Page 21 of Pick-Up
Sasha pets a passing dog, notices me and shoots me a perfunctory smile, checks the time on her phone multiple times. Begins tapping her toes.
She’s late. She’s late. For a very important date.
13 | Let Me Take You On an EscapadeSASHA
Derek atEscapade Magazinemakes spreadsheets about spreadsheets. That’s something I learn in the first five minutes of our meeting. It’s also something I should have guessed after he sent a calendar event, a backup calendar invite, a confirmation email the day before and another this morning. The man is organized.
I can respect that.
After I hustled my kids back to our apartment post pick-up and my parents arrived to babysit at 3:00 p.m. sharp, I made my own premeeting confirmations: I checked my bag for lip gloss, earbuds, antianxiety meds.
As I gathered my belongings, my mother began banging around in the white kitchen cabinets. Bart watched from the table, already knee-deep in his packet of rainbow Goldfish. Nettie was in her room reading.
“Mom,” I said, holding the front door open as I grabbed my shoes from the charcoal-gray mat in the hall and readied to leave.
“Yes, sweetie?” she asked.
“What are you looking for?”
“You moved your glasses!” she said, rummaging through a selection of ceramic vases.
“No. Nope. I haven’t,” I said.
“Really?” she said, now rummaging through my tea selection, which had been neatly stacked against the teal backsplash—probably my favorite detail of the whole place. “I could have sworn the cups were right here!”
My glasses—short, squat tumblers with ribbed edges—have been in the same cabinet since Cliff and I first moved to this apartment four years ago. They remained there through our arguments—over his constant travel, over prioritizing his career over mine, over his phone addiction, over the way he opted out of watching our children, over the way he would lie down on the couch and, without guilt or irony, just watch me clean while he critiqued some movie he thought he could have made better. Over the fact that he was not who he had seemed. Or maybe he was.
Cliff moved. The glasses did not.
“Well, then, where are they?” my mother asked, now cross. As if the glasses and I were colluding against her.
They are most certainly not on the counter.
“Over there!” I pointed.
“Here?”
“No, the next one.”
“Here?”
“No. Up.”
“Up where?” she snapped, exasperated.
“Two cabinets to the left,” said Bart, surprising us both. He picked up a Goldfish and swam it through the air, making a fish face.
My mother had forgotten where the glasses are kept. There was a drop in my stomach that I didn’t enjoy. An uneasy flutter in my chest. I brought a hand to my heart to still it.
She finally located two glasses and pulled them down. I watched her take them to the sink and rinse them. This habit of my mother’s drives me insane. They’re already clean! That’s why they’re in the cabinet! Where they always are!
At least she could find the sink.
“What’s this meeting again?” she asks.
“Just a possible gig—a shoot on a tight deadline,” I said, as if I wasn’t nervous. “I’m not sure of the details yet.”
“So, not a hot date?” she asked, swallowing multiple pills.
