Page 37 of Sublimate
“No, I stayed and attended Emelia Shuab. That’s not too far from here,” she explained. “Are you thinking about going back for a degree?”
“I couldn’t go to college because I didn’t graduate from high school,” I reminded her. “And I don’t have ID, anyway.”
She sighed. “I’m so sorry that I couldn’t help you with your paperwork problem, Vivi. I really tried but you’re right, it feels impossible. Everything had a circular answer until I really lost my patience. I wrote an email that ended, ‘I don’t thank you.’ It was so rude.”
“You worked hard at it and I’m very grateful,” I said. “Maybe Nolan’s mom will help.”
“I looked her up,” she told me. She looked up everything. “She’s a partner at one of Detroit’s biggest law firms and I saw her hourly rate. Want to guess what it is?”
“Uh, fifty dollars,” I hazarded.
“No, a lot more.A lot,” she emphasized, but I still couldn’t guess. When she told me the real number, I also couldn’t breathe at first, and then I whistled.
“She gets paid that much per hour? Are you joking?”
“I know. I think I went into the wrong career.” We stopped at an intersection and she waved at everyone to go first, until the car behind us gave a slight honk. “Lucky for you, she’s Nolan’s mom. Although, my mother kept the books for her sister’s alterations shop and she charged the same going rate that she did for everyone else, because it was a business relationship. They don’t talk anymore,” Cadence continued. “It wasn’t just about money, though. My aunt said some really rude things about how Mom was raising me, and she didn’t even have kids of her own so she didn’t understand what it was like to be a single parent and have to do everything by herself. My mother sacrificed so much.”
I nodded in agreement with her single-parent comment, but I was still stuck on the amount that Nolan’smèrecharged her clients. It was really lucky that I wouldn’t have to pay that much per hour since it was more than I currently made in a month. But when I refocused on Cadence, I realized that she was still talking about her own family members and it sounded like she didn’t ever see any of them. There had been lots of issuesbetween her mother and the rest of those relatives, not just the one aunt.
“I always wished for siblings,” she said. “I know you said that you had a sister, but you’re not close.”
“That’s really understating our relationship. She totally hates me and I can’t be around her without wanting to strangle her with my bare hands.” I glanced toward my bag, where I still carried my knife, and thought of the times I’d been tempted to use that on her. “You already know that I don’t talk to my mom and I’ve never met my dad. His name was Ron, according to the page in the