“We’re going to be OK, Mom,” Savannah assured me as she took the pint out of my outstretched hand. “He gave me a debit card.”
Savannah’s words hit me like a slap in the face. I should have been relieved to have a sugar daddy. We certainly needed one. And it’s not like I didn’t know we had accepted his offer. But eating food that he paid for here in my apartment made the whole arrangement feel frighteningly real.
“Savannah,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking, “I think we’ve done a really bad thing.” As soon as I said it, I knew it came out wrong. “I’ve done a really bad thing.” This was on me. I was the adult. I shamed our family, corrupted my daughter, sinned beyond redemption.
“What he did was worse,” she replied flatly, and I didn’t know if I should be horrified or relieved. She had found a way to justify it. It felt cruel to take that away from her after everything she’d been through. Plus I couldn’t support us. And what kind of a mother would let her own child drop out of school to pay her bills?
Savannah took a bite of ice cream, then offered me the carton. I waved it away.
There was no food I loved more than H?agen-Dazs vanilla. But I suddenly had lost my appetite.
CHAPTER 19
“I like your plates!” Libby exclaimed as she removed them from the buffet. I hadn’t asked her to set the table, but she was clearly a take-charge kind of person. I learned that when she invited herself and her entire family over for dinner at my house. “Where did you get them?” she asked as she set them on the table.
“Pottery Barn,” I replied. I decided not to tell her I had bought them special that very morning. The plain white CorningWare plates we’d brought with us were flimsy, and I was embarrassed to put them out.
“Oh, I love Pottery Barn!” Libby said in her upbeat, cheerleader voice. I wondered if she was always this enthusiastic, or just really liked dinner parties.
“The place mats are from there, too,” I told her, even though she hadn’t asked. I had bought the thick burgundy mats that morning, too, along with a dozen cloth napkins and three scented candles. It was a strange experience, shopping at Pottery Barn. I had never been in one before, as I knew it to be two price points higher than we could ever afford. But when Savannah and I moved in, the china cabinet was empty, and I needed dishes worthy of this house and my new friends.
What struck me while plate shopping was how empty the store was. It was enormous—two stories with an escalator up the middle—but I was practically the only one there. I remember wondering how a place like that stayed in business. When it was time to check out, a saleswoman appeared out of nowhere and opened a register just for me. As she was ringing up my purchase, a second saleswoman swooped in and wrapped my plates one by one in thick oatmeal-colored paper. I wanted to tell her just to wrap them in the place mats instead of wasting all that paper, but I didn’t want to seem tacky or ungrateful.
“I’d like to go there and get new everything,” Libby sighed, and I wondered why she couldn’t. I had always thought people in rich neighborhoods could buy whatever they wanted. She had a Rolex—surely she could afford new dishes.
“I think everything’s ready,” I said. “Shall we call everybody?”
As promised, Libby had brought over a big pot of sauce, and we cooked two boxes of spaghetti in the big lobster pot I’d brought from the apartment. I had never used it for lobster, but it was great for making soup and the occasional pot roast, which Gabe liked to recycle into sandwiches and take to work. I didn’t cook in big quantities anymore, now that it was just Savannah and me. The only reason I still had the pot was because it was too big to fit in the trash.
I watched with a tiny puff of pride as Libby surveyed my selection of wooden spoons. I hadn’t picked them, but they were still mine, and it made me feel good to be able to share them. My kitchen at our old apartment was so small you couldn’t open the fridge and the oven at the same time—the doors would bump—so the experience of making a meal with a friend was all new to me. It was fun having someone to taste test and talk with as I chopped and stirred, and for those glorious few moments I let myself forget how I’d come to have such an impressive array of wooden spoons. When I’d accepted Libby’s invitation to get our families together, I thought I was doing it for Savannah—to show her I was trying, inject a seed of optimism in a landscape that had grown cold and barren. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might actually enjoy it. As I watched Libby stir the spaghetti with my long-handled bamboo spaghetti server, I was suddenly super glad I’d kept that big pot.