The One That Got Away (13 page)

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Well, I don’t blame you. This place is awesome.”

He took another bite, sending rice and salsa down his shirt, across his paper-lined basket, and dangerously close to the large, burly man beside him.

Alex wiped up the drippings and told him, “Don’t mind me. I just got out of prison.” The guy laughed and I could see that it pleased him.

God, he’s cute,
I thought. Even while perched on a round metal stool, sipping diet lemonade out of a paper cup and making an absolute mess of himself. If voters knew this Alex—this funny, self-deprecating burrito lover—they couldn’t help but like him and accept him as one of their own. So what if he sometimes used words like “brilliant” and “vexing”? And that he dressed like Matt Lauer twenty-four hours a day?

He was more than that. Much more.

Even Frank had to agree that the Chipotle whistle-stop was a shrewd move. Alex had been relaxed and made some real connections, like his bearded tablemate, who, after discovering their mutual hatred of green peppers, had shaken his hand and told him, “Good luck, bro.” On the car ride to the next event, I made sure to let Frank know how many hands Alex had shaken—more than two hundred!—and how cool it had been when the manager let him come behind the counter to try his hand at burrito folding.

But Frank acted dismissive, droning on about how much more
work we had to do. I was beginning to understand that Frank was a bit of a taskmaster, while Alex could be more loose. Which was probably what made them such a good team.

The next event had Alex serving as moderator for a mock debate about gun control at South Westbrook High School. After that, he would stay and speak to members of the PTA at their afternoon meeting. It was a good idea: South Westbrook was an enormous 1950s-era brick public high school, with a student body of twenty-five hundred from the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods. Its sprawling campus felt more like a small college, with a gym, classroom buildings, and a huge new theater.

Here, Alex didn’t seem nervous at all; he came alive interacting with the students, listening intently as they awkwardly debated Second Amendment rights versus the threat of gun violence in a free society. When one girl froze, he walked up and whispered a joke. She laughed and was able to continue.

He was giving the debaters some tips when a long buzz sounded, and in an instant, the students were packed up and pushing for the door, then schlepping off toward buses, ten-speeds, and beat-up sedans. When they’d gone, I helped Frank and Calvin arrange chairs in a circle on the stage for the PTA, while Alex talked to a potential donor on the phone. Twenty or so women wandered in, and with their tied-back hair, exasperated expressions, and Big Gulps, I felt at home.

Strangely, though, not one woman spoke to me. And when I did catch someone’s eye or attempted to introduce myself, I received only a quick, grim smile. In my tight-fitting Calvin Klein wool suit and high-heel Altuzarra booties, I was out of the club.

Eventually, they settled into metal chairs, like an Arthurian council in mom jeans. Alex opened with a five-minute overview of his platform, then took questions. Hands shot up all around and several women started talking at once, so he pointed at a middle-aged
brunette to begin. I thought she would ask about schools or health care, but she asked about Pakistani militants.

Another mother asked about his stance on the two-week waiting period to own guns. Another peppered Alex about tort reform. And yet another asked what Alex could do to protect her husband’s solar-powered factory job now that the governor had repealed the three percent “Wind, Solar, and Geothermal” incentive.

Wow. These women were hard-core. I was ashamed to admit it, but I thought they would ask about “women’s issues” like education and health care. But they knew everything about everything, even the most confusing amendments and the most obscure foreign policies. I made a mental note to start reading the paper more.

In return, Alex gave them specifics, discussing policy, legislation, and his beliefs in detail. As he paced back and forth, he cited statistics and personal stories and even conceded when one woman’s argument topped his own. When he spoke about crime, a subject he knew well, he sat down and told an anecdote about why he became a district attorney. A childhood friend of his had lost his only brother in a botched convenience store robbery, and the day after the funeral Alex changed his major from business to prelaw. If the moms weren’t on the Alex train before, they were on board now.

I left them there—discussing alternative energy sources—and slipped out to check on the kids. Outside, the crisp fall air felt good after a day spent indoors.

May picked up the house line after six rings.

“Hi, May, just checking in,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It’s Mrs. van Holt. Just checking on the kids.”

