The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (16 page)

“Hey,” I said, happy to see her out of bed but still mad. “Hey, Willow.”

“Hey, Annabelle. You good?”

I liked Willow. Mom told me that when she first got sober she had a purple Mohawk, so she had to buy a wig before she went on job interviews. Now her hair was long and black and shiny. “Sure,” I replied.

She nodded. “Good.”

“Do you want to sit with us and have some tea?” Mom asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” That was progress. The old me would’ve said yes just to keep the peace. But as someone had said in the meeting, “‘No’ is a complete sentence.”

Her shoulders sagged a bit. “Okay.”

They were still talking quietly when I turned out the light and went to bed. Part of me wanted to stand at the door with my ear against a glass eavesdropping, but I didn’t. If Mom suffered from Disclosure of Inappropriate Information disease, I was just as guilty in that I was willing to listen. While I was glad that she was once again part of the human race, I didn’t need to know why. It wasn’t my problem.

Over the next few weeks something weird happened. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had started going to Alateen meetings regularly and Mom was going to her AA ones again, too, sometimes twice a day. Maybe the timing was all just a coincidence. But it was as if the umbilical cord between us—the one that the doctor had apparently forgotten to snip when I was born—started to dry up and crumble.

For the first time, when I would glance up from my Lean Cuisine and see my mother, I thought of her as something separate from me. Now, when my mouth would open to finish her sentences, or I’d want to rush in to do something for her because it would’ve made things that much easier, I didn’t. To her credit, she let up on me as well. She stopped trying to tell me what I wanted or thought (or if she did, she’d quickly catch herself and say, “You know what? Forget I just said that.”).

That Wednesday night as I worked on a paper for English class, Mom knocked on my door—
she knocked on my door
—and asked if she could come in.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“I was wondering if you could teach me how to use the printer,” she said, “so I can print out my résumé.”

“Your résumé?” I asked, confused. “You mean your credits on IMDb?” IMDb stood for Internet Movie Database and gave you information on actors’ credits and mini bios of them, including birth dates that were a few years off.

She shook her head. “No, I just put together a résumé for my interview tomorrow.”

“What interview?”

“At Promises,” she said.

Promises had been the first of the fancy rehabs back in the day.

“To
work
there?”

She nodded.

“Wow. Well, that’s . . . great,” I said, trying to be supportive. In trying not to butt into Mom’s business, I wasn’t going to tell her that she didn’t actually have any skills other than acting and accessorizing. “But Mom, if you have a regular job, you know you’re not going to be able to leave during the day to go to auditions and stuff.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. She shrugged. “I’ve decided I’m done with acting.” She flashed a camera-ready smile, but her eyes were sad. “I just think it’s time for me to do something different now.” She smiled bigger. “I can be a walking example that when you get sober, your life just gets better and better!”

I looked around the room that was stuffed to the seams with furniture as the smell of cigarette smoke from the downstairs apartment came through the radiator. It did?

A car alarm went off, and Mom cringed. “Or that at least you can stay sober through whatever life throws your way.”

A second alarm joined the mix, which made a dog start to bark. Back when we lived in Santa Monica, the loudest thing you heard was the stone fountain from Japan that had been on our patio.

“So you’re in a bit of a dry spell,” I said. In the middle of the Sahara Desert. “It’s not like it’s going to last
forever
.” It couldn’t, could it?

She didn’t look convinced. Maybe because I didn’t sound all that convincing.

“Mom . . . you love acting,” I said quietly. “It’s your life.”

She shook her head. “No.
You’re
my life, Annabelle,” she replied. “Or rather, taking care of you and making sure your tuition is paid and putting food on the table is my life.” She walked over and hugged me. It wasn’t the bone-crushing-push-the-air-out-of-you kind of hug that I was used to from her. “Do you know how grateful I am to have you?” she asked into my hair. “You really are the best, Annabelle. And for these last months that I have you before you go off to college, I want them to be as normal as possible.”

“But we’ve never been normal,” I said into her hair. “Why should we start now?”

