The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (13 page)

“That Wendell boy seems very nice,” Mom yelled from her bedroom as she tried on half her closet looking for just the right outfit for the party, even though there would be only six of us. “I’m glad you invited him to the party.”

“It’s Walter,” I called out while I set out the food. Nothing fancy—just guacamole, hummus, chips, spinach dip. A little different from the time Mom had convinced the chef from Nobu to cater our Oscar party. “And I didn’t invite him—you did.”

The day before, while Mom was over in the bath-and-body-cream aisle of Whole Foods, even though I told her that buying fifteen-dollar vanilla body cream was not how people without money shopped, and I was in the middle of checking the ripeness of some avocados and wondering whether we could get away with not having guacamole and serving just salsa, seeing how much the avocados cost, I felt a jab in the back.

“Is that you?”

I turned around to see Walter—the Munchkin-eating kid from the Alateen meeting—chomping away on one of the jumbo chocolate chip cookies from the bakery shelf.

“Yup. I thought it was,” he said with his mouth full. “Annabelle, right? I’m Walter. In case you forgot.”

“Hi, Walter,” I said in the singsongy way the kids had used in the meeting. I was trying to be funny, but from the look on his face I had missed. Like by a mile. I glanced over to see that Mom was now demonstrating her signature pratfall from the show to a small group of shoppers. “Mom,” I called out. As she glanced over at me I shook my head in an attempt to get her to stop.

“That’s your mom?” Walter asked, surprised.

I nodded.

“The woman who got busted going the wrong way down the PCH?”

Apparently, even fourteen-year old gamers read the gossip blogs. “Yup.”

“That was
epic
. My dad only hits mailboxes. But he’s gotten pretty good at it.” He held out his cookie. “Want some?”

“Thanks,” I said as I broke off a piece. Maybe he wasn’t
that
bad.

“I said a
piece
—not
half
of it.”

Then again.

Mom made her way over. “Did you see that older couple? They’re from Des Moines, and it turns out they have every single episode of
Plus Zero
on their DVR. It’s like they’re . . . what do you call that . . . superfans!” She flashed her signature Janie Jackson smile at Walter. “Hello, I’m Janie Jackson.”

“I’m Walter.”

“So do you two know each other from school?” Mom asked.

“Mom, I go to an all-girls school, remember?”

“Oh, right.” She laughed. “Early sobriety space-out, I guess.”

I shook my head. So much for anonymity.

“I know Annabelle from . . .
around,
” Walter said. He made it sound like we were part of the CIA, rather than two people who ended up in a smelly basement because our parents drank too much.

She turned to me. “Did you invite Walter to the party?”

“Um—”

“What party?” he asked suspiciously.

“We’re having a little soiree for the MTV Movie Awards tomorrow night,” Mom replied. “A combination awards/housewarming thing. We recently had to move because—”

“Mom, Walter probably already has plans—”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “That sounds like fun.”

“You don’t have to come,” I said quietly as Mom turned away to pose for a picture with the couple from Des Moines.

“Why would I have said I wanted to if I didn’t mean it?” he asked. “If I had done that, that would’ve been people-pleasing, and that’s one of the things that attending meetings helps us to stop doing.”

I sighed. “Fine. Give me your number. I’ll text you the address.”

When I had recently given the praying thing a try, like those kids had been talking about at the meeting, and had asked if maybe God could bring me some friends now that mine were gone, this wasn’t what I had in mind.

“Bug, come quick!” Mom yelled. “Look who’s on!”

Camera in hand, I walked to the door of her filled-to-the-gills-with-slipcovered-furniture bedroom, where a shirtless Billy Barrett was running away from a burning building in an ad for
Rad and Righteous
.

“Isn’t that
weird
?” she asked. At least she was wearing a towel instead of walking around naked, like usual.

“What?” I asked as I snapped away at her nightstand, which was littered with self-help books and little Twelve-Step meditation books.

“That at the exact second I turned on the TV, there he is!” She turned to me. “What do you think it means?”

