Last Breath (The Good Daughter 0.5)(6)

Before Charlie could answer, Flora left the bathroom.

“What was that about?” Belinda asked.

Charlie opened her mouth to explain, but she got stuck on Flora’s desperate tone, her insistence that what Charlie was thinking was not what was actually happening. But what if it was? If the girl was being abused by her grandfather, that changed everything.

“Charlie?” Belinda asked. “What’s up? Why are you hiding out in here?”

“I’m not hiding, I was—”

“Did you throw up?”

Charlie could only concentrate on one thing at a time. “Did you make that frosting from scratch?”

“Don’t be stupid.” Belinda squinted her eyes, as if Charlie was an abstract painting. “Your boobs look bigger.”

“I thought your sorority taught you how to deal with those feelings.”

“Shut up,” Belinda said. “Are you pregnant?”

“Very funny.” The only religious thing in Charlie’s life was the schedule by which she took her birth control pills. “I’ve been spotting for two days. I’m cramping. I want to eat candy and kill everything. I think it’s just a bug.”

“It better be a bug.” Belinda rubbed her round belly. “Enjoy your freedom before everything changes.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“You’ll see. Once you start having babies, that perfect, loving husband of yours will start treating you like a milk cow. Trust me. It’s like they think they have something over you. And they do. You’re trapped, and they know that you need them, but they can walk away at any time and find somebody younger and tighter to have fun with.”



Charlie wasn’t going to have this conversation again. The only thing that seemed to change about her friends with children is that they started treating their husbands like jerks. “Tell me about Flora.”

“Who?” Belinda seemed to have forgotten the girl as soon as she left the room. “Oh, her. You know that movie we saw last month, Mean Girls? She’d be the Lindsay Lohan character.”

“So, part of the group but not a leader, and not particularly comfortable with the meanness?”

“More like a survivor. Those bitches are next-level cruel.” Belinda sniffed toward the handicap stall. “Did you eat bacon for breakfast?”

Charlie searched her purse for some mints. She found gum instead, but the thought of the peppermint flavor made her feel queasy again. “Do you have some candy?”

“I think I have some Jolly Ranchers.” Belinda unzipped her purse. “Ugh, I should clean this out. Cheerios. How did those get in there? There’s some mints. Oreos, but you can’t—”

Charlie snatched the bag out of her hands.

“I thought you couldn’t do milk?”

“Do you really think this white crap has milk in it?” Charlie bit into an Oreo. She felt an instant soothing in her brain. “What about her parents?”

“Whose parents?”

“B, keep up with me. I’m asking about Flora Faulkner.”

“Oh, well, her mother died. Dad, too. His parents are raising her. She’s a cookie-selling machine. I think she went to the ceremony in Atlanta last—”

“What are her grandparents like?”

“I’ve only been doing this for a minute, Charlie. I don’t know much of anything about any of those girls except they seem to think it’s easy to bake a sheet cake and throw a party for twenty snotty teenagers who don’t appreciate anything you’ve done for them and think you’re old and fat and stupid.” She had tears in her eyes, but she had tears in her eyes a lot lately. “It’s exactly like being home with Ryan. I thought it would be different having something to do, but they think I’m a failure, just like he does.”



Charlie couldn’t take another crying jag about Belinda’s husband right now. “Do you think that Flora’s grandparents are doing a good job?”

“You mean, raising her?” Belinda looked in the mirror, using her pinky finger to carefully wipe under her eyes. “I dunno. She’s a good kid. She does well in school. She’s an awesome Girl Scout. I think she’s really smart. And sweet. And really thoughtful, like she helped me get the cake out of the car when I got here, while the rest of those lazy bitches stood around with their thumbs up their asses.”

“Okay, that’s Flora. What about her grandparents as human beings?”

“I don’t like to say bad things about people.”

Charlie laughed. So did Belinda. If she didn’t say bad things about people, half her day would be spent in silence.

Belinda said, “I met the grandmother last month. She smelled like a whiskey barrel at eight o’clock in the morning. Driving a sapphire blue Porsche, though. A freaking Porsche. And they had that house on the lake, but now they’re living in those cinder-block apartments down from Shady Ray’s.”

Charlie wondered where the Porsche had ended up. “What about the grandfather?”

“I dunno. Some of the girls were teasing her about him because he’s good looking or something, but he’s got to be, like, two thousand years old, so maybe they were just being bitches. You get teased about your dad all the time, right?”