she just Westerly Fat? The only thing she was certain of was that she wasn’t thin. Except for a brief respite during her late teens and early twenties, she had struggled with her weight her entire life.
This was the dark truth behind Lydia’s burning hatred for the Mothers: She couldn’t stand them because she couldn’t be more like them. She liked potato chips. She loved bread. She lived for a good cupcake—or three. She didn’t have time to work out with a trainer or take back-to-back Pilates classes. She had a business to run. She was a single mother. She had a boyfriend who occasionally required maintenance. Not just that, but she worked with animals. It was hard to look glamorous when you’d just come from aspirating the anal glands of a slovenly dachshund.
Lydia’s fingers hit the empty bottom of the potato chip bag. She felt miserable. She hadn’t wanted the chips. After the first bite, she didn’t even really taste them.
Behind her, the Mothers erupted into cheers. One of the girls was doing a series of handsprings across the gym floor. The movement was fluid and perfect and very impressive until the girl threw up her hands at the finish and Lydia realized she wasn’t a cheerleader, but a cheerleader’s mother.
Lydia groaned as she searched her purse for something else to eat. Penelope was heading straight toward her. Lydia brushed the crumbs from her shirt and tried to think of something to say that wasn’t strung together with expletives.
Fortunately, Penelope was stopped by Coach Henley.
Lydia exhaled a long sigh of relief. She pulled her phone out of her purse. There were sixteen emails from the school noticeboard, most of them dealing with a recent plague of head lice wreaking havoc in the elementary classes. While Lydia was reading through the posts, a new message popped up, an urgent plea from the headmaster explaining that there really was no way to find out who had started the lice pandemic and for parents to please stop asking which child was to blame.
Lydia deleted them all. She answered a few text messages from clients wanting to make appointments. She checked her spam to make sure Dee’s permission slip hadn’t accidentally gone astray. It had not. She emailed the girl she’d hired to help with paperwork and asked for her again to submit her time card, which seemed like an easy thing to remember because that was how she got paid, but the child had been hand-raised by an overbearing mother and couldn’t remember to tie her shoes unless there was a Post-it note with a smiley face physically attached to the shoe with the words TIE YOUR SHOE. LOVE MOM. PS: I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!
That was being ungenerous. Lydia was no stranger to Post-it mothering. In her defense, her helicoptering tended to revolve around making sure that Dee could take care of herself. LEARN HOW TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH OR I WILL KILL YOU. LOVE MOM. If only she had been warned that teaching this sort of independence could lead to its own set of problems, such as finding an over-packed suitcase in your daughter’s closet when she had ten whole months before she was supposed to leave for college.
Lydia dropped her phone back into her purse. She watched Dee pass the ball to Rebecca Thistlewaite, a pale British girl who wouldn’t be able to score if you put her face through the basket. Lydia smiled at her daughter’s generosity. At Dee’s age, Lydia had been fronting a really terrible riot girl band and threatening to drop out of high school. Dee was on the debate team. She volunteered at the YMCA. She was sweet-natured, generous, smart as hell. Her capacity for detail was astounding, if not highly annoying during arguments. Even at a young age, Dee had had an uncanny ability to mimic back whatever she heard—especially if she heard it from Lydia. Which is why Dee was called Dee instead of the beautiful name Lydia had put on her birth certificate.
“Deedus Christ!” her sweet little child used to scream, legs and arms kicking out from her highchair. “Dee-dus Christ! Dee-dus Christ!”
In retrospect, Lydia could see it had been a mistake to let her know it was funny.
“Lydia?” Penelope Ward held up a finger, as if to tell Lydia to wait. Instantly, Lydia checked the doors. Then she heard the Mothers tittering behind her and realized she was trapped.