Back in the Burbs by Tracy Wolff
Chapter Six
Dawn shoves its way past my aunt’s minuscule curtains and bitch-slaps me right across the face the next morning.
It’s just my luck that the one thing my aunt apparently didn’t hoard was good window coverings. The drapes in here definitely subscribe to the same rules that govern most good lingerie—reveal more than you conceal. And like the sexiest lace teddy, the filmy hot-pink-and-lime-green zebra-print fabric over the east-facing windows do the revealing quite artfully. The concealing? Yeah, not even close to mastering that one.
The clock on the once white, now definitely more tea-stained cream wicker nightstand reads 6:12. Fantastic. Great. Perfect. So much for sleeping in. I could bury my head under the pillow and try to go back to sleep, but with the way my luck has been running lately, I’d end up suffocating myself while getting poked in the eye with the feather quills packed inside it…which might not sound like the worst option in the world right now, except I flat-out refuse to give Karl that satisfaction. I already made things too damn easy for him with this divorce. Death would just be overkill.
Plus, since I’ve recovered from the retina-searing brightness shining through my window—dear God, how did Aunt Maggie deal with this every morning?—my mind is racing with all the things I have to get done today.
Go through the HOA complaints and sort in order of importance.
Find a contractor who will work for magic beans.
Buy about eight million garbage bags to take care of the stacks and stacks of junk my aunt has in every single room in this house. Seriously, who still subscribes to magazines, let alone has multiple copies of the Sears Christmas catalog from the eighties?
Mow the damn grass…though maybe that doesn’t have to be today. I’m totally okay with letting my obnoxious neighbor marinate in his own stuck-upedness for a while. I mean, how far up his ass is that stick if he feels the need to whine about the length of my grass? Of course, maybe that’s how he got such a perfect ass—he has a copy of Butt Clenching Your Way to Perfect Glutes For Dummies. If I encourage him, he’ll probably be over here with a ruler to get the exact measurement of my lawn, just to make sure I mowed enough but not too much.
Renewed annoyance sweeps through me like hot fudge over a scoop of vanilla bean, and I push the covers off and all but spring out of bed—and knock over three stacks of magazines. I ignore all the little aches and pains that come with sleeping on a new mattress and mentally readjust my to-do list. Definitely need trash bags before HOA regulations.
But first, coffee. Please God, let Aunt Maggie have hoarded the magical brown bean of happiness.
After a quick shower in my aunt’s searing hot-pink bathroom, I dry off with one of her zebra-striped towels and slap some expensive moisturizer onto my face. It soaks in and—I swear to all that is good in the world—my skin lets out a relieved sigh. Karl got me the moisturizer for my last birthday. No doubt it was his way of telling me I’m looking old. Sure, I was tempted to hurl the hourglass-shaped bottle at his head, but I controlled the urge. And my skin has thanked me every day since.
A quick brush of my teeth and topknot later, I make my way down the creaky stairs, doing my best not to trip on everything my aunt piled on the edges of them.
By the time I get to the kitchen, every cell in my body is jonesing for a hit of caffeine. But when I finally open one of my aunt’s circus-tent canisters—the one marked Caffeine, not the one marked Quaaludes—it’s empty except for a lone coffee bean. Desperation has me searching all the others—Calories, Candy, Quaaludes, Ganja, Gluten, and Glitter—but to no avail.
I do find small individual snack packs of Oreos in the Calories canister, though, and a bunch of Hershey Kisses in the Candy one, so I take the win. It’s okay to chew a Kiss and a coffee bean at the same time, right? Isn’t that just a deconstructed mocha?
As I swallow, I do my best to ignore the gummy bears in the Ganja canister. It’s possible they don’t contain marijuana.
Suuuuuuuuuuuure.
The part of me that is more like Aunt Maggie than my parents can stand is totally curious. I’ve never smoked weed—or done any other kind of drug—in my life, but that dearth just makes the gummy bears all that much more enticing.
Too bad even thinking about trying one of them is for another day, when my to-do list doesn’t involve driving to town for trash bags, coffee, and—I open the door to the very empty pantry—absolutely everything else a human being needs to survive.
Wonderful.
I grab my purse and the keys to Aunt Maggie’s purple Cadillac, aka Jimi Hendrix (Jimi for short), and head toward the store, marveling as I make my way downtown that nothing in this place has changed. Nothing.
I pull into the local Stop & Shop parking lot—which is packed—and try to find a place to park Jimi. I end up circling the lot for five minutes before someone finally pulls out of a spot all the way at the end of the lot and I manage to squeak in. A guy with wild hair and a wifebeater tank top in a baby-blue minivan waves his fist at me like I didn’t just sit here for several minutes with my blinker on for this spot before he turned down the same lane.
As I climb out of Jimi, the guy rolls his window down and yells about my driving, my parentage, and—my absolute favorite (sarcasm alert)—the fact that women shouldn’t be able to have driver’s licenses at all. I ignore him; a pissed-off dad in the New Jersey burbs has nothing on a New York cabdriver when it comes to creative insults. Plus, it’s hard to take him seriously when at least two kids in the van are singing at the top of their lungs about Mickey Mouse’s clubhouse and a third is screaming that she wants her My Little Pony.
No wonder he’s in a bad mood.
In fact, if I didn’t need caffeine so desperately, I might have felt bad enough to give up the parking spot. But there’s a Starbucks right next to the Stop & Shop, and inside it is a caramel macchiato screaming my name. Or maybe I am screaming its name. Either way, right now I need coffee more than he needs a parking spot, My Little Pony notwithstanding.
As I hop out of Jimi, I’m not surprised I’m drawing a few questioning looks. I throw my shoulders back, tilt my chin up in a total yes-I’m-bold-enough-to-own-a-car-like-this move, and head into the store.
I have a date with the coffee shop—or there will be bloodshed. And I have a trunk big enough to hide the body.