have in this world.
Take Gwen. She isn’t as pretty as McKey, but she has this saucer-eyed, you’re-so-wonderful thing going on, which boys ate up sideways with a spoon when they were kids. To give her credit, she seemed to come by it naturally, and she didn’t use it only on boys. She cast those looks on her parents, on McKey when they first met, eventually on Sean, although never on Tim, not really, and definitely not on Go-Go. The youngest Halloran always made Gwen a little nervous, although perhaps that was her parents, talking through her, especially Tally Robison. Everyone thought Gwen’s mom was so saintly, especially after she died. A well-timed death could make a saint out of anyone, as McKey would have reminded the others if they were in touch. But McKey, then Mickey, saw Tally Robison differently. Oh, yes, she was kind to Mickey, sitting down with her in the kitchen in the afternoon, waiting for Gwen to return from school, feeding Mickey the treats that Gwen had chosen for her. But Mickey quickly realized that Mrs. Robison was being kind, and there is no real kindness in obvious magnanimity. Oh, wasn’t she the bighearted grand lady, dispensing candy and cookies and Hi-C to the poor little girl who lived in Purnell Village, with her waitress mother and her not-quite-stepfather. Wasn’t she enlightened? Wasn’t she democratic?
But if an eleven-year-old girl could figure that out, imagine what the rest of the world intuited. They saw Mickey being pitied, that was what, which wasn’t fair at all. Mickey’s mother might have been a little on the trashy side, but she was pretty steady for a divorced woman who needed a man around. And Rick, the stepfather of record for most of those years, was a good guy. Too good for her mother. He was sincerely kind to Mickey, not fake kind, and when baby Joey arrived, he did what he could to keep her from feeling left out. If anything, he went out of his way to make her feel even more like his daughter. Even after he left, he stayed in touch.
Then, when Mickey was going on nineteen and Rick long gone, an attorney had contacted her. “About custody,” he said, and at first Mickey had this crazy feeling that Rick wanted to adopt her all these years later, make official the status he had sworn was hers all along. Rick had done okay for himself, maybe there was some money coming to her.
It turned out that Rick had hired the attorney because Rita was now saying that Joey wasn’t his and he was trying to figure out if he could recoup the child support he had been paying her. Legally, the case was kind of interesting, sort of like the Solomon story in the Bible, only instead of offering up a baby that would be sliced in half, it was an all-or-nothing decision about the relationship between Rick and Joey. Rick could have a court establish he was no longer Joey’s father and stop paying child support, although he would have a hell of a time getting back what he had paid in. But if he did that, he would have to abandon the relationship, too. It was real fucked-up stuff. Rick, of course, did the right thing. He decided he didn’t care what the blood test said. He was Joey’s father and he would continue to be, even if that meant paying support to a kid that he seldom got to see. Her scheming skank of a mother really played that poor guy.
She catches a man coming out of the lavatory, the smell of smoke clearly on him. She pulls him aside. He looks so furtive and guilty that she doesn’t have the resolve to write him up, but she explains to him in an urgent, intimate whisper that she’s doing him a favor, that he could be flagged in the reservation system if she reported the infraction as required.
His furtive look switches to flirtatious. Great, now he thinks she’s hot for him because she cut him a break, when it was merely her generosity toward her mother overflowing into the world. She goes back to the galley, tells a surprised Wendy that she will take over denture duty, which is still under way, if Wendy will help her keep her distance from Mr. Not-So-Smoking-Hot.
The thing is, she felt kindly toward her outlaw smoker because his face reminded her of Sean’s this morning. Not in its particulars, but in the emotions. She had planned to keep Sean in suspense about the night before, but he looked so guilty that she couldn’t bear to goad him. She thought, hoped, it might happen, but even as she was piloting him up the stairs, she realized he would be no good to her. A shame. She always had a crush on him. She was surprised, in fact, when he chose Gwen to be his girlfriend, because she assumed he was hers for the taking should she decide she wanted him. She always chalked his relationship with Gwen up to the circumstances, which had been so very
Yet Sean and Gwen didn’t even make it to Christmas of that year as a couple. And Mickey was
Still, she wishes she had found a way to sleep with Sean, drunk as he was. Just the once. She bets she’s better than Gwen, despite Gwen’s success rate at landing impressive husbands. Of course, the first one turned out to be a faggot, and McKey has a feeling that even Dr. Wonderful, who put in a brief appearance at the reception after the funeral, isn’t quite the prize he seems. They never are. Sean, however-Sean tempts her, if only because he belongs to someone else. The thing she can’t work out is whether she wants to steal him from his wife or from Gwen.
Chapter Twelve
I n the spring of the year she would turn fourteen, Gwen did a very odd thing: she asked her parents to take her to visit a classmate, Chloe, who had been stricken with mononucleosis. That was not the weird part, although the two were more friendly than friends, but their school was small enough that Gwen’s parents did not question her suddenly fervent desire to visit this particular girl. No, the weird part was when Gwen, after spending a polite twenty minutes chatting with Chloe and catching her up on class gossip, asked to use her bathroom and then stuck Chloe’s toothbrush in her mouth, praying that there were still germs on it and she, too, would get mono. We all found out, too, because Gwen told Mickey and Mickey told Tim, who told Sean and Go-Go.
It was an article of faith at the time that mono was a good way to get skinny. We all knew some girl who had lost weight that way. Chloe was already skinny, but another girl at the Park School had caught the so-called kissing disease and appeared six weeks later, suddenly slender, her eyes now huge in her face, cheekbones and collarbones sharp. Gwen was desperate for a similar transformation, but her parents refused to let her diet. That is-they would not let her try Scarsdale, very trendy at the time, or any of the strict, rigid diets that approached religions, with their arbitrary lists of things allowed and things forbidden. The Robisons were happy to make healthy meals for her, to substitute fruit for dessert, to fill the refrigerator with cut-up carrots and celery and hummus, quite avant-garde at the time. Go-Go took a mouthful once and spat it out on the refrigerator door. But Gwen was not allowed to diet. Her mother said that Gwen would come into her height, and the pounds would fall away. Miller and Fiona had gone through similar transformations. Gwen, however, did not believe Tally Robison. She was desperate for her own cure, and Chloe’s toothbrush was her best bet.
Yet mono never did come for Gwen. Instead, things happened as her mother had prophesied. She added three inches to her height in three months, and what had been an extra fifteen pounds became just right. Her mother let her buy new clothes, dropping her off at the mall with an allowance and no rules. Gwen bought gauzy, “ethnic”
