Emergency Contact(47)

“There wasn’t enough space to keep the boxes inside,” he continued. “She’d stacked some outside under a tarp. It was demented. I couldn’t stop yelling. I wanted to shake her or push her. I was so drunk and so mad. . . .” Tears dampened his pillow.

“Did you shake her?”

“No.”

“Did you push her?”

Sam wiped his nose on his shirt.

“No. I thought for a second I was going to hurt her though. It’s why I left. I haven’t spoken to her since. Also, it’s why I don’t drink anymore. I don’t drink anymore, at least not really,” he added, thinking about Lorraine and their last hurrah.

Sam sat up, his nose was blocked. Shit.

He’d called her to cheer her up and now he was crying. Penny was like Sodium Pentothal to the jugular. He couldn’t stop telling her his worst truths. It was horrifying.

Penny was silent.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Sam felt depleted. Ragged.

“Why?”

“I don’t know where that came from. I called to see if you were okay.” He laughed dryly. “I genuinely thought I was going to tell you something profound and reassuring about the human condition or something. What a spaz, right?”

“We’re all spazzes.”

Sam nodded glumly. Uuuuuuuugh. He wanted to die of embarrassment.

“You probably needed to tell someone for a while, and I’m glad it was me. And, whatever, maybe you were right.”

“About what?”

“This is probably how emergency contacts work. You say something to your person before you go nuts and blow a gasket.”

“God forbid anyone has a panic attack,” he said.

She laughed. “Exactly.”

“So . . .”

“So.”

“As I was saying . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

She laughed again. “Yes. Thank you for asking. Are you okay?”

“Me? I’m fucking fantastic.”

“You win, you know.”

“At being fantastic?”

“No. You won the mom-off this round.”

Sam laughed.





PENNY.


Phone calls. Who knew phone calls were so intense? Penny thought about what Sam had told her. About Brandi Rose. The trailer. Penny didn’t know anyone who had grown up in a trailer. It was clueless, but she’d assumed she and Celeste were on the poorer side of the spectrum. Where Penny wore her Koreanness and her weirdness on the outside, you’d never guess that Sam wasn’t in the same tax bracket as everyone else.

Sam trusted her. That was a big deal. Progress had been made. Not that she and Sam were trying to get anywhere specific. Or that phone calls necessarily led to hand-holding, which led to make-outs and dates and marriage and kids, but somewhere, somehow, a needle had been moved. Sam really trusted her, and she felt lucky for it.

They were getting closer. It was the best feeling in the world.

With Sam’s call, it was as if the best part of her day had already happened. As Penny showered, she wondered if her mother would see a change in her, if she appeared more worldly or something. Then again, Penny used to stare at her mom, silent-screaming about the bad things that had happened, and Celeste never got a clue.

She wiped down the foggy mirror. Penny never looked the way she thought she did in her head, like how your recorded voice sounds positively vile when you hear it out loud. She applied some of her mom’s lipstick and smiled as if she were posing for a picture. Was this her new life? Would she and Sam be calling each other now? She loved the interface—how they could tell each other anything on text, from silly trivial things to deep truths—and hoped that part would still happen. She’d bought an app that saved a copy of everything they’d said. Phone calls though . . . Oh man. They were something else. So heart-squishingly intimate. She could almost feel his breath when he laughed. Penny wished she could stay in that call forever.

“Is she tiny like you? Does she dress cool or super mommish?” Jude was dying to meet Celeste, so they rode the elevator down to the lobby together. It was a source of great curiosity that while Jude’s parents were over in California and Mallory’s mom had flown in twice from Chicago expressly to decorate her daughter’s dorm room, Penny’s mom, who at an hour away by car, remained a mystery.

Celeste was both easy and hard to explain. Penny thought about her first day of kindergarten. Even at a young age, she was mortified that her mom had required so much extra face time from her teacher, Ms. Esposito.

She recalled the way her teacher smiled with eyes widened over her mom’s shoulder at the other parents. The way that she—despite being younger than her—patted Celeste on the arm as she sniffled. None of the other parents were crying. Not to mention how Celeste had worn these completely incorrect tie-dyed tennis shorts and had dyed her socks to match. The worst was during recess when Penny saw her mom standing outside the school gates. Spying on her. She’d spotted her mom’s frothy permed hairdo crouching conspicuously behind the bus stop. At one point Celeste bought a Popsicle and sat on the bus bench to eat it, as if she’d forgotten what she was doing there in the first place.

“She’s fun,” said Penny. “We’re nothing alike. Everybody loves her.”