trying to push some pieces back into the big poof of curls they’d made on her head.
“I had too much to drink,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I keep telling people, too, and then my mother laughs and starts to cry. She’s going to give everybody in town something to talk about. You’re next, Mimi.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, knowing I meant it but not what I was going to do about it. I walked out and Steven and Fred were talking, their arms around each other’s shoulders, their bow ties hanging from clips off their collars, and behind them two older women danced while their husbands sat at a table with Mr. Venti. I felt a hand on my arm and it was my mother. “I’m heading home to check on your father,” she said. “You okay to get yourself back? You don’t look well.”
“I had too much to drink,” I said.
“Well, it’s a wedding. I think you got a little tipsy at Ed’s wedding, too.”
“You’re not planning a wedding like this for me, are you?”
My mother looked around and made a little bit of a face. “I always thought it made a lot more sense to spend the money on a down payment,” she said. “But even so we’ve got years and years to think about that, Mary Margaret. Don’t stay out too late.”
Sometimes you don’t know who in the world to ask for help and then you just run into the right person by accident, like some stranger who comes down the road when your car won’t start and has jumper cables in his trunk. My lab partner, Laura, who looked like the kind of person who would someday be a Girl Scout troop leader, who someday would actually turn out to be a Girl Scout troop leader, always went to the ladies’ room right after class was over because she had a long drive to the hospital where her mother was being treated for breast cancer. Three days running she found me in the stall on my knees, and on the fourth she said, “Are you expecting?”
“I think so.”
“Do you want to be?”
I looked up at her and I figure it was written all over my face. It was written all over hers, too. I never asked and she never told me, never in all the time I knew her, but there was something about the way she lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes that made me know she’d been kneeling where I was and had found some way out of it. We went out to her car and she wrote something on a sheet of loose-leaf and tore it out of her binder and handed it to me.
“Are you okay for money?” she said.
“I think so,” I said.
This is all I have to say about that because it’s pretty much all I recall:
I took the day off work. I called in sick to school. Laura made an appointment for me so the long-distance number wouldn’t show up on my mother’s phone bill. She would have noticed. Before dawn I drove an hour to a grubby little bus station with a wire newspaper stand and a candy machine in one corner.
I rode for almost two hours on a dirty bus with candy wrappers on the floor in the back, which was where I was sitting. Fifth Avenues and Baby Ruths. It was early in the morning and it was a good thing I had a plastic bag in my purse, because I brought up the Cheerios I’d had for breakfast.
I fell asleep for the last ten minutes and woke when the bus went up a big loop-the-loop ramp that felt like a carnival ride in the worst way. I left the plastic bag on the floor of the bus, next to the candy wrappers. I was past caring.
I walked fourteen blocks through the city streets to an office building with an elevator that seemed to take a long time to come. I took it to the sixth floor.
The waiting room was filled with women but I can’t tell you anything about them because none of us looked at each other. There were two men and they seemed to make it worse. Both of the women they were with were crying.
We all pretended to read magazines. I don’t know why they had Highlights for Children. Maybe some women brought their kids, although I couldn’t imagine why, or how the rest of us would have felt if there