I aimed the camera at the heap of dresses on her bed. If she had sold them—which she refused to do (“Annabelle, this is your
legacy
,” she kept saying, even though they were all size twos, and I was a six)—I bet we could have paid our rent for a year. I shrugged. “I think it means his movie’s number one at the box office, and they want to keep it that way.”

“No, I mean the
deeper
meaning,” she said. “You know what they say . . . ‘Coincidence is God’s—’”

“‘Way of remaining anonymous,’” I finished. “I know. You’ve mentioned that.” That was the latest slogan Mom had picked up at meetings. I just prayed there wasn’t a bumper sticker for it. Her car was already covered with ones that said things like ONE DAY AT A TIME, EASY DOES IT, and LIVE AND LET LIVE. (“Are you sure you don’t want me to get you one for your car at the Twelve n’ Twelve?” she had asked the other day. “Not only is it such a great reminder for you, but you’re actually being of service to other people when they’re driving behind you!”)

“I’ve actually been thinking of calling him,” she said. “Except I can’t find that piece of paper with his number on it. . . .”

Because it was still in my sock drawer.

“So I was thinking of e-mailing Carrie’s assistant to see if she could find out who his publicist is and—”

“Please don’t,” I pleaded.

She glanced up from the pile of dresses. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t—” The look on her face made me stop. Like she was this innocent kid, and I was about to tell her that Santa Claus was just something made up by Walmart and Target to justify people getting pepper-sprayed on Black Friday. “Nothing.”

She shook her head. “Nope. Can’t get away with that, Bug. That’s not clear and open communication.” She pushed the dresses aside so she could stretch out on the bed and put out her hand, motioning for me to join her.

Thank you, Oasis, for that. “It’s just . . . he’s sixteen years younger than you!” I said as I walked over and lay next to her.

She cringed. “Do you really need to keep bringing that up?” She shrugged. “So there’s a bit of an age difference. It worked for Demi and Ashton.”

“No, it didn’t! They broke up!” I reached for the camera and aimed it at her. I loved the little lines that were starting to come in on her face now that she couldn’t afford Botox as often.

“Well, it worked
until
they broke up.” She put her hand up. “Not so close, Bug.”

Instead of pulling back, I actually zoomed in closer. “Yeah, and then she had a total meltdown and became anorexic and started doing Whip-Its and got carted off to rehab.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with rehab,” she said. “It’s the beginning of healing.”

I put the camera down and curled up beside her. “I thought the AA people told you you can’t get into a relationship for a year.”

“It’s not that you
can’t
,” she replied as she tickled my arm, “it’s just something that’s
suggested
.”

I closed my eyes. For years I had been the one to tickle her arm. It felt good to be on the other end of it. “How come?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably because if it doesn’t work out you’ll want to drink or something.”

My eyes snapped open. “Well, there you go. That’s a good enough reason right there,” I said. I hated how much I still worried that at any moment things could go back to how they had been. “Don’t you think you have enough going on at the moment without getting involved with some ginormous star who’s closer in age to me than you?”

“What are you talking about? I have nothing going on,” she replied. “That’s the problem.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “You just got a voice-over.”

She sighed. “For
dog food
, Bug.
Dog. Food
.”

I was glad we weren’t facing each other so she couldn’t see me cringe. That sounded a lot worse when said out loud. “Well, it’ll pay the rent for next month at least.”

“Nope. Half the rent.”

If Ben weren’t helping us out, we would have been even more screwed. Because he didn’t want to make Mom feel worse than she already did, he tried to do it in ways that weren’t so humiliating. Like how he said the reason he was paying my tuition was because he wanted an excuse to go to the East Coast and visit me when I went to college. And how he took over the car payments because he cared about our safety and didn’t want us to have to deal with some used car that might have bad brakes.

Mom got up from the bed. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s too depressing.”

She was right. It was.

“Getting back to Billy—”

Okay, that was as depressing as the fact that we were broke.

“It’s just . . . I really felt a connection with him,” she said. “Like at a very, very deep level.”

“Um, did you
see
SimonSez’s Not-So-Blind item on his blog this morning?” I asked.