“Oh.”

“Did Sam—excuse me—Van have a good morning?”

“Yes.”

“Did he eat a good breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“Did he have any outdoor time?”

“Yes.”

Will you please stop yessing me to death and tell me something specific about my son’s day?
I wanted to scream at her. May never seemed to volunteer any more info than the bare minimum, in the fewest possible syllables. I knew it wasn’t a language barrier; her English was really good. This morning, she’d read Gloria a page of Rainbow Loom instructions without hesitation and in the woven tote bag she brought each day I glimpsed a thick textbook on applied calculus and a copy of the latest
Atlantic Monthly
. I also heard her tell Alex a dirty joke at breakfast. Perhaps she only became an introvert around Mrs. van Holt.

“Well, kiss him for me when he wakes up, and we’ll see everyone when we get home. Probably five thirty or six. Seven at the latest.”

“Yes.”

I took my time going back into the auditorium, wanting a few moments away from policy talk. I pulled my jacket tighter and strolled along the covered walkways, painted with various iterations of Buster the bulldog, the school’s mascot. I knew Buster well: my high school tennis team got crushed by the Lady Bulldogs every year.

I found a courtyard filled with picnic tables and trash cans full of the remnants of today’s lunch. Dropping down to a bench, I parked my leather tote beside me and kicked off my booties. I tucked my sore feet up under me and took a deep breath.

A young girl walked by, her head down and shoulders hunched under the weight of her overstuffed backpack. She wore too-short, too-blue jeans and a dowdy, plain sweatshirt, her face hidden by glasses and long, stringy hair. Her lone attempt at style—red-and-green bowling shoes—backfired horribly, making her look even younger and gawkier, instead of the subversive coolness I knew she
was after. With her eyes downcast, I could tell she was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, even here, with only a stranger watching.

I thought of myself at that age and remembered my own teenage self-consciousness and my constant slouch to hide my height. I thought of my mother too, who would chide me for not standing up straight and, even worse, for my wanting to be like everyone else. Roberta was a woman who lived to stand out, to be noticed.

But she also liked that I was smart and never encouraged me to abandon my studies to be cool or popular. She admired people who knew Latin and calculus and read something other than celebrity biographies and horoscopes. She liked that I always had my nose in a book, even at the expense of a prom date. And in fact, that’s why we lived in Tallymore. It may have been a sad little low-rent village tucked between fancier neighborhoods, but it fell squarely in the Lower Merion School District, one of the best in the country.

Life with Roberta was a constant battle. She embarrassed me with her tight outfits, her loud jokes, and her complete lack of subtlety. I avoided mentioning or including her as much as possible, trying hard to hide the fact that I didn’t have a father and that we lived in an apartment. I wanted to fit in with the popular girls, the pretty, bubbly ones who lived in old stone colonials, played field hockey, and rode horses, and whose dads left each day in suits, hot coffee steaming from law firm–logoed mugs.

Despite Roberta’s urging, I never invited girls back to our place for sleepovers. I discouraged my mother from attending tennis matches and cello recitals, even stooping so low as to giving her the wrong times. And when Joshua Freeman was making fun of the lady in the grocery cart ads wearing a short, tight tennis dress and proclaiming herself as the “Main Line’s Real Estate Ace,” I laughed along with the crowd, too ashamed to admit that not only did I know her; I was her only child.

As a mother myself now, I wasn’t proud of the way I had acted, but I understood: To a gawky, smart kid with borderline social skills, a suspect wardrobe, and a 34A bra size, having a mom like Roberta was one liability too many. There were only so many aberrations the popular kids could ignore.

So it was with sheer terror that I found out days before the senior trip that Roberta had signed up to be a chaperone.

“You hate flying, you hate humidity, and you hate mosquitoes,” I screamed at her one afternoon in our apartment’s galley kitchen, not caring if the tenants who lived below us could hear. “Why are you doing this?”

“Principal Myrtle asked for chaperones,” she replied calmly, pouring herself some iced tea, then taking a sip. “And since I’ve never done much for your school, I figured my number was up.”

