The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown

how this situation would have pleased her last summer. she told herself that today would be just as it always was—that she and her mother would sit together in the lounge chair and judge beth Filley’s diving. That her mother would count to see how long sadie and beth could stay underwater.
    sadie and her mother took the car down their street to the next, through wappaquasset’s gated entrance and up the long curving driveway, a trip that took all of five minutes. Her mother had her drink in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. she drove her new Coupe de Ville, cranberry red with white leather interior, a car that floated along the narrow tar roads of the neighborhood. The car nosed up the driveway’s incline to the top.
    “you’re going to hit that shrub,” sadie said.
    Her mother said she would not, and then laughed when she did. “you were right,” she said. “smarty pants.”
It used to be that when her mother hit various stationary objects—trees, mailboxes, a bike abandoned on a lawn—sadie would laugh along with her. These things became secrets they kept from her father, from the owners of the objects, as if the objects weren’t really of any consequence to their owners, or if they were, they shouldn’t have been.
“It was an old mailbox,” her mother would say. “Jim Frobel should have replaced that rusted thing a long time ago.”
That day sadie suddenly saw it all differently. “you should be more careful,” she said as her mother realigned the car in the driveway and put the car in park.
she turned to sadie and lifted her sunglasses. “Are you judging me?” Her eyes were pale blue and glassy, ringed with liner, heavy with mascara.
sadie said she was not.
Her mother leaned in and kissed her on the forehead. sadie smelled the lime and gin, felt the thickness of her lipstick, and she reached up and wiped it away. Her mother turned off the car and climbed out.
“Help me with all of this, would you?”
It was up to sadie to carry her mother’s silver mesh cigarette case; the copies of her script; her straw bag with sunscreen, extra limes, and the new Cosmopolitan, her Chanel no. 5 scenting everything with notes of jasmine. They went up the two levels of stone steps and sadie’s mother rang the bell. The door was large, constructed of oaken planks. It was beth who came and pulled it open.
“look who I brought,” sadie’s mother said.
beth gave a bright, false smile that she dropped as soon as sadie’s mother walked past. “where’s your mother?” Clare called out, the gold heels of her sandals echoing across the foyer.
“outside,” beth told her. she sighed and shut the door. she was shorter than sadie now. she had her dark hair cut neatly to her shoulders, and she wore what sadie took to be a boy’s oxford.
beth stood looking sadie up and down. “look at you,” beth said quietly. “All blossoming .”
sadie instantly wished she hadn’t come. Gone was the soft-spoken, easygoing beth of summers past. sadie usually didn’t feel comfortable in other people’s houses. The color schemes were different; the air was charged with the smell of an unusual food, or a damp odor coming up from the basement, or the musty smell of the recently used vacuum. At betty Donahue’s house her younger sisters and brothers— all chestnut-haired and freckled, copies of each other— squabbled over who would watch what on television, over a ball they’d bounce in the driveway, the sound of it ringing against the blacktop and the aluminum siding. They fought over the Cap’n Crunch, their father’s bottle of Pepsi, the last Hostess cupcake. They threw things and struck each other. They slammed doors and played radios too loud. The mess of betty’s house was something sadie could never get used to: clothes strewn everywhere—clean piles, dirty heaps, lone socks behind the toilet, wet towels flung over the glass shower door, handprints, smears, torn screens, ashtrays filled to overflowing,