“No. Willow suggested I try and detox off the gossip stuff for thirty days.” Willow was Mom’s sponsor. She was only twenty-five but had been sober for five years. An ex-heroin addict, she now worked at Neiman Marcus in the Chanel department. “What’d it say?”

I picked up her iPhone and surfed for it. “It says . . .
What Hollywood hottie, recently crowned Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, is also a major commitmentphobe as evidenced by the canoodling with cuties that was going on last night at Soho House?
”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t say it’s him.”

I looked at her.

“At any rate, I’m telling you, Bug. The way I feel is very strong. It might even be a past-life thing.”

I sighed. “Mom, people are going to be here in, like, an hour, and you haven’t even put your makeup on yet.” I picked up a purple-and-tan-striped wrap dress. “Here—how about this?”

She took it from me. “Bug, I’m serious. Why are you so against my getting in touch with Billy?”

I might have answered her if I had known the answer, but I didn’t. It was partly the age difference. Partly that I worried that if they hooked up and then he dumped her, on top of everything that had gone down this past month, she’d start drinking again. Partly the fact that I knew the bloggers would have a field day with their snarky comments. But it was more than that. I just wasn’t sure what the more was.

“You know what? You should just do what you want,” I said.

“Annabelle, you don’t have to get
hostile
.”

“I’m not
hostile
,” I said. Only a little hostile-ly.

“I didn’t get sober to sit here and watch my life pass me by.”

I stood up. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought part of why you got sober was to make sure you didn’t
die
. Or kill someone,” I retorted. “I didn’t realize it was so that you could get a new boyfriend.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.” She let her towel drop, as if being butt naked in front of another person was the most natural thing in the world, and pulled on a pink-and-gray Halston dress that crossed so low in front you could almost see her belly button. “Well?” Mom asked as she turned from side to side in front of her three-way mirror.

“Are you trying to get Ben back?”

“Of course not.”

I shrugged. “Then I’d lose the cleavage.” I wouldn’t have dared bring it up, for fear of its sending her over the edge, but I had noticed that over the last few months Mom’s perky boobs—for which she was just as famous as her haircut—had started to droop a bit. Not that you could blame them. There wasn’t much to be perky about lately.

Pulling the dress off, she began to rummage around on the bed for another outfit. I cringed.

“What about this one?” she asked, wriggling into a turquoise silk shift.

“You look like you should be salsa dancing at a club in Miami.”

“Oh, you’re no fun.” She pouted. “This is a
celebration
.”

I had to laugh. My mother may have been annoying, but her ability to interpret the glass as being half full when it was almost bone dry was pretty impressive. Seeing a flash of red on the bed, I fished it out. “Here, wear this.” It was a cleavage-lite Diane von Furstenberg.

She wrinkled her nose. “But it’s so . . . bland.”

“Mom, we’re not
going
to the awards—we’re just watching them on TV.”

“Okay, okay,” she sighed, walking over and scooping me up in her arms, hugging hard. “Do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” I said into her hair.

“How much?”

“All the way up to God.”

She hugged harder. “And?”

“Past God, past God,” I replied as I pulled back a bit.

And I did. Really. Which is what made the whole thing so frustrating.

One good thing about not being able to afford to throw a big party for an awards show was that you could actually see and hear everything. Including the
Rad and Righteous
commercial. The one they played, like, three times within ten minutes.

“Again?”
Ben asked as we all sat in the living room on assorted, oversize, mismatched furniture. In the few minutes everyone had been there, Carrie had banged her hip on an end table and tripped on a Persian rug; Ben had knocked over a lamp; and Walter had spilled some Coke on a white slipcovered chair.

I glanced toward the kitchen, relieved to see that Mom still held Walter hostage and was talking his ear off about this horrible romantic comedy she had done after she left the show—in which she played Katherine Heigl’s older sister, and the entire cast and crew got food poisoning on the first day—while he popped shrimp after shrimp in his mouth. (I had tried to veto the shrimp because it was expensive, but Mom overruled me.)