Stay (6 page)

“What are you doing in there?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. She didn’t say anything either. It was quiet except for the sound of my waves. I broke before she did.

“I’m trying to take a bath, so I don’t get stuck in the car for eight hours smelling like a booze hound.” I coughed lightly. “No offense.” It was one of those things we would have laughed at together before, but now Diane stayed silent. “So, what do you want from me?” I said, quickly.

“I just don’t want to see you get left behind, Van. Maybe it’s time you did something new, took a chance at something. Or someone. Start over somewhere else.”

“What do you mean?”

“We haven’t really talked since the funeral,” she said.

“Well, I’ve been busy,” I said, praying she’d pick a different subject. I couldn’t get into it with her. I just couldn’t.

“Your mother left you some money, you know.”

“My mother didn’t have any money.” The water in the tub was starting to get cold, but I didn’t want to get out and lose the protection of the shower curtain.

“She had fifteen thousand in savings. And then there was the life insurance. That was in your name.”

“What life insurance? She didn’t have life insurance.”

“How would you know? You don’t know these things, Van,” she said, like I was still some silly kid.

“What are you pulling?” I asked. The bubbles in the tub were mostly popped now, but the bubble bath had left the water an awful green-gray color. My legs looked swollen and too white. “Am I supposed to be grateful?” I hugged my knees up to my chest so I wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.

“You don’t have to be grateful, Savannah. It was one of your mother’s employee benefits.” There was the slightest hesitation in her voice-this extra breath before she said
employee benefit
s.

“So why haven’t I heard about this before?”

“You refuse to take my calls. You won’t meet me for lunch when I come to see Jane.”

“Why not have Janie tell me?”

Diane took an audible breath and forced the air out through her nose. “You know how she is. This isn’t between you and her. This is between you and me.”

“I just-” I stood up. The water dripped off me and sounded like a rainstorm. “Isn’t some man in a bad suit supposed to come and tell me this?”

“You watch too many movies.”

“Call it what it is, Diane.” I pulled the shower curtain open, and stepped out onto the bath mat.

Diane was leaning her butt against the counter, with both hands stretched behind her. Her right hand curled into the sink, still tapping. Her legs were crossed, and she was resting on the balls of her feet. Diane’s feet were like Barbie’s. She’d worn heels for so long that she couldn’t stand flat-footed. I scanned her face for hints of unease, but she was hiding behind her surly smile.

“Call it what it is? Insurance money. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

I got up close to her; close enough to drip water on her dark red satin dress, leaving black splotches across her chest. I reached around her to grab a towel.

We locked eyes while I wrapped the towel around me. I was hoping for some speck of light, but her eyes were set and dark.

I walked away, my wet feet slapping loudly against the floor.

“I know a payoff from you when I see one, Diane,” I said.

“You might want to get your eyes checked, missy,” Diane said. “You don’t know-”

I shut the door behind me, leaving her in the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to hear the rest of her excuses. I shut myself in my old bedroom, and opened drawers to scavenge for left-behind clothes so I wouldn’t have to wear my orange gown again.

I opened and closed the top drawer of my dresser three times, like maybe if I looked one more time it wouldn’t be empty. My hands were shaking. This was not the first time I’d seen Diane throw money at a problem to make it go away. It was just the first time I’d ever been the problem.

Janie had a crush on the pool boy the summer she turned seventeen. Every time he showed up to clean the filters, Janie made it her business to be outside at the pool sunning herself in her classy black one-piece and movie star sunglasses. When the pool boy started flirting back, Diane was furious. “I don’t pay that boy to make attempts at impregnating my teenage daughter,” she’d whispered sharply to my mother when she thought I was out of earshot. Even though the poor boy had done nothing more than smile and make small talk with Janie, Diane decided he had to go. On his next visit, Diane sent me down to the pool with an envelope for him, while Janie was in the bathroom applying sunscreen. I peeked in the envelope before I delivered it. There was a bank check for two hundred dollars, and a note written in Diane’s curvy script telling him that his services were no longer needed and any attempt to contact Jane would not be met kindly. We never heard from him again.

And, when my mother graduated from college with a degree in art education after years of night school, Diane gave her a congratulations card and a check that turned all the studying and homework she’d done into an exercise in futility. The bonus and the raise Diane gave her paid much more than teaching ever would.

“It doesn’t matter, Mom,” I told her. “Teachers make good money, right? We’ll be fine. We don’t need a big apartment.”

My mom looked broken. She sat there, tracing the letters as they went from blue to purple to red, spelling out
Natalie Mavis Leone
.

“You can’t buy her, Diane!” I’d yelled, thinking about all the times I’d watched my mother run out the door frantically, to try to make it to class on time after a full day of work, textbooks in one hand and the peanut butter sandwich she’d call dinner in the other. She’d been working to be an art teacher so hard for so long, and I hated that Diane was taking it away from her. “You can’t buy us.”

Diane was sitting at her makeup table, taking a drag of her cigarette. She talked without air. “Oh, I know, I’m such a horrible person, giving my head housekeeper a bonus and a raise like that.” She blew the smoke out after her words, and waved it away like I was just being silly.

“You can’t buy us,” I said again, since I couldn’t find a better argument.

