Emergency Contact(88)

Celeste reached out to touch her hand. Penny let her and her anger deflated. Finally, she wept.

“I did my goddamned best,” Celeste said.

“Do you know how terrifying it is to be your kid?” Penny bawled. “I don’t know if you’re going to make rent. Or if you’re going to get murdered by some stranger that you’re being way too nice to. I had to be the adult. I had to fend for myself and for you. It was so stressful all the time. Why do you think I had an ulcer in middle school?”

“Oh, honey.” Celeste pulled her in for a hug. “Penny, at a certain point I don’t know how much of that’s me and how much of it’s you.” She rocked her daughter. “You were an intense kid. So smart and thoughtful and so far into your own head. During your first week of school I got a note from your art teacher saying you had an anxiety attack when you couldn’t finish your drawing.

“I said to myself, man, this kid has to lighten up. Only I didn’t know how to make you do that. The thing is, being your mom feels an awful lot like having a roommate move in. Ever since you were an infant, you were fully formed in what you liked and didn’t and what you wanted to spend your days doing. Most of the time it had nothing to do with me and I had to get over that.”

“Well, not everyone can be a hippie-dippy free-flow freak show,” Penny lamented. “Do you know how it is to live inside my head? Do you know how much worry I carry around? The amount of math I’m constantly doing to make sure that we’ll stay alive and be safe?”

“You know you’re still alive, right?” Celeste said, clutching Penny’s shoulders. “That I kept you alive even when you were a baby and hadn’t yet developed these incredible instincts that you think saved you these past years and this magical computer brain of yours? It’s a team effort, Penny. It has been since the start.”

Penny’s sinuses stung. The pressurized anger that had built up at the bottom of her heart to push up against the backs of her eyeballs was finally out. Her electrolytes would be shot when this was over.

“You’re not some miracle of science, Penny,” said Celeste. “You have to give me some credit.” Celeste continued to cradle her. “And look at us. We’re fine. We’re a little messy, but we’re so great.”

With Celeste’s smeared makeup, she resembled a watercolor. Penny could feel her own heartbeat in her eyes.

“No, we’re not,” moaned Penny. “I don’t have anyone other than you.”

Her mother sighed. “That’s your favorite complaint,” she said. “Even when you were teeny-tiny, you moaned that you didn’t have any friends.”

Celeste rocked her slightly. “But there were loads of kids who wanted to be your friend that you disqualified for one reason or another. Remember Allison Spector? In second grade you were friends, and then one day you dismissed her after you decided she was boring.”

“Yeah,” breathed Penny. “She was painfully not smart.”

Celeste laughed. “I bet you have a lot of people,” she said. “You’ve got to understand that not everybody’s going to be exactly your kind of person. They’re not going to be completely satisfactory or meet your myriad qualifications.”

Penny sighed. Celeste was right. She thought about what Mallory said about how her mom would feel if she’d heard the things she’d said about her. If Jude or Mallory heard her disavow their friendship they’d be hurt. Sam too.

Ugh. Sam.

“You’re a particular petunia,” she said. “And that’s okay. It’s good to have high standards. I worry because you hold yourself against these standards too. You’re way too hard on yourself. This analysis and thinking and plotting and figuring out, it’s stopping you from living your life. Just be, Penny. Don’t push people away.”

“I think I pushed someone away,” said Penny. “But it wasn’t on purpose.”

“Was he cute?”

Penny rolled her eyes. “Mom.”

Celeste nudged her daughter in the ribs. “Well, was he?”

Penny laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “You’ve met him—Sam.”

“The guy from the coffee shop?”

Penny nodded.

“Stop. The one with the tattoos?”

Penny nodded again.

“Are you on birth control?”

“What? Mom. We’re not sleeping together. I’m in love with him.”

“Oh, thank God, because, Penny, that isn’t a boy. That’s an actual man.”

“Mom seriously, stop,” said Penny. They sat on her bed. Her pillows were so soft and enticing.

Celeste sighed. It had been a long night for both of them.

“Mom?”

“Yes, baby?”

Penny took a deep breath. “How do you know if you’re in love?” Penny snuck a peek at her mom and could practically hear the AWWWWWWW in her head and Care Bear stares flying out of her eyes.

“Okay, hmm . . .” Her mother tightened her embrace. “You know how I know?”

If there was anything Celeste was good for, it was exactly this.

“I know I love someone when I can’t remember what they look like in any real way. I can never seem to recall whether they’re handsome or ugly or if other people think they’re cute. All I know is that when I’m not with them and I think about them, where their face should be is this big cloud of good feelings and affection.”