Good for You: A Novel (5)

“Us? You don’t need to do anything.” What was it about her mother that made Aly revert to the absolute worst version of her teenage self? She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then said coolly, “It’s my problem, and I’ll deal with it.”

“You’ve been living in a city for too long, Miss Fancy Pants. Because where we come from, having an entire house in your name is hardly a problem. And it’s almost been a year.”

Aly wondered if Cindy had been drinking. She’d allegedly been sober for a while now, but as the years had gone by she’d gotten better at disguising her relapses, and sometimes the only way to know for sure was to wait and see if she’d pass out midsentence.

“Actually, eight months and twenty-seven days,” Aly said, gazing out her office’s one small window, which looked out at an airshaft. Although it was no corner office, it was better than where most of the other editors sat—a cube city lit with overhead fluorescents and completely devoid of sunlight, practically a prison—but Aly’s office was still so dark. “Who’s counting, though, right?”

“Don’t be like that. If you’re not going to put the house on the market, I’d like to move in there.”

“I am putting it on the market in the fall, after I get through the busy season at the magazine. And for the record, you have a home, Mom.” Cindy had bought a tiny bungalow just outside of Grand Rapids a few years earlier. Aly was pretty sure Luke had helped her buy it—and by helped, she meant bought it for her—but he’d never fessed up.

And now Cindy wanted his home. The one that had technically become Aly’s.

“Things with Billy aren’t going so good,” Cindy said quietly.

Billy was her sometime boyfriend. Unfortunately, they were happiest together when they were both off the wagon. So maybe she was sober.

“Yet the house that you and Billy live in belongs to you. Unless you signed the deed over to him in some misguided romantic overture?”

“No, Allegra. I did not. And don’t use your big words on me.”

“I’ve asked you a million times,” Aly said through gritted teeth. “Please. Don’t call me Allegra.”

“It’s on your birth certificate.”

“It’s an allergy medication.” It was also the name of the person best known for the bruises she used to show up with at school before Luke ran their father out of town. She’d officially switched to Aly, which Luke had called her since she was little, the minute she’d arrived in New York as an ambitious twenty-two-year-old, ready to forget almost everything that had come before that.

“Well, it wasn’t a pill when you decided to welcome yourself into the world. Your brother—”

Aly’s brother was dead. And the last person she wanted to discuss him with was their mother. “I’m going to stop you right there,” she interjected.

Cindy exhaled loudly. “I’ve been trying to pin you down about this for months now.”

Admittedly, she had been trying to bring it up for a while. But Aly had no legal or ethical obligation to speak with her about it. And she’d decided not to deal with the issue of Luke’s house until a full year had passed.

Just then James appeared in the doorway to her office. Thank goodness, she thought, waving him in. Now she didn’t have to lie to get off the phone. Anyway, she wanted to tell him that she’d already executed their plan. “I’ll call you later,” she told Cindy, and hung up.

“Am I ever glad to see you,” she said as James strode toward her desk. Her stomach chose that particular moment to growl loudly, reminding her that she’d now missed not one, but two meals. That wasn’t unusual—sometimes Aly got so busy that she ended up eating 90 percent of her daily calories when she got home at night (which definitely broke all the All Good rules). But forgetting that she hadn’t eaten was strange. Obviously, her mind was a mess.

“Sorry about that—never did make it to lunch,” she said, pointing to her stomach as she smiled sheepishly.

But James barely returned her smile, and Linda from Human Resources had just walked in behind him. They stood in front of Aly’s desk, even though there were two perfectly comfortable Ikea chairs they could have sat in, and Linda held a manila folder that struck Aly as highly suspicious.

She suddenly regretted getting off the phone with her mother. Which was how she knew something was seriously wrong.

“About lunch,” said James softly. “Aly, we need to talk.”





FOUR


“Seth? Seth, is that you?”

Aly was still crying hard enough that she couldn’t really make out the figure that had just walked in the apartment, but it was safe to assume it was her boyfriend of three years. After all, no one else had a key. But why wasn’t he calling out to her? Didn’t he see that she was in distress?

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and slowly rose from the sofa, where she’d been semicomatose for the past several hours. “Seth?”

“I’m here,” he said from the kitchen. Their Gramercy Park one-bedroom was small by most standards but practically palatial compared to the closet-sized Chinatown studio Aly’d lived in before. She loved being a stone’s throw from Union Square. She’d been instantly smitten by the farmers’ market and Union Square Park when she’d first visited on a trip to the city during college. Now she lived just next door.