She laughed. Her laugh sounded different nowadays. Deeper. Older. More real. “Okay, maybe not normal. But at least with some . . .
stability
. Listen, I had a career that most people only dream of. . . .”

I hated that she was speaking in past tense.

She let me go and smiled at me. “But now it’s time to move on.”

I searched her eyes for tears, but there weren’t any. It was as if she had just said, “And now let’s go have Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches.”

Maybe she was ready to move on from being an actress—but I wasn’t ready to let her. My mother was never happier—or more herself—than when she was acting. And as much as I was trying to separate from her, watching her do that made me happy as well.

I couldn’t let her quit. Especially not now.

Even if I had no idea what to do to stop her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I know this was my idea,” I said to Walter as we sat in my living room a few days later staring at the receipt with Billy Barrett’s number, “but now I’m thinking it might be a very, very bad one.” I pulled the bowl of microwave kettle corn away from him. “And stop hogging.”

“I’m not,” he replied, pulling it back. “Plus, my doctor told me I need more nutrients.”

“Then maybe you should try eating something that’s actually
nutritious
,” I countered. I wasn’t sure how Walter had become the person with whom I spent most of my free time, therefore making him resemble something along the lines of a best friend, but he had.

“Look, you said it yourself,” he said—stopping to try and catch some kettle corn in his mouth, but missing so the pieces joined the other missed pieces in between the couch cushions—“there was obviously a reason you didn’t throw away that piece of paper.”

“Yeah. Maybe because I couldn’t be bothered to walk over to the garbage can at that moment in time?”

“Or maybe because your Higher Power knew that you were going to need it down the line.”

I cringed. While the meetings were definitely helping, I still got weirded out when Walter or my mom started talking about a Higher Power aka God, as if He/She/It were living next door. That being said, it was a little bit weird that this was coming into play now.

Walter picked up the receipt and handed it to me. “Just do it.”

I sighed. I had rehearsed my speech numerous times, but every time I tried to dial the number, I got cold feet.
Hi, Billy? This is Annabelle Jackson—Janie Jackson’s daughter? You know, the ex–TV star who ended up driving the wrong way down the PCH a few hours after she met you in Whole Foods? Well, I’m not sure if you heard or not, but while she was in rehab she found out that she was totally broke and now she’s paying our rent with tampon commercials
. It was usually at that point that I would have to stop rehearsing in order to take a huff of Play-Doh.

“Okay, well, I guess I’m going to have to help you,” Walter said, picking up my iPhone and punching in the numbers.

“What are you doing?! Stop!” I yelled, trying to grab it away from him. When I heard the sound of ringing, I started to freak. And when I heard Billy’s voice saying “Hello? Hello?” after Walter thrust the phone into my hand, I
really
started to freak. I didn’t have to talk to him. I could just hang up. It’s not like he would recognize the number.

“Hello?” I heard Billy demand as I stared at the phone. I could hear people in the background, as if he was in a café or something.

I pulled the phone closer to me, my finger poised over the End button. And then . . . “Is this Billy?” I asked.

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“This is Annabelle Jackson . . . Janie Jackson’s daughter? We met you in Whole Foods a while back. . . . You probably don’t remember, but—”

“Sure, I remember,” he said.

At that, I stumbled. I had spent so much time practicing the part where I reminded him who I was that I blanked on what came next.

“Who is it, Billy?” a woman’s voice demanded.

I heard him cover the phone. “I’ve got it, Skye,” he said, slightly muffled.

I quickly pushed the Speaker button so Walter could hear.

“Is it another one of your
friends
?” Skye asked. “’Cause we talked about this with the therapist. Either you get rid of those
friends
, or we’re over. For good.”

“Yeah, and we also talked about the fact that you need to stop being so freaking paranoid that I’m scamming on every girl I say hello to, or it’s over,” he snapped.

Walter and I looked at each other. “This is
good,
” he whispered.

“I think I should just hang up. This doesn’t seem like the best time to—”

“So what’s up, Annabelle?” he asked.

I quickly took it off Speaker. “I, uh, had a favor to ask you, but if this isn’t a good time to talk, I could just—”

“You know the Apple Pan?”

