Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

I wondered if mortification qualified as an excuse for justifiable homicide.

Lacey said yes and no and please and thanks so much for the delicious and not at all overcooked and underseasoned food. Lacey said that small towns bred small-minded people and she was waging a one-woman war against shrinkage — two-woman now that she’d rallied me to her side. Lacey said she never accompanied her stepfather to church because religion was a destructive influence on impressionable masses and she refused to support any institution with a commitment to intellectual oppression, and when my mother, semiapostate granddaughter of a minister, suggested that it was the arrogant moral cowardice of youth that led us to dismiss things we didn’t understand, Lacey said, And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are , then said that accusing your enemies of ignorance was the coward’s way out of honest argument, which made my father laugh, at which point I began to seriously doubt whether any of us would make it out alive.

“So how did you two crazy kids meet?” Lacey asked. “You seem like the type to have a good story.” Which was how I knew that Lacey, too, sensed things were running off the rails, because if there was anything my mother didn’t seem like, it was the type with a good story.

Except that, of course, she did have one — and it was this one. Love at first sight, a story I’d always loved to hear, less because of the details than because of the way they liked to tell it together, and the way they looked at each other when they did, as if they were suddenly remembering that this was a life they’d chosen.

My mother smiled. “It was shortly after college, and I was filling in, temporarily, at a subsidiary of my employer, an auto repair facility in town.”

This was Julia Dexter — speak for dropping out of college when the financial aid ran dry and taking a crap paper-shuffling job that was supposed to last a summer, not a lifetime. My mother applied the same cardinal rule to autobiography she did to interior design: Accentuate the positive and hang a curtain over everything else.

“It had been, to say the least, an unpleasant afternoon. I was looking forward to locking the doors and finishing my book in peace, when in strolls a gang of hooligans, smelling like an ashtray and dressed like they thought they were Bruce Springsteen.” She said it fondly, as she always did. “Your father was wearing this silly grin. .”

Here, always, she paused, so my father could jump in to say he was wasted, and she would then clarify that he wasn’t driving drunk, of course, his friend Todd was at the wheel, a teetotaler Christian they’d only befriended because he was always willing to drive. This time, though, my father said nothing.

She finished the story herself, more quickly than usual. “They’d gotten a flat tire on their way to a party, and as you can imagine, they were in quite a mood. All of them making stupid jokes, showing off for me, not even because they cared but because I was the only girl in sight and this, apparently, was their biological imperative.”

Let that be a lesson to you, kid , my father usually said, but mercifully not this time.

“All of them but Hannah’s father. He was the quiet one, that’s what I noticed first. That he wasn’t a fool, or at least hadn’t proven himself one yet. Then he noticed I was reading Vonnegut, and he pulled a folded paperback out of his coat pocket. Would you believe what it was?”

“Same book?” Lacey asked.

“Same exact book.”

This was the part of the story I loved best, the part I wanted Lacey to hear: That their meeting had been fated. That there was something special about them after all and, by extension, about me.

“Well, his friends went off to their party, but Jimmy stayed where he was, somehow talked me into closing early. We spent the night on the roof, talking about Vonnegut and showing each other the constellations, neither of us wanting to admit we were just making them up as we went along. And then, at the perfect moment, sun rising over Battle Creek. .”

“He kissed you?” Lacey guessed.

“You’d think! And, I’ll admit, so did I. But instead he only walked me home, shook my hand, and that was it. I waited two days for him to call. When he didn’t, I took myself over to the bookstore where he worked, and said, ‘You forgot something.’ Then I kissed him.”

“ Nice ,” Lacey said, then shot me a look saying, Possible your mom is cool, too?

“That was when he started calling me Hot Lips,” she added, a detail I found gruesomely embarrassing, but also perfect. “It took me years to train him out of it.”

“Of course, you can guess why I didn’t call,” my father said, and my ears perked up. This was a coda I’d never heard before.

My mother lost the dreamy smile. “ James. ”

“I was so drunk that by morning I’d forgotten the whole thing,” my father said. “Imagine my surprise when some girl shows up claiming to know me, then kisses me before I can tell her any different. I only called her Hot Lips because I’d forgotten her name!”

“James,” she said again, over his laughter. Then, just like she’d said to me, but in a very different voice, “Stop showing off.”

It wasn’t until she said it that I understood it was true.

My father grinned like he’d gotten away with something, and my mother stood, saying she’d forgotten she had to take a work call. “It was very nice to meet you, Lacey.”

I waited for my father to follow her out; he didn’t.

“What about your parents, Lacey?” he said, like he hadn’t noticed the door to the torture chamber had been unlocked and we were all free to slip loose our chains and get the hell out.

“Don’t you think we’ve had enough interrogation for one day?” I said.

“Chill out, Dex.” Lacey tapped her nails on the side of her glass, then skimmed a finger around the rim until it whined.

She never talked to me about her parents, or anything else from the time before we’d met. I didn’t mind. I liked imagining the past, the before-us, as a void, as if there had been no Lacey-before-Dex as much as there’d been no Dex-before-Lacey. I knew she’d grown up in New Jersey, nearish the ocean but not near enough; I knew she had a stepfather she called the Bastard and a father she’d liked better who was, in some vague but permanent way, gone; I knew we were better together than we were alone, and better still than everyone else, and that was enough.

“My dad took off when I was a kid,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since.”

“I’m sorry,” my father said. I said nothing, because what could I? “That’s an asshole move.”

Lacey raised her eyebrows at his word choice, then shrugged. “I’m thinking he’s a pirate. Or a bank robber. Or maybe one of those sixties hippie terrorists who had to go on the run. I could get behind that. Or, you know, he’s your typical deadbeat who chose his dick over his daughter and started up a new family on the other side of town.” She laughed, hard and insistently, and I tried not to wither and die just because she’d said the word dick with my father in the room. “Jesus, your faces! It’s no big deal. My mom’s got herself a shiny new husband and a baby to match. Fresh start, she says — best thing that ever happened to her. Of course, a real fresh start would slice me out of the picture, too, but life’s a compromise, right?”

I’d figured on the absent father. I knew about the Bastard. But not the baby. She’d never said anything about that.

“I’m sorry,” my father said again.

“She just told you it’s no big deal,” I said, because I had to say something.