“Hey indeed. Did you by any chance forget to do something?”
She gives me a blank look. What a waste of perfectly good sarcasm.
“To pick me up from the bus stop,” I say, feeling redundant.
Clearly, Laura agrees with me on that. “Well, what for? You’re here now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Because Luc gave me a lift.” My ex cares more about me than my own mother, I think, and I’m sorely tempted to say it. But I haven’t been here five minutes, and something tells me there’s still going to be plenty of time to pick a fight.
“Oh yeah? How is Luc? How’s Catherine?”
I can only grit my teeth. Is she just so oblivious or doing this on purpose? Who can tell anymore? Not me—I could never tell at the best of times.
And these, it needn’t be said, are far from the best of times.
“I’m sure Luc and his lovely wife are just fine. Which I’m sure you knew, since you live a ten-minute drive away. Were you going to ask how I am? You know, your daughter, whom you last saw—”
“—two years ago,” she says, waving her hand. “Or was it three? And if I hadn’t gone out of my way to find you, it wouldn’t have even been that.”
Okay, okay, she’s got me there. Laura gets up from the couch, stretches her arms over her head, and lumbers around the room, picking up empties on the way. “Sorry for the disorder,” she says cheerfully. “I hope you weren’t expecting to be greeted with a sparkly clean house. We’re family after all. We don’t need to put on airs.”
She could be making a veiled jab at the last time we met when, once she finally did track me down to my room at the inn, I took her out to dinner and offered her money. Money that I hoped she’d refuse out of pride because I didn’t really have it. My advance for the podcast melted like ice cream under the heat of all those city-living bills. Thankfully, Laura did refuse, but I was made to understand that she’d seen right through the game.
“You can have your old room,” she says, the very image of magnanimity. My gaze darts reflexively toward the flimsy door that leads to my old bedroom. I haven’t set foot there in about fifteen years.
“Hopefully not for very long,” I mutter.
I feel Laura’s gaze on me and marvel, like I have many times before, at the sudden shrewdness in it. For someone who’s been soaking her joints in cheap beer for as long as I can remember, and probably for a while before then, her lucidity can come as a shock to anyone who doesn’t know her.
“You think it’ll go better this time?” she asks.
Laura was once quite beautiful, and enough of that beauty still clings to her in defiance of everything. Two years ago, as I sat across from her in full sunlight on the terrace of the town’s one semidecent bar and grill, I marveled at it. Squinting, with the solid inch of gray plainly visible at the roots of her hair that she always dyed back to its original auburn, with the ring of brown-red sunburn permanently etched onto her neck and chest, she looked about as washed-up as can be, but still the beauty lurked beneath the surface of this Laura like a ghost. Even with the leathery skin and the faded blue tattoo peeking from under her sleeve, I could see the woman from the few photographs she kept at home. That O’Malley upturned nose and megawatt smile, even tarnished with nicotine. The hair dry but thick. The blue-gray eyes that I’ve inherited. And miraculously, she’s kept her figure pretty much intact, even though, to my knowledge, Laura O’Malley never lifted anything heavier than a beer bottle.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say coldly, struggling not to flinch under her sharp glare.
“Oh, please. It’s so obvious why you’re here. It was all over the news. The moment I saw it, I said to myself, Watch out, Stephanie is about to blow back into town. And not a day later—I swear, not a day—I get the call from you. This stuff about being broke is just an excuse.”
“If it’s such a burden,” I say through my teeth, “then you could have said so.”
“And where would you have gone?” Laura parries with a chuckle. “The inn’s closed. Oh, I know! I’m sure Luc would be happy to let you crash in his family’s guest room.”
“Will you shut up about Luc?” I hate to take the bait, but I can’t help it.
“What’s the matter? Regrets got you down? I’m just surprised that, in all this time, you hadn’t managed to do better than the son of a small-town cop. With that ass of yours.”
Good thing I’m used to Laura and her comments about my body. I’ve been listening to them since before I needed my first bra at thirteen, and it’s never let up. Oh, I heard all about Laura and her glory days. Oh yeah? I almost say. It takes a lot of restraint. Then where’s my dad? Guess your attributes weren’t enough to keep him around.
“Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere. That city venture of yours was doomed from the start. I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out sooner. You were born here, and your place is here.”
I glower at her.
“You think you’ve got it made this time. You’re going to breeze in here, get the full story on Michelle Fortier, and hightail it back to Montreal. Well, guess what. It won’t work. Nobody gives a shit about you in Montreal. No one ever gave a shit about you in Montreal.” Her lips press together in a mean, hard line, and suddenly, she looks decades older than her age. “About you, or about Michelle, for that matter.”
This is the part of the conversation where I’d normally storm out and slam the door. But as it happens, there’s nowhere to storm out to and no door to slam.
“Last time you were here, there’s a reason no one would talk to you. What makes you think they’ll talk to you now?”
“Are you done?” I ask. If there is a way of dealing with Laura, it’s to play oblivious. To act like she can’t get under your skin. “If you are, any chance I could go get settled in? I had a long bus ride, so…”
Laura shakes her head and chuckles. “I think you know the way. Or have you forgotten?”
Yeah. Forgotten which suite in the hundred-room O’Malley family mansion is my humble bedroom. I walk past her and push the door open—it gives way more easily than I remember. At the ripe old age of thirty-one, I find myself on the threshold of my teenage bedroom.
Laura’s house is one step up from a trailer. It’s a squat construction meant to be disassembled and reassembled, the kind usually built on rented plots of land. Except it hasn’t been moved ever since Laura’s parents, or maybe her grandparents, decided to put it up here, in the center of this two-thousand-square-foot lot. There’s a kitchenette, a bathroom with a plastic shower stall the color of tobacco, a small living room with its lopsided, deeply dented couch, and two tiny bedrooms, all paneled in plastic half-heartedly made to resemble wood. The ceiling is low, and it’s always humid, no matter the weather. I find myself looking at the same old futon I’d slept on for as long as I can remember, the bedspread discolored, rippling boy band poster still taped to the wall. The very existence I’d been so determined to escape closes in on me, its smell of old cigarettes and stale beer wrapping me like a funeral shroud.
“Not good enough for Her Majesty?” Laura crows. She’s crept up behind me, and in the moment, I’m glad she can’t see my face.
“It’s fine,” I snap.
“Sure it is.”
“I have to work, Laura. I don’t suppose you have Wi-Fi?”
She cackles. I glance at her over my shoulder, and her face really says it all.
I perch on a plastic chair at a Formica table at one of the new fast-food places, realizing I look like a fool with my laptop. At least Laura let me borrow her car, a prehistoric Honda Civic. Having wheels again makes me feel, if not better, then at least slightly less dependent and pathetic. $6.99, charged to my credit card, buys me a meal that’ll keep me full for the rest of the day and unlimited Wi-Fi usage. Jackpot.
