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First, I opened my phone and scrolled through the HHH hashtag, dragging out the dreamlike feeling of being in bed, relaxed and calm for the first time in weeks.
My hockey jersey picture was up near the top, collecting a ton of likes and comments. Only a little further down, I stopped scrolling, arrested by the sight of a blurred-out picture of a naked person tied to a statue. The comments were mean and awful. No one seemed to know who it was, and I couldn’t make anything out from the distorted photo.
My phone rang while I was looking at it. I answered quickly.
“Mom?”
“Winter, darling. I’m in town and we never had our shopping trip. Do you have time to indulge me and spend a few hours with your mother?”
We went to the one shopping area in Hade Harbor that my mom could tolerate. For such a small town, it had a decent selection of luxury boutiques, but Angela DeLaurie wasn’t an amateur shopper, she was a professional, and a handful of high-end stores didn’t usually cut it. I imagined that because spending this time together constituted my birthday present, she’d decided to forgive Hade Harbor and its inadequate shopping experience this time.
We went into a few little stores, my mother charging around, ordering sales assistants around with an ease that only came with decades of practice. I trailed after her, trying on the things she instructed me to, turning and posing, smiling on cue. It was our MO. My mom got to dress up her daughter and I got to see her. I couldn’t complain. Doing so would only get me less time with her.
“So, your father was telling me about your boyfriend… Asher, isn’t that his name? Asher Martino. Is he foreign?”
“His mother’s Colombian.”
“Oh, how exotic. And his father?”
I shrugged. “We haven’t gotten there yet,” I evaded her question.
Mom nodded. “Well, Latino men know how to value family.”
“Mom! What are you talking about?”
She was sipping champagne, waiting for the assistants she’d commandeered to bring her ten shoe options.
“I mean, they like kids, often they want big families. Are you ready for that, honey?”
“I’m nineteen years old, so no, of course not,” I blustered. For some reason, imagining Asher as a father was doing something weird to my insides. “You’re stereotyping a huge, diverse group, and I just think we should change the subject,” I added.
She sighed. “You kids and your PC language. Very well. I’m happy for you, how’s that?”
I stared at her, genuinely surprised by her enthusiasm. My mom could be aloof; I’d learned from the best, after all. She was snotty sometimes and entitled in a way that had taken years to develop. I knew she hadn’t come from money, but she certainly owned her lifestyle now.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “What? Does it surprise you?”
I shrugged. “Kind of.”
“I know. Broken family, single-mother household, grew up south of River Drive…an athlete, no less. I know there’s nothing about this boy on paper that I should like.” She leaned in and smiled at me. “Except for one thing.”
“What?”
“You chose him. That means I like him,” she finished.
I had no idea what to say. It might have been the sweetest thing my mother had ever said to me.
“Don’t underestimate the privilege of having a choice, Winter. Take it from me. Choice is everything.”
I tried to process her words and stumbled. “You had a choice. You chose Daddy.”
My mother stared at her fizzy flute of champagne for so long I thought she might not answer. “Sometimes life can take your choices away or change them. When you make the same choice again and again, regardless of circumstance, that’s how you know a choice is real.”
I had no idea how to react to this version of my mother. I usually got a different version every time she came home. Hippie Angela, off to an ashram in Goa, or fashion maven Angela, freshly back from Paris. Cryptically honest Angela? It was a new one.
“I don’t understand,” I admitted.
“When I met your father, I was halfway through school on about a million loans I couldn’t afford. You know your grandparents were never wealthy. I found a way to supplement my budget, but I was one missed paycheck from dropping out of school.”
