“Hi, Mom.”
“Listen,” her mother started in with a confidential air. “Keith told me last night that hedge funds is what you want to be in.” Keith was the bartender at the P.F. Chang’s where her mother worked. For reasons Florence couldn’t quite glean, the entire waitstaff credited him with almost supernatural powers of intelligence.
“I don’t really have the qualifications for that,” Florence said.
“You graduated summa cum laude! I know you think I’m some simple-minded hick, but I do know that summa means best. I’m not sure what other qualification you could need.”
“Mom, I don’t think you’re a hick, but—”
“Oh, I see, I’m just simple-minded.”
“No, that’s not what I said. But I’m not good with numbers, you know that.”
“I do not know that, Florence. I do not know that at all. In fact, now that you mention it, I remember you being very strong with numbers. Very strong.” Her mother spoke with the cartoonish cadence of a preacher or newscaster, an affectation absorbed perhaps by the hours she spent tuned in to both every week.
Florence said nothing for a moment. “I guess I just don’t really want to work in finance. I like my job.” This wasn’t entirely true, but she had learned that it was best to communicate with her mother in stark black-and-white terms. Shades of gray offered her a foothold.
“You like being at someone’s beck and call all day long? I’ve been at someone’s beck and call for the past twenty-six years for one reason and one reason only: so that my only child could tell anyone who tried to beck and call her where to put it.”
Florence sighed. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Don’t apologize to me, honey. God’s the one who gave you your gifts. He doesn’t like to see you squander them any more than I do.”
“Alright, I’m sorry, God.”
“Oh, no. Don’t get smart with Him, Florence. Not with Him.”
Florence said nothing.
After a beat, her mother asked, “Who loves you?”
“You do.”
“Who’s the best girl in the whole world?”
Florence glanced toward her door as if to ensure that no one would overhear her. “I am,” she said quickly.
“That’s right.” Florence knew her mother was nodding forcefully on the other end. “You’re not small fry, baby. Don’t act like it. That’s disrespecting me, and it’s disrespecting your Maker.”
“Okay.”
“Love you, baby.”
“You too.”
Florence hung up the phone and closed her eyes. Her mother’s bloated and wildly imprecise flattery had the unintended effect of making Florence feel utterly insignificant. All through high school, her mother had kept up the fiction that Florence was the most beautiful and popular girl in her class when in reality she was a lost soul clinging to a small group of friends held together more by mutual desperation than any particular affinity. The only thing she’d really had in common with her closest friend, Whitney, was a 4.0 GPA. “Don’t you see me?” Florence had wanted to shout.
She sometimes wished her mother were outright cruel; then at least Florence could cut ties without feeling guilty. Instead, they were locked in this endless masquerade: her mother supplying encouragement undercut by disappointment and Florence responding with affection and contrition she didn’t feel.
Vera Darrow had been twenty-two when she got pregnant—not young enough to garner stares but certainly not old enough to know what she was getting into, as she’d told Florence often enough. The man responsible, a regular guest at the hotel where she’d been working at the time, had wanted nothing to do with the baby, but Vera had gone ahead with it anyway. It was, she told anyone who would listen, the best decision she’d ever made: Her life began when Florence’s did. Though she’d also found God when she was pregnant, so perhaps some credit was due to Him too.
Someone at work had told Vera about a church that had helped out her cousin, another single mother, so Vera had gone with some vague notion that she would leave with a free pack of diapers. Instead she’d left with a community.
Ever since childhood, Vera had been told to quiet down; calm down; simmer down. Here, her enthusiasm had found a purpose. That’s what Pastor Doug said. He also assured her that the baby she was carrying wasn’t a sin, but rather a precious gift from God.
Florence knew that there were some in the church who thought her mother wasn’t quite as devout as she made herself out to be: Vera never hid the fact that she found certain parts of the Bible dubious （like the idea that the meek would inherit anything）， and she managed to introduce discord into any committee she joined. But her detractors would have been surprised to learn how strong her faith really was, even if she didn’t bother much with the details. Above all, Vera believed with unwavering fervor that God had something special in store for her child.
Growing up, Florence had been told about this divine plan with the regularity of a bedtime story. She accepted it as she used to accept everything from her mother—passively and without question. Skepticism is a risky venture for children of single parents.
Florence had stopped believing in God in high school, but she still assumed that she was destined for greatness. It had been ingrained in her for too long. Giving it up at this point would be like asking her to stop having blond hair or to stop hating mustard.
The problem was that Florence and Vera had vastly different ideas of what greatness looked like. To Vera, it was simply the best version of a life that she could recognize, so that in effect, her expectations were hemmed in by the limits of her own imagination. God would grant Florence a good job and a good marriage. And in turn, maybe Florence would grant her mother a condo.
But the word great had stirred up something much wilder and more foreign in her daughter—something out of Vera’s control. Florence’s horizons, it turned out, could expand in ways that her mother’s could not.
It was through books that Florence first felt the edges of her mother’s world chafing at her. She’d always been a voracious reader, and it dawned on her that a corporate job in Tampa or Jacksonville was not, in fact, the be-all and end-all. Something lay beyond that point.
Florence had haunted the library, desperate for glimpses of lives unlike her own. She had a penchant for stories about glamorous, doomed women like Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer. Soon, however, her fascination shifted from the women in the stories to the women who wrote them. She devoured the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, who were far more glamorous and doomed than any of their characters.
But without a doubt, Florence’s Bible was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Admittedly, she spent more time scrolling through photos of Joan Didion in her sunglasses and Corvette Stingray than actually reading her, but the lesson stuck. All she had to do was become a writer, and her alienation would magically transform into evidence of brilliance rather than a source of shame.
When she looked into the future, she saw herself at a beautiful desk next to a window, typing her next great book. She could never quite see the words on the screen, but she knew they were brilliant and would prove once and for all that she was special. Everyone would know the name Florence Darrow.