The pageant is my mother’s single greatest accomplishment. She still fits into her dress—a fact she won’t let anyone forget, which is why as head of the pageant committee and the official hostess, she takes it upon herself to squeeze into the dress as a yearly encore for all of her adoring fans.
I feel the weight of Lucy’s cat, Riot, settle in on top of my feet. I tap my toes and he purrs. “I saw a bunch of girls doing some kind of pageant boot camp after school.”
She grins. “I tell you what. The competition gets stiffer every year.”
“What about you? How was the home?”
“Oh, you know, just one of those days.” She flips through her checkbook and massages her temples. “We lost Eunice today.”
“Oh no,” I say. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”
Once a year, like Cinderella, my mom’s life is glamorous. It’s the life she expected to live. But for the rest of the year, she works as an orderly at the Buena Vista Ranch Retirement Home, where she does exotic things like dole out daily prescriptions, feed the elderly, and wipe their asses. Eunice was one of my mom’s favorites. She always confused her for one of her sisters and whispered childhood secrets in her ear every time my mom bent down to help her up.
“She had her after-lunch ambrosia and closed her eyes.” She shakes her head. “I let her sit there for a minute because I thought she was napping.” She stands and kisses the top of my head. “I’m going to bed, Dumplin’.”
“Night.”
I wait for the sound of her door clicking shut before I bury my dinner in the trash can beneath one of those free newspapers. I grab a fistful of pretzels and a soda before running upstairs. As I pass Lucy’s closed door, I linger for a moment, letting the tips of my fingers brush the knob.
THREE
“I think I want to have sex with Tim this summer,” says Ellen as she plucks a cube of cheese from her lunch spread and pops it into her mouth. El has been “considering” having sex with Tim every Friday for the last year. Seriously, before the start of every weekend we debate the pros and cons of Ellen and Tim finally doing it.
“That’s weird.” I don’t look up from my notes. I’m not a bad friend. But we’ve had this conversation so many times. Plus, it’s the last day of school and I have one final left. I’m trying to cram and El is not because she’s done with all of her finals.
With her mouth full of candied pecans, she asks, “Why is it weird?”
“Quiz me on this.” I pop a few grapes in my mouth and hold out a study sheet dissecting the branches of the government. “Because it’s not like a wedding. It’s not like, ‘Ohh, I like summer colors. I’m gonna do it over the summer so that I can properly coordinate my lingerie with my most preferred season.’ You should do it because you want to.”
She rolls her eyes. “But summer’s like a time of transition. I could come back to school a woman,” she says, sparing no dramatics.
I roll my eyes back at her. I hate talking to talk. If El was actually going to go through with it, I’d have crawled over the table to have a nose-to-nose conversation with her about every detail. But she never goes through with it. I don’t get how she can talk about the possibility of sex so much.
When she sees that I haven’t taken the bait, she glances down at the paper. “The three branches of government.”
“Executive, legislative, and judicial.” I decide to give her a crumb. “Plus, having sex doesn’t make you a woman. That is so freaking cliché. If you want to have sex, have sex, but don’t make it this huge thing that carries all this weight. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment.”
Her shoulders sink and her eyebrows pinch together. “How many senators and representatives serve in Congress?”
“Four hundred and thirty-five and one hundred.”
“No, but yes. You got it backward.”
“Okay.” I repeat the numbers under my breath. “And it doesn’t matter what time of year it is as long as it feels right. Right? I mean, winter is cool, too, because you’re all like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so cold. Body heat.’”