Page 54 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“Hester’s upstairs watching a movie with the girls,” Maddie volunteers, and Sloane nods and turns back to the door.
Alessandro eyes me from beneath his long lashes, as if wanting to study my reaction, and then leans toward Maddie with a lift of one of his adept surgeon’s hands. I step forward to block her from seeing his handsomeness and undisputedly talented fingers, and then my front door flies open to reveal Leo holding a bottle of scotch, and—for no reason that I can immediately discern—a pumpkin.
“I see I’m tardy,” he says. Then he sees Alessandro and stops. Looks down at his own pewter-blue two-piece and brown shoes. “You look better than me today. Fuck you.”
“I always look better than you,” Alessandro says, glancing down at his perfectly manicured nails.
“Bold words from a man who wears blue pajamas to work.” Leo sniffs and then walks over to me and hands me the pumpkin. “Here’s a pumpkin,” he says, unnecessarily, and then moves past me into the kitchen with no further explanation.
Torn between setting the pumpkin somewhere pumpkins should go and making it so Alessandro can’t impress Maddie anymore, I hover for a second or two, then decide to walk over to Maddie while holding the heavy orb.
Sloane opens the back door again with a nudge of her hip, carrying a cardboard flat of glass Perrier bottles that thunk and rattle on their way to the kitchen island.
“Where did you justfindenough Perrier to supply an emergency Andromeda meeting?” I ask, instead of the real question, which isWhy didn’t you bring a cardboard flat of Diet Coke instead?*
Sloane freezes, like I’ve just asked her where she scores molly. “Uh,” she says. “Um. Just a place.”
“Just a place?”
“A place. A normal place. Like most people have. You know, normal.”
Before I can follow up on this, the front door opensagain. This time to reveal a tearful Joey, who is carrying nine pizza boxes.
“Hell is empty!” Alessandro says cheerfully.
“Joey, that is a lot of pizza,” I observe.
He sniffles, tears running into his beard. “Why are you holding a pumpkin?”
“It’s Leo’s fault.”
“You’re supposed to bring your host flowers, Joey,” Leo says, coming back from the kitchen with a glass of scotch. “Which you’d know if you weren’t born amongst the proletariat.”
“But you didn’t bring me flowers,” I say to Leo. “You brought me a pumpkin.”
Leo takes a sip of his drink. “It’s seasonal.”
“It’s a squash,” Alessandro says.
Still holding nine pizzas, Joey says, “Pretty sure a pumpkin is a vegetable?”
“Botanically speaking, there’s no such thing as a vegetable,” I inform them for the ten millionth time since college.
Groans erupt all over the room.
“A pumpkin is a fruit—aberry,” I say over their collective complaining. “And it’s really a berry, unlike raspberries, for example, which are aggregate fruits. Aggregate fruits are easy to confuse with multiple fruits, by the way, but the difference—”
“Someone stop him before he gets to plant ovaries,” says Leo.
The only other person in the room who had to remember the wordeukaryoteafter graduation, Alessandro says, “Wait, I’m enjoying this. Do drupelets next.”
“Will someone help me with the pizzas?” Joey asks in a disconsolate voice, and Maddie is the first to move, going over to take the stack of boxes.
“I’ll bring some pizza up to the girls,” she says as she passes me. “And I’ll let Fern know there’s some here when she comes home from the newspaper meeting.”
“Thank you,” I say, and then quieter: “I’ll come up and check on the girls in thirty minutes. You’ll be done working then.”
I’ve learned that Maddie struggles with maintaining one particular boundary, and that’s walking away from work (which I understand when work follows you around and asks you to read an Elephant and Piggie book just oooone mooooore tiiiime) but it’s cleanest and best for everyone if we keep Maddie’s childcare hours carefully delineated from her non-childcare hours. I asked her to move in so that she wouldn’t be shivering in a truck stop parking lot, not because I was trying toSarah, Plain and Tallher.
