forth. Finally, her answer came through: OK. Your father will pick you up.
* * *
Orla’s parents seldom drank, so that wasn’t a problem. But in some bizarre upending of a life’s worth of expectation, Gayle had purchased sushi for dinner. She had gone to a new restaurant on Mifflin’s main drag to get it. “It doesn’t have any windows,” she reported. “I don’t trust a restaurant I can’t see out of.” But she had bought the sushi all the same, and now she put down her fork and stared at Orla, who was moving a yellowtail roll around her plate.
“I thought this is what you liked,” Gayle said.
“Your mother’s nervous,” Jerry mumbled.
“That’s ridiculous.” Gayle peeled a California roll open and sniffed its contents. “I am not.”
“I do like sushi,” Orla said. “I’m just not feeling well.”
Gayle and Jerry looked at each other. Then Gayle reached across the table and rubbed Orla’s forearm.
“I know, honey,” she said, and then she drew herself up in a way that told Orla she was about to say something she had rehearsed. “I may never understand why you hitched your wagon to that girl,” Gayle said. “But I know you, and I know you must have seen a way to your dream.” She glanced at Jerry, who nodded encouragingly. “And you will find your dream another way, Orla,” she said. “This will pass and you will start fresh. Here, in New York, wherever you want. You will be special wherever you are.” She said the last part emphatically, doting on each syllable, and Orla knew her mother was thinking of that day in the restaurant. She had probably been planning this speech ever since. This was how it worked, Orla saw now: being a parent meant that, sometimes, you got to apologize without apologizing, and being a child meant that, sometimes, you got to not apologize at all.
Jerry put one hand on Orla’s and the other on Gayle’s. Orla looked at their hands on hers, their faces turned toward hers, toward where she sat, at the place that had always been hers. She was the point toward which they had aimed their hopes and modest resources for twenty-nine years. She had forgotten this feeling—the feeling of being someone’s primary focus, rather than a secondary character.
Her mother smiled and said, “I made chicken cacciatore, too. Would you rather have that?”
Orla nodded, though just the thought of chicken cacciatore made acid rise from her stomach, and she knew then that she could never tell them she was pregnant. She was not finished being their child. They had been sitting here every night since she left for college, trying not to look at her empty chair, and all that time she was mostly ducking their calls, mostly ignoring their texts. She owed them, at the very least, the absence of heartache. She owed them permission to keep hoping that she would amount to something, even if—she thought of Marie Jacinto, her tongue streaked with cheese filling as she rejected Orla’s efforts—she never actually did.
After dinner, Orla went up to her childhood bedroom and threw up into her Tweety Bird trash can. She sat back, when she was finished, and looked through her watering eyes at her bedroom door. Over the last decade, Gayle had slowly replaced her bedroom fixtures with things that were more mature, corralling Orla’s old collages and photo negatives into linen cubes, replacing her Joe Boxer bedding. But Gayle had left the door alone. Still stuck to it, with aging loops of masking tape, were wallet-sized school photos of people Orla didn’t talk to anymore. There was Ian, who had the parties; there was JC Kraus, a handsome year-older quarterback who once tossed a handful of his pictures into the air and watched the girls scramble for them. And in a larger-sized photo—indicative of their best-friend status—there was Catherine, her blond hair worn down for picture day, arranged in two neat swaths on her shoulders. Her smile was extreme, uncharacteristic, but Orla remembered she had wanted to show her teeth off that year. The braces that Orla still pictured her in had been removed over the summer.
What was it Catherine had said about her on television, the morning after Anna died? The sight of her former friend nodding into the camera was so disorienting, Orla almost fainted. “So she was sort of a shady character, even then?” the anchor had cut in, impatient with Catherine’s rambling. “Yep,” Catherine had answered. “She always acted so innocent,