“Well, call him back and tell him you can’t,” I pleaded, following her into the living room, with its white wicker couch and conch-shell-strewn coffee table. “Besides, I really don’t think they’ll need you. I heard they have enough chaperones.”

But she wasn’t buying it, waving me away with her hand and plopping onto the couch. I switched tactics, this time going with the brutal truth.

I sat down beside her, my hands in my lap. “Mom, I really don’t want you to go.”

“I can see that, Abigail,” she said, setting down her tea and grabbing the
TV Guide
. “But I already committed. So deal with it.”

This prompted a week-long sulk, until one night after a conversation-free dinner, she asked, “What’s the big deal, baby? It will be fun. I
promise
I won’t embarrass you.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, then stormed out of the room.

Scheduled for fall break of my senior year, the trip was a seven-day “working vacation” to Costa Rica to help build a one-room schoolhouse
in a small village near Puerto Limón. I had worked the entire summer at our local grocery store in order to afford the $450 fee and was looking forward to my first time out of the country. The farthest away from home I had ever been was to visit Grandma Gloria in Virginia Beach, and that was only for a long weekend, my mom and her mom in agreement that four days together was plenty of intergenerational bonding.

And now Roberta was going to ruin my trip by chaperoning. I continued doing everything I could to dissuade her—the silent treatment, tears, bribery—but she had made up her mind. She was going.

So we went. And for the first six days, the trip turned out to be pretty uneventful. Roberta kept her promise, sticking mostly to the other chaperones, biting her tongue, and pretending to not mind what the humidity was doing to her hair. Her outfits were as demure as the heat would allow; it was the first time I’d ever seen her wear a one-piece swimsuit. She also didn’t try to hang out with us or pretend she was a teenager, like some of the other parents with their bad jokes and dated references. She played the part of den mother and grown-up convincingly—keeping a watchful eye on us, but a healthy distance too.

Despite the differences in social status of the students—soccer players, theater geeks, cheerleaders, art-school wannabes, and cliqueless kids like me—everyone seemed to be getting along. Maybe it was living among the Costa Rican villagers, who lived so simply, or the incredibly hard work, or simply being two thousand miles from school, but the artificial walls that normally kept us confined came crumbling down, leaving room for real friendships to bloom. And my mother, not usually one for physical labor, seemed to be enjoying herself too, hammering roofing nails by day and leading lantern-lit games of charades at night. I didn’t dare tell her, but I was almost happy she was there.

And then, on the last night—disaster.

A group of adult chaperones decided to celebrate having survived the week without losing any kids to snakebites or human trafficking. They planned a night out at one of the local cantinas, leaving us with Principal Myrtle and his wife. They thought they made plans stealthily, but one of my classmates, felled by an attack of Montezuma’s revenge and camping out in the latrine, overheard their plans, then generously relayed them. It was the perfect time for an illicit outing.

A few ringleaders spread the word and collected money for a couple of fifths of
guaro
, the sweet Costa Rican moonshine we saw advertised everywhere. Feeling emboldened by the new friendships and wanting to impress, I agreed to go too.

We waited until ten thirty, after Principal Myrtle completed his final cabin check, then slipped out of the concrete windows like teenage commandoes. There were just seven of us: five boys and only two girls, me and head cheerleader Melanie McCarthy. We tiptoed quietly behind the cabins and down the jungle-lined path to the village, our footsteps muffled by a chorus of insects.

In the small “downtown,” a few locals were out enjoying their Friday night, strolling along wide dirt streets, chattering with neighbors. Occasionally, a motorbike or doorless minivan would bounce by, leaving a flutter of angry chickens in its wake. My friends and I found an abandoned stone courtyard that overlooked the water, sat down, and took turns passing the bottle. A cute soccer player sat next to me, eventually putting his arm around my waist. A welcome breeze blew in from the Caribbean Sea, making the humidity bearable and chasing away the bugs.

The time ticked by lazily as we laughed and talked and teased one another, our voices getting louder as the alcohol dimmed our senses. When the two bottles began to get low, and not one of us as drunk as we’d hoped, we headed toward the main part of town, searching for a shop still open.