purple-faced, bucking the car into reverse as Marlow slumped in the back seat. Aston was at City Hall that morning, getting reamed out by the network.
“We’ll just move somewhere else,” he said when he got home. “We’ll go back to LA or New York, and...”
“And get jobs?” Floss said. Marlow was sitting at the kitchen table with her head down. She heard the way Floss said “jobs.” Her voice was thick with uncertainty, the same way it sounded when she pretended to know French. She watched her mother get up and walk out the door.
For days after that, Marlow stayed in her room and thought about that—the sound of her mother saying “jobs.” It brought back things she didn’t know she knew: vague memories of life before Constellation. She could see, in blurry hindsight, the hotels they had lived in when she was a little kid: the fancy ones, at first, where Floss loved being recognized, then the dingy ones where, when people came up to her, she pretended to be someone else. She recalled games of hide-and-seek, Aston springing at her from behind the ice machine, Floss holding her on rusted pool chairs late at night. Floss would sing to Marlow, to help her fall asleep—but then she’d seem insulted when Marlow did. “I only sing for you, you know,” Floss would say, annoyed. “Don’t you think Mommy has a pretty voice?” Marlow thought her mother had a beautiful voice, but she didn’t know then this was special. She figured all mothers had beautiful voices—it was nothing worth staying awake for. So she would nod off to the songs, then the sound of what they gave way to: Floss trying to talk herself into going on. “Look at this girl in your arms,” she would mutter. “She’s beautiful, and she’s yours. Hashtag blessed. So toughen up for her, Floss. Fucking toughen up now.”
She remembered the hotels getting worse and worse until they landed in one so dirty, Floss tore the bedspreads off the beds and stuffed them right out the broken window. Floss took towels from the maid’s cart and laid them on the floor, mapping a path from the bed to the bathroom, forbidding Marlow to step anywhere else. She asked Aston, when she thought that Marlow was asleep, “What about your mother?” And he said: “Oh, no problem. I’ll just have to divorce you first. What about yours?” Floss didn’t answer.
Marlow remembered feeling like that last motel room was swelling like a balloon, like she could see the walls warping outward from the pressure building inside them. And then, one day, at the height of the tension, Floss banged in with a brand-new look on her face and a brand-new bag on her arm. She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips. She said to Marlow and Aston, “We’re in.”
“They liked the footage?” Aston said skeptically. He and Marlow had been playing scat on the walnut nightstand, laying discards down on top of the curse-word mosaic scratched into it. (The first time her father saw the profanity, he had turned to Marlow and sighed, “You can’t read yet, right? Let’s keep it that way. Don’t be trying to sound this stuff out.”)
Floss dug her fists into her hips like a superhero. She had left the door to the room open and was silhouetted, now, against the hazy arid hills, the moping California traffic. “They loved it,” she said.
Marlow looked down at her cards. They meant nothing to her; usually, she needed Aston to peer over the edge of her hand and tell her if she was close to twenty-one. Even when he saw her cards, he played on in good faith, like he hadn’t.
Floss kicked the towels on the floor out of her way and walked across the room to them. “That birthday party was worth every penny,” she said as she sank down onto Marlow’s bed.
Marlow put her arm around her mother’s waist. Privately, she disagreed. Her fifth birthday party, a few months before, had been an odd affair, with hushed lighting and down-tempo music. The guests were all children she had never met who seemed uncertain as to why they were there. A frightening cluster of men with cameras documented everything. Marlow noticed