Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

no, Abby could not ride with them. “Don’t worry, Moll,” Abby’s mother said, like the two of them might have been friends. “You can trust him to be a gentleman, and if he isn’t, well, you know who to come to.” She patted her chest and laughed and Abby slipped out of the house and into the cemetery before her dad returned because she knew there would be a fight. Dr. Owens listened, her brow wrinkled. It was clear that if she had a kid she wouldn’t be doing it that way and that was a good thing for Abby to know.
    And as if life isn’t bad enough all the way around, now her mom is planning Abby’s birthday party like it’s her own stupid party. She wants something educational so all the other mothers will say how wonderful she is to “combine fun and education.” She says crap like that all the time, too. In celebration of First Ladies. What a lame and stupid idea from her lame and stupid mother. A party featuring the First Ladies and idiot shitty actors coming in to pretend to be them. The invitation says: Ladies First and then lots of crap about First Ladies, and it will be at the country club, which is a stupid place anyway unless it’s a pool party. Her mother is going to have a little table with knock-off purses for the mothers (who also are invited) to peruse and they all also will get their nails done and have make-overs.
    “If we have to do that, then at least let C.J. be the person,” she had said, and reminded her mother who C.J. is, the woman who does nails and exercise classes over at Pine Haven and has the cute little baby named Kurt.
    “You have got to be kidding,” her mother said. “The slutty mixed-race one with all the tattoos? Your dad might think that’s okay, but I do not. It is certainly not very First Lady–like.” She laughed at her own stupid joke.
    Yeah, Eleanor Roosevelt was all about pedicures, Abby had told her dad later that night. What’s-her-face Carter in the cotton coat and all those designer purses. Her dad had held a finger up to his lips and then shook his head, let his tongue roll out to the side like a strangled victim as if to mime tolerating her mother’s whims.
    “It’s humiliating,” she screamed, near crying, and not caring what her stupid mother heard. “It’s like it’s her party.”
    “She said you love the First Ladies.”
    “I wrote one shitty report last year in sixth grade because I had to. That’s all,” she said. “That was over a year ago. She doesn’t even know me.”
    “It’ll be over soon,” he said, and stretched out across the foot of her bed. He was in the same spot where Dollbaby had slept for the past two years and she knew her dad thought of it, too, because he patted the place as if the dog were still there. Neither of them had gotten over her disappearance. They were only gone for five hours. Her mother said Dollbaby dug her way out of the yard and ran away. Her mother said that she had called every vet and every rescue place in this county and two over and not a trace. “I suspect something bad has happened to her,” her mother said. “Maybe it will be easier to just accept she’s gone.”
    “I don’t even want a party,” she told her dad. “I want Dollbaby.”
    “Me, too,” he said. “But you don’t turn thirteen every day.”
    The only reason Abby was even having a big party was to compete with all the bat and bar mitzvahs she’d attended all through seventh grade. Everything was a competition for her mother, whether Abby felt the desire to compete or not. Her dad had grown up here, but her mother had not and it was very important that she establish herself in her own way and right. People should like and respect her for who she is and not because they remember when cute little Bennie was the fastest kid on the track team or won a prize one Halloween for being the solar system. Abby had heard it all so many times she could recite it back.
    Her mother is like a topsy-turvy doll, one minute funny and happy