CHAPTER FIVE
There’s this throw rug of crushed cigarette butts back by the garbage bin, which Jenny doesn’t understand, because how hard is it to put your cancer stick out and take two steps and flick what’s left into the trash? Hundreds of flat cellulose cylinders with their ragged charred ends, like spent bullet casings, which, she muses as she takes another deep, unpleasant drag on her last Spirit, is totally apropos.
No, she’s not trying to quit. Yes, she knows it’s a disgusting habit that doesn’t even give her pleasure anymore.
What’s your fucking point?
A dolphin-gray Amazon Prime delivery van bounces down the alley that flanks the minimall, stirring up a miasma of Baltimore urban decay. The driver’s rosacea and aspirational neck beard are familiar to her from all his chummy banter across the barista bar: his name is Chet or maybe Chuck, skinny decaf butterscotch macchiato, no foam, no tip. Now he leers at her from the open side window as he drives past. Last week she complained to her manager about Chet’s relentless attempts to ask her out and got a lecture on customer primacy and a how-to on using her wit and charm to defuse uncomfortable interactions “before they start,” and while doing so perhaps she should upsell to the man the apricot scones that are always piling up because they arrive from the bakery rock hard. The manager concluded with a suggestion that Jenny not wear so much makeup. And a long-sleeve shirt would cover the dueling dragons that curl down around her upper arms.
He’s an asshole, sometimes.
She smokes, making the most of her illicit break to take out the garbage. Her phone chimes. Text from Jeremy. Her brother had his monthly lunch with their mom; no insight into the memory lapses. Because they both share the suspicion that she hasn’t actually seen a doctor, Jeremy was going to call the neurology clinic directly to find out if their mom made an appointment. Jenny was pretty sure it wasn’t going to get them anywhere. Her brother’s message confirms it: if they want to know about her private medical matters, the receptionist told him they should ask their mother directly.
Jenny sends a shrug emoji. Then the smiling pile of poo.
Texting her brother is so much better than talking to him, and this is why she invented the argument that she’s been able to string out for the past three months. Its catalyst was a typical Jeremy Troon harangue on how Jenny was pissing her life away on sybaritic indulgences in childish defiance of their mother’s stolid and cautious career path. This rapidly devolved into a shouting match in which Jenny accused her brother of feigning ADD in high school to buy more time for his SAT tests so he could get into Johns Hopkins, something she didn’t really believe but had always been jealous about because her own test anxiety had resulted in mediocre scores and, by this same theory, doomed her to the third-rate state school she’d dropped out of junior year. Jeremy countered with a dig about weed stealing her ambition. She insisted weed helped her anxiety and accused him of only dating sociopaths, citing Kimmy, then kicked him out and cut him off except for texting, which didn’t count as real conversation but enabled her to keep tabs on him since that was one thing she had promised her father before he’d died.
With her mother, the communication blackout has been longer than three months, and Jenny didn’t need to invent anything. The last time they were together was Jenny’s birthday, just the three of them. Her mother has made a point of mustering “the family” on special occasions for the past few years; Jenny finds this super ironic, considering that they’re all adults now and that her mother missed so many important family milestones back when they were important. When they were kids. Her kids.
They were never close, Jenny has decided, never had the mother-daughter thing Jenny assumed all her friends had. The lunches, the intimate girl talks, shopping for prom dresses, and sharing little secrets. Her grandfather once told her, in his blunt, declarative style, that the reason she didn’t get along with her mom was because they were so much alike. “Coupla ornery warrior princesses,” he growled. “Two peeves in a pod.”
She doesn’t believe that for a minute.
Their relationship got worse after her father died, when, as irony would have it, her mother began spending more time at home. The mom phase lasted fourteen uncomfortable months, and then Jeremy moved back from the dorm to be Jenny’s adult surrogate for the remainder of her high school while their mother (the professional Aubrey Sentro) went back out into the world of commerce and crisis and did whatever it was she did there.
On the one-year anniversary of Dennis Troon’s funeral, still grieving, Jenny slipped out with her friend Rachel and got her father’s portrait tattooed on her back, left shoulder. First ink. She didn’t tell her mother, and her mother didn’t notice the bandage that covered it for the first few days. But when Jenny finally uncovered and looked at it in the mirror, she was horrified at what she saw. Although she’d given the tattoo artist her favorite photograph of her father, what she discovered on her shoulder was some sort of black-and-green wolverine—not the X-Man, the animal, and badly drawn at that. So badly rendered that Jenny burst into tears seeing it, and her mother heard her and forced her way into the bathroom (how did she know how to jimmy the lock?) and thus discovered Jenny’s ugly secret.
Not that her mom was judgmental; she offered to take her daughter to have it removed. Jenny, however, in her grief and embarrassment, insisted that she didn’t want to lose it; she wanted it fixed. Which she now knows was impossible, but the reflexive willfulness she inherited from her mother caused her to dig in and refuse any help.
At least, she thinks, in every other way I’m nothing like her.
A couple of years later, stoned and moody after dropping out of college, she tried to have another artist turn it into a rose. Her brother says now it looks like a hallucination broccoli. And ever since, Jenny just doesn’t take her top off except when she’s alone, not even for sex, although that hasn’t been much of an issue. She’s told her few hookups she has a hideous scar from a childhood kitchen grease fire, and she used to hope they would think this was something her mother had done to her.
Lately, she’s just ashamed of the whole fiasco. And sometimes wishes her mom would bring it up and offer again to go with her to have it removed. Or does she not remember that?
Shayda bangs out of the back door and into the alley, dragging two black plastic twist tie trash bags and looking surprised to find Jenny already back here. “You on break?”
Jenny takes one final drag on her cigarette and mashes it out on the bottom of her shoe. “No. Why?”
“We’re short behind the register. And somebody just did an online order for, like, ten gazillion variations on venti mocha frozen frappe shit.” Shayda takes some scarlet lipstick from her pocket and applies it blind, like a slash, to her mouth.
Jenny flicks her cigarette butt onto the ground and helps heave the trash into the bin. One of the bags splits open on a sharp metal flange and spills half its contents back out onto the pavement. “Dammit.”
The Amazon van rolls back up the alley, passing them, slowing to a crawl, Chet’s face in shadow in the driver’s side away from them, but his eyes are turned this way and bright, like they’re backlit. “Hey, ladies.”
“Ew. I know that guy.”