Chapter 12: Twenty-Four

I turned twenty-four on a Thursday in March, in a kitchen in Glendale with an orange tree outside the window.

Five of us were squeezed around a table meant for four.

It was the first birthday I had ever spent where nobody had been told what to wear.

Beck's mother was seventy and five feet tall, a retired nurse who ran her house like a ward.

She had met me at the door by looking me over from my shoes to my hair.

"You're thin," she said.

"Mom," Beck said.

"She's thin. Sit down, honey. I made enough for a battalion."

She had.

There was roast chicken, three kinds of potatoes, a salad nobody touched and a pie from a bakery she'd decided to be ashamed of.

My roommate got through two glasses of wine.

Then she started telling the story of the day I tried to cut my own bangs with kitchen scissors.

"She said, 'It's a creative choice.'"

"It was," I said.

"It was a crime."

The old assistant had met Beck's mother in the hallway fifteen minutes earlier and they'd discovered a shared hatred of the same card game.

They were now playing it at the end of the table, in grim silence, for matchsticks.

"You cheated," she said.

"Madam, I have never cheated at anything."

"You hid a jack," she said.

"It was already there."

I laughed until my ribs hurt.

I could not remember when I had last laughed that hard with food in my hands.

I was in a room where I didn't have to be useful.

Beck sat beside me, and his knee was against mine under the table.

Neither of us mentioned it.

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