“You don’t come cheap, Vannie,” Diane said, laughing. “No kid does.” She used the mirror to make eye contact with me while she pinned her hair up in a French twist. “You need food and clothes. Eventually, you’ll need to go out in the world and get a good job, and you can’t do that without going to college. Your mother can’t do all of that herself on an assistant art teacher’s salary.” She tucked a stray hair up and pinned it. “This is a good thing,” she said, smiling, like it was absurd for me to think otherwise. “This is a nice thing I’m doing.”

So my mother turned down her dream job at Rye Country Day School, and I went to the University of Rochester on a partial scholarship and a grant from the Driscoll Housekeeping Society.

I rounded up some grandma-cut cotton undies with yellowed elastic, a tattered gray sports bra, and a pair of brown- and-beige-striped socks with matching holes at the big toes. The closet was pretty much empty, with the exception of a pair of black stirrup pants hanging up, and a pair of jeans folded on the top shelf. I grabbed the jeans. They were from my short-lived, but memorable, badass phase in high school. They had a hole below the knee and another one under the butt that was loosely stitched with a black shoelace. I pulled them on. They were cold, and the seams creaked. They still fit, but they were much tighter across the hips than they used to be.

I left my bedroom out of necessity. I couldn’t find a shirt. The bathroom door was open. “Diane?”

No answer. Her coat wasn’t draped over the back of the couch anymore.

I went over to the kitchen window and saw Diane walking briskly toward the main house. Her camel-hair coat was open and billowing out behind her.

There was an envelope on the kitchen counter with
Savannah Leone
scrawled across it in Diane’s bold, curvy script. The back was sealed with a silver diamond-shaped sticker-an ornate
D
. I slid my finger along the envelope flap. The seal lifted but didn’t tear. Inside was a bank check for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.

I pulled the check out and looked at it. It was powder blue and water-marked, Manhattan Savings Bank printed in the upper left-hand corner like the framework of an old Roman palace. The check was made out to me, Savannah Marie Leone, in plain block carbon-transferred letters that went from blue to purple to red. There was no other name attached-no insurance company title, no trace of the Driscoll name.

I started to crumple the envelope up in my hand when I realized there was something else in it: a strip of paper folded up like an accordion. It was a photo booth strip of me at thirteen with big puffy bangs that had taken many turns around the curling iron and clouds of L.A. Looks hair spray to perfect. I had a mouthful of metal I was trying to hide. The first two pictures had my forced attempt at a mature and sexy nonsmile. The third was blurred. I was moving my head to look toward the curtain. In the fourth, my mouth was wide open, braces gleaming in the flash, eyes squinted shut with hysterical laughter.

“You better not be flashing your boobs in there, young lady!” Diane had yelled.

It was one of our first hooky- day shopping trips. Diane had never been in a photo booth before and there was one in the food court on the way to the ladies’ room.

She had been bitching that my insistence on drinking a large strawberry smoothie from Fruit & Co. and my greater insistence on not wetting my pants in the middle of the mall were making us late for meeting her personal shopper at Neiman Marcus.

“Van, I told you that a small was enough,” she said, from the stall next to me in the bathroom, where I heard her pee a long steady stream too. “We don’t have a lot of time, and I need a dress for the Neuberger gala this weekend,” she lectured, like I didn’t know why we were there or that we needed to get home before my mom noticed.

As we washed our hands, she shook her head and said, “You’re just like your mother. Drink and pee. Drink and pee.” She sighed and yanked paper towels out of the dispenser.

And I felt so awful, like I was ruining something that hadn’t even taken off yet. I’d annoyed her. I was some baby with a tiny bladder who was turning into an inconvenience. Maybe she wouldn’t take me again.

But as we walked back, she stopped for a second at the photo booth. She ran her hand along the curtain.

“I always wanted to do this when I was a kid,” she said.

“You’ve never been in a photo booth?” I asked. I loved the fact that I had and for that second it made me superior.

I pulled a wadded one-dollar bill out of my pocket, held it tightly from either end, and rubbed it up against the corner of the machine to straighten it out.

“Get in,” I said, feeding the bill into the slot. “Here’s your chance.”

She looked like she wasn’t going to go. The first shot clicked. I grabbed her purse and gave her a little shove.

The first picture on Diane’s strip was just the curtain. The second one was blurry, her hair falling in her face as she sat down. The third caught her trying to smooth her hair, but by the fourth, she was smiling wide and crossing her eyes. I loved that last picture of her, and I loved that I was the only person who knew it existed.

We’d traded strips. She made me pinkie-swear not to show the pictures to anyone. I got the feeling that she’d never made a pinkie swear before either.

I couldn’t believe she’d kept my strip all this time, maybe folded up in her purse the same way I kept hers.

I pulled the ends of the strip of me and straightened them out to see the whole series all at once.

My knees wobbled. I slid down and sat on the kitchen floor. She paid to keep us, back when my mom wanted to be a teacher. She paid us to stay and now she was paying me to leave. This was “stay away from my daughter’s husband” money. This was “start a new life for yourself and forget about Peter” money. This was “I’m done with you” money. She didn’t even want to keep my picture anymore.

The check with my name on it was thin, like onionskin. I closed my eyes and thought about how it would feel to rip it in tiny pieces and feed it to the garbage disposal, but I didn’t. I folded it up and tucked it in my purse. I fished through my purse and found the strip of Diane, folded up like an accordion, shoved in one of the credit card compartments of my wallet. I left it on the counter without taking one last peek of Diane crossing her eyes.