I walked out of the condo I’d financed with no help, got in the fancy European sedan I’d leased because I couldn’t afford to buy one, and pulled onto busy Manhattan Beach Boulevard. A light rain was falling, which would add another thirty minutes to my already-hellish commute. I was used to morning traffic, because, like all working stiffs, I didn’t have a sugar momma or a vanity career like playing in a band. I knew it wasn’t my cousin’s fault that he’d won the birth lottery, but that didn’t make me any less envious. I had a million excuses why I’d done what I’d done. But excuses—even valid ones—didn’t make me any less of a jerk.
Maybe Louisa was a crazy-ass bitch to pull a prank that made us all question our sanity and self-worth. Or maybe she’d given us all exactly what we deserved.
CHAPTER 58
* * *
WINNIE
It wasn’t the first time I’d woken up in my bra and underwear not knowing who had taken my clothes off and put me to bed, but—for the first time in my ten-year addiction—I understood it was a symptom of a much bigger problem.
I wasn’t hungover—it took a lot more than half a glass of Jack to ring my bell. But though I’d slept as soundly as a hibernating grizzly, I didn’t feel Irish Spring fresh, either. I had mastered the art of waking up just miserable enough to justify starting the day with a hair of the dog. Unfortunately, I’d drained my bottle before that trip to the graveyard, so I forced myself to get out of bed without one.
It was nearly ten o’clock, but the sky was still dull gray. It would have been nice to have some sunshine to coax the darkness out of my blackened heart, but a cleansing rain would have to do.
I got up and showered, then went down to the kitchen to forage for something to wipe the blur out of my vision. My head was pounding, and my throat was as dry as a burlap sack. I would have given a limb （or at least a digit?） for a stinging shot of tequila, but French roast with an ibuprofen chaser was a reasonable placeholder, and I was grateful to find a steaming pot and a full bottle of Advil waiting for me on the counter.
“Thanks for making coffee,” I said to my brother as he poked his head into the kitchen to check on me. “And for the strip-down.” I raised my cup in a symbolic hats off.
“You OK?” he asked kindly.
“Well, I’m upright,” I offered.
“You gave me a bit of a scare,” he said.
“Graveyards are scary,” I replied. This exchange had the potential to devolve into a Hallmark moment, so I quickly changed gears. “We going zombie hunting today?” Now that we knew Mom was alive and destined to continue fucking with our collective well-being, I figured we should try to find her before she popped out from under a rock like a demonic jack-in-the-box and scared us all half to death.
“I think we’ll let the police do that,” my brother said.
“So we’re calling them?”
“I promised Nathan we’d wait until he got here, but yeah. I don’t think we can put it off any longer.” And then I remembered: Nathan had asked us to hold off calling the police, just in case we peered into Mom’s coffin to see that his new girlfriend had slashed her face off. Which arguably might have been preferable.
“You tell Marcela?” I asked. I wondered what his wife made of this whole debacle; I imagined she was rather frantic.
“She’s on her way.”
“Great,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic, but it didn’t matter; my brother knew I was not his wife’s number one fan—there was no reason to try to hide it. Of course I didn’t know that Charlie had lied to her, and that her real motivation for coming had nothing to do with finding Mom. Which in retrospect was probably a good thing, given that I was out of whiskey and the anticipation of high drama might have sent me into a tailspin.
I sipped my coffee, then made a face. If French roast was the new Bloody Mary, it was going to need some sprucing up. “Is there any sugar?”
“Look in the pantry.”
I put my cup down and walked into the pantry. The “secret door” was open a crack—it didn’t close all the way anymore; we must have worn out the hinges during our countless games of hide-and-go-seek. My favorite trick was to tuck under Mom’s desk, then, when I heard Charlie coming, creep into the pantry, then run back to Mom’s study and scare my brother from behind. I still tease him about how he would scream like six-year-old Drew Barrymore in E.T., poor guy.
I didn’t want my coffee to get cold—it was dull enough piping hot—so I quickly scanned the pantry shelves. Mom didn’t bake, but she must have kept some sugar lying around somewhere. My eyes combed over jars of pickled things, two kinds of rice, three kinds of jam, every kind of bean. The pantry was jam-packed, but no damn sugar. I was about to go back into the kitchen when I was struck by something odd. Not something I saw, but rather, something I didn’t see.