Who didn’t know the Apple Pan? It was an L.A. institution. “Of course.”

“Well, I’m totally jonesing for their banana cream pie—”

“You always do that!” Skye cried in the background. “You
know
I can’t have that because of the gluten and dairy thing, so you pull this passive-aggressive move and go there in order to avoid me because of your fear of intimacy!”

She was loud enough that Walter could hear her even without the phone being on Speaker. Jeez. If she were my girlfriend, I’d want to get away from her, too.

“Meet me at four?” he asked.

“Meet you. In person. At four,” I repeated nervously as I looked at Walter, who nodded. “Okay.”

I tried to convince Walter that if he were really a good friend, he’d come with me, but he was having none of it.

“Listen, I think the guy is awesome—I mean, I’ve already seen
Rad and Righteous
five times and actually paid full price for the tickets rather than only going at matinee times—but it would be weird if I went with you,” he said as I dropped him off at home.

“But the whole thing is weird!” I cried. “Why not just have it be
weirder
?”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “You can do this, Annabelle. I know you can,” he said as he got out of the car. Before he shut the door, he turned. “And if you would bring me a piece of banana cream pie afterward, that would be awesome.”

I also loved the banana cream pie at the Apple Pan, but not when my stomach was so jumpy I was positive that if I swallowed a bite, I’d immediately upchuck it.

“Are you going to eat that?” Billy asked after he finished off his slice.

I shook my head. I was so nervous I didn’t trust myself to talk.

“Then can I have it?” he asked, pulling his L.A. Lakers hat down a little lower as a couple across the room stared at us.

I barely had the “shh” part of “Sure” out of my mouth when he slid my plate over his way and started to eat the slice of pie. “I love this stuff. Makes me think of home.”

I knew from articles that Billy was from Iowa. Or Nebraska. Or some other place where they had a lot of corn.

“So what’s up? What’d you want to talk to me about?”

“Well, um—”

His iPhone dinged with a text. As he looked at it, he sighed. “Are there, like, sanity tests or something online that you can print out? “‘Cause I’m definitely making the next woman I go out with take one first.”

Well, that was good. That meant there’d be no way he’d want to date my mother. “I don’t know, but that sounds like a good idea,” I replied. “So what I wanted—”

As his phone beeped again, I saw him will himself not to look at it and to stay focused on me.

“I wanted to ask you—”

Finally, he gave in, picked up his phone, and sighed. “Oh, man. Rondo’s out tonight because of his knee! That
blows
.”

I nodded as if I knew who this Rondo person was. “Totally.”

His eyes lit up. “You like basketball?”

“Huh?” I asked, confused.

“The way you said ‘totally’ when I mentioned Rajon Rondo’s knee made it seem like you followed basketball.”

“Oh. Well, I do follow it . . . a little . . . but not, you know, all the time,” I said.

“Oh, man, I love it,” he said. “I keep telling my agent to find me a script where I play a player. I played in high school, you know. I mean, I wasn’t the
best
on the team, but I have a pretty awesome dunk.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“I’m thinking something where there’s a role for Jack,” he went on.

“Is Jack another player?” I asked.

He laughed. “No, I mean
Nicholson
,” he replied. “Don’t you think that would be awesome? If Jack played, like, my grandfather? Or maybe some old coach who comes out of retirement to coach my team and at first he’s all up in my grill about stuff but later you find out that’s only because he thinks I have all this potential?”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“Yeah, I think so, too,” he agreed. “So what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

I was always amazed at how people with ADHD could move from subject to subject without missing a beat. I took a deep breath. The only thing I hated more than asking people for help was . . . actually, there
wasn’t
anything I hated more than that.

“I . . . actually, will you excuse me for a sec?” I asked as I grabbed my bag and stood up.

Once inside the bathroom, I took out a can of red Play-Doh. (My blue can was tapped out because of how often I had opened it over the last few weeks.) As I started to take a sniff, I got a look at myself in the mirror. “Okay, you need to stop this,” I said to my reflection as I chucked the can. “Not only is it pathetic, but if you get cancer, Mom’s not going to be able to afford the treatment.”