Jesus.
I forced a smile as I pulled the knit cap over her head, just low enough to conceal the evidence. Delia grinned up at me, her tiny fingers raking the mop of Frankenstein-like strands from her eyes.
“Happy?” I asked, trying not to cringe and draw attention to the chunk of hair that had fallen loose and was now resting on her shoulder.
She nodded.
I stuffed the knife and tape in my shoulder bag along with my cell phone and plucked Zach from his high chair, holding him high enough to get a whiff of his droopy drawers. Satisfied, I slung him on my hip and slammed the door behind us.
I was okay, I told myself as I slapped the remote door opener on the wall of the garage. The motor lit up, a horrible grinding noise drowning out the children’s chatter as it hauled the door open, flooding the garage with autumn-gray sunlight. I loaded us all into the minivan, setting Zach’s sagging drawers gingerly in his car seat. It wasn’t as satisfying as a kick to my ex’s groin, but today, a sticky two-year-old in a shitty diaper felt like the best I could do.
“Where’s Zach going?” Delia asked as I started the van and eased out of the garage.
“Zach’s going to Daddy’s house. You’re going to school. And Mommy…” I pressed the remote button on my visor and waited for the door to close. Nothing happened.
I set the brake, ducking down to see into the garage. The light on the motor was off. So were the front stoop lights, and the light in Delia’s bedroom window she always forgot to turn off. I pulled my phone from the diaper bag and checked the date.
Shit. The electric bill was thirty days past due.
I thunked my head against the steering wheel and rested it there. I’d have to ask Steven to pay it for me. He’d have to call the power company and beg them to turn it back on—again. I’d have to ask him to come over and manually close my garage. And Guy would probably hear all about it by the time I got home.
“Where are you going, Mommy?” Delia asked.
I lifted my head and stared at the stupid pink shovel on the pegboard. At the darkened window of the office I hadn’t stepped foot in for weeks. At the weeds creeping up the front walk and the stack of bills the mail carrier had tossed on the front step when they’d overflowed the mailbox. I put the van in reverse, catching my kids’ snotty, syrupy, cherubic faces in the rearview mirror as I backed slowly down the driveway, my heart aching at the possibility of losing them to Steven and Theresa. “Mommy’s going to figure out how to make some money.”
CHAPTER 2
It was thirty-six minutes after ten when I finally made it to the Panera in Vienna, too late for breakfast but too early for the lunch rush, and I still couldn’t find a parking space. When I’d called Sylvia and explained I’d be too late to make our reservation at her fancy brunch restaurant pick, she’d asked for the name of a place that was close to a Metro station, opened early, and wouldn’t require one. Feeling guilty and frazzled while navigating a traffic jam on the toll road, Panera was the first place to fly out of my mouth, and Sylvia had disconnected before I could take it back.
The lot at Panera was full, brimming with shiny Audis and Beemers and Mercedes. Who were these people, and why did they not have office jobs? For that matter, why didn’t I?
I swung my minivan into the adjoining lot of the dry cleaner and picked a few last strands of Delia’s hair from my pants before finally giving up. Slipping on a huge pair of sunglasses that obscured most of my face, I tied my silk wig-scarf around my head, fluffed the long blond waves cascading from the bottom, and smeared burgundy lipstick beyond the natural lines of my mouth. I sighed at my reflection in the rearview mirror. This was the same version of me inside the cover of my books, but also, it wasn’t. In my headshots, I seemed mysterious and glamorous, like a romance novelist who wanted to preserve her secret identity from hordes of rabid fans. But in the drab lighting of my run-down minivan, with hairy syrup stains on my pants and diaper cream under my nails, and with a loose strand of my own brown hair poking stubbornly out of the bottom of the scarf, I just looked like I was trying too hard to be someone I’m not.
Let’s face it, I wasn’t wearing my wig-scarf to impress my agent—Sylvia already knew who I was. And who I wasn’t. Today, I just wore it to keep me from being kicked out of this particular Panera. If I could make it through lunch without being recognized as the disaster who’d been banned from this establishment eight months ago, that would be enough.
I threw my knockoff designer diaper bag over my shoulder, took a deep breath, and got out of the van, praying Mindy the Manager had quit or been fired since the last time I’d been here, when Theresa had requested to talk out our differences over lunch.