Young Wives. Olivia Goldsmith

but it’s a start.” Natalie took a deep breath. “You never really liked that job up in Needham. You just took it to be close to Reid.”

      Angie couldn’t remember now why she had taken the job, but she knew she was lucky to get it. It hadn’t been easy to get the month’s leave of absence, either. But Angie wasn’t ready to go back or to quit. She put her head down and hunched her shoulders, knowing what was coming.

      “Why don’t you give up those rich people’s wills and trust funds?” her mother asked her. “Why don’t you join our practice?”

      Angie looked up from the Formica tabletop and stared at her mother. Natalie ran a women’s legal services clinic where the clientele was primarily women so down and out, so pathetic, that they didn’t have a few thousand to ante up to an attorney.

      “I can’t work there,” Angie said, frightened of both the idea and her snobby repulsion. Her mother’s practice served mostly poor or embattled women coping with everything from a disastrous divorce to immigration problems to harassment. Angie wasn’t ready to spend her time helping other depressed women. She was too depressed herself. “I’m not registered with the bar here.”

      “That doesn’t mean you can’t drink I can swear you in until you get the bar,” Natalie said, and with a flourish brought a bottle of burgundy over to the table. She poured herself a glass—a jelly glass with blue dinosaurs on it—and then one for Angie. “Listen to me,” Natalie said, leaning forward and holding her glass of wine. “What the hell is the point of going back to the scene of the crime? What’s the point in going back to a selfish life where you’re thinking of nothing but your own pleasure—or your own pain? Believe me, one is worse than the other. Join us. We’ll get you through the bar in no time and we have a hundred women with problems so pressing, they’ll make your adventure with Reid look like a day at the circus. Did I tell you about the eighty-two-year-old woman evicted from—”

      “Mom, I don’t want to hear about her pain,” Angie interrupted, and took a swig of her wine. “I have my own.” This wasn’t what she had craved, what she had expected and needed. She wanted her mother to fix her old life for her, not offer her a new one … a boring, awful new one with a house like a garage and a job worse than social work.

      “You think I don’t understand?” Natalie asked, raising her brows. “Of course I understand. All you can do is think of him. How maybe it didn’t happen, how you are looking for excuses, or, if there is no excuse, how maybe it was your fault and then you can forgive him anyway. How just because it happened once before, doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. Yup, I know what you’re thinking. But those are all the desperate configurations of a rat trapped in a maze, looking for the little bar to press to get the cocaine that the scientist administers at the end of every test. You’re obsessed with your future former husband because you’re still hoping somehow you can get that hit of affection. That hit of sex.”

      Angie turned her head away. Her mother might be accurate, but accuracy didn’t feel like what she needed right now. Natalie leaned across the table, trying to get closer, but Angie kept her face averted. Natalie’s voice softened. “You feel like without it you can’t go on, that you’re trapped. But I’m here to tell you that being ‘in love’ is only an addiction. It keeps delusions going. It separates you from your real life, from real love, which you can feel for a friend, God, an animal, even a man. ‘In love’ sets you up to worship Prince Reid, some false idol you’ve erected within your temple. You were only with him for a year, Angie. You’re young—only twenty-eight. Oh, there can be a man, later, if you want one. A good man, one who could be there for you.” Natalie’s voice toughened up then. “One who doesn’t look like Brad Pitt in any way.”

      Angie stood up and reached for her purse. Somehow she felt more depressed but less hysterical then she’d been. Her mother hugged her. “You look beat,” Natalie said, patting her on the shoulder. She hugged her again and Angie, too weak to hug back, let herself melt against her mother. That was what she wanted: to melt, to disappear, to lose herself forever.

      “Do you want to sleep over?” Natalie asked. “I can unfold a cot I use when we get full at the crisis center.”

      Angie restrained herself from shivering. The idea of sleeping on a bed of misery here in this warehouse made her father’s sofa and the plaster infinity signs overhead seem almost heavenly. “No,” Angie said. “I’m just fine.”

      “Yeah,” her mother said. “You’re fine and I’m skinny.”

      Angie managed to give her mother a watery smile before she shrugged into her coat and left.

11

       In which dinner and an ultimatum are both served

      Jada and Michelle had planned to rendezvous at Post Road Pizza, but Michelle had called back to say she had to go down and pick up Frank. Jada pulled the car into the driveway, got out, and opened the rear door for Jenna. Jenna got out, moving slowly, as if overnight her eleven-year-old body had been transformed into an old woman’s. But at least she was moving. Frankie seemed to have become paralyzed, turned into a block of stone, or maybe ice, by the trauma of the last twenty-four hours. When Jada lifted him from the backseat, she was surprised by his heaviness. The kid couldn’t weigh more than forty pounds, but as dead weight he felt like the huge bags of Sacrete that Clinton used to throw so easily across his shoulder in the old days. Jada hugged the little boy to her, freed up a hand, and put it on Jenna’s shoulder as she led them into the house.

      When Clinton looked up from the kitchen table, Jada knew immediately that there would be trouble. She decided to ignore him for as long as she could. Normalization was the goal here, and since she normally ignored Clinton anyway, that was the route to take.

      “Hey, Kevon! Hey, Shavonne! Guess who’s here?” she called out. Shavonne wasn’t crazy about Jenna lately—sometimes they got along and sometimes they fought—but Kevon adored Frankie. Kevon ran into the kitchen, but skidded to a stop when she put Frankie down on the linoleum. Kevon stood almost as still as his friend, then his eyes flicked from Frankie’s face to his mom’s.

      “What’s wrong with him?” he asked her in a hoarse kid’s whisper, as if he could already tell that Frankie wasn’t talking and maybe couldn’t hear.

      Jada felt Clinton’s disapproval from all the way across the room. He was such a hypocrite! He’d hung with some neighborhood brothers who’d gotten in plenty of trouble, and once or twice had even brought the kids along until she’d put her foot down.

      “He had a bad sleepover,” she said. “Remember when you had that sleepover at Billy’s?” Kevon nodded. It wasn’t easy for her son to be the only African-American in his grade. “Well, it was scarier than that. But he’s okay now. He’s with us.” She tightened her arm around Frankie, really talking to him. Kevon, bless his heart, reached his hand out to Frankie, who still stood immobile.

      “Come on, Frankie,” Kevon said. “We hate Billy.” Jada realized that Kevon thought Frankie had spent the night with Kevon’s little enemy. But she wasn’t going to bother to correct the picture because, thank the Lord, Frankie allowed Kevon to pull him out of the room. She turned to Jenna, who was chewing the end of her hair.

      “Is my mother coming back now?” Jenna asked.

      “She’s having dinner with your dad. He wanted pizza. We’ll be eating in a little while,” Jada said. Then she raised her voice and called her daughter again. Shavonne came into the kitchen clutching the baby.

      “Oh, hi,” she said, overly casual. She looked at Jenna. “I can’t really play with you now,” she told her self-importantly, “I’m baby-sitting my little sister.”

      “Jenna’s going to help you baby-sit,” Jada said. She felt like strangling her daughter, and the girl wasn’t even a teen yet. “If you both do a