Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,61
he immediately reassumed his persona. “Speaking of performances, you used to be in this band, too, right? Why aren’t you onstage?”
“It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just sometimes be in a band and sometimes not,” she explained patiently, as though to a child, a dumber child than either of her actual children. The manhattan or whatever it was had been better and stronger than any of the other drinks she’d had that night; apparently, the comedian’s fame gave him access to a better class of everything, even overpriced plastic-cup drinks. In her back pocket, her phone twitched. She pulled it out and read a text from Matt asking her to please pick up Popsicles if she saw any on her way home.
“Thanks for the drink,” she said, putting the empty glass back into the comedian’s hand.
“See you around, teen mom,” he said, seemingly still under the impression that this was a funny thing to say.
Half an hour later she clattered through the door of her apartment, drunk and slightly nauseated by the smell of the cab she’d taken. Matt and Marie were sitting together on the couch, watching a DVD. Marie turned toward the sound of Laura coming in and she could see the red streak in her little eyeball from halfway across the room. “Oh my God!” she said, forgetting to try to seem calm for Marie’s sake.
Matt shot her a look, less admonishing than confused, then registered that she was drunk. “Should we take her to urgent care?” he said in the hushed tone that they used to talk about the girls when they were right there. “I mean, should one of us? I’ll stay with Kayla?”
“Mommy, where are the Popsicles?” Marie whined.
“Baby, I forgot, I’m so sorry. We can get Popsicles tomorrow.” Exhaustion was threatening to envelop Laura. Today had lasted so long already. There had been so many different parts of it. Could there really be an entire new part of it still to go, at the pediatric urgent care clinic or the emergency room?
“But I want one now!”
“I don’t think it’s going to make a difference whether we go now or in the morning,” she said quietly to Matt. “It looks bad, but I think it’s just irritated. We should put a cold washcloth on it and try to get her to bed.” She was pretending to be in control, making her voice calm and stern, but she was faking it; she wasn’t some kind of eyeball doctor.
“Really? It’s so red.”
“Matt, it’s not about to fall out of her head,” Laura said, finally out of patience for everyone.
“My eye is going to fall out of my head?” Marie was now paying close attention. Matt looked at Laura with the cold, tight expression that meant he would, starting now, seethe silently for up to twenty-four hours, until she could weasel her way back into his good graces or until it simply became too inconvenient to hate her.
“No, it’s not going to fall out, baby,” said Laura to Marie. “It’s just a scratch. I’m going to put a magic soothing cloth on it, okay? It’s going to take the scratchiness away, and you can sit here with us till the end of the episode and then we’ll all go to sleep.”
“But I want a Popsicle!”
“You can have a lollipop.”
“Does Kayla get one, too?”
“Not right now.”
Marie snuggled under Matt’s arm, satisfied that the negotiation had gone in her favor. Laura chanced another attempt at eye contact with Matt, but he was resolutely staring at the TV. On the screen, a dragon in a pink tutu floated down an inner tube on a lazy river.
“Come on in,” the dragon said in a plummy, supercilious voice. “The water’s delightful!”
PART III
10
The night that Marie threw her phone at her mom—impulsively, almost accidentally—was a new low. She had been waving her arms around and shouting and it left her hand and flew, much faster than she’d thought possible, straight into her mother’s face, connecting with Laura’s cheekbone with an audible thwack that made them both stop yelling. They stared at each other for the duration of a long silence that ended only when Laura put her hand up to her face and turned away from Marie, sitting down heavily on the couch.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
Laura didn’t answer immediately, and Marie felt, irrationally, even angrier at her. The ball was now in Laura’s court, because Marie’s bad behavior had justified her anger. Before she’d thrown the phone, Marie had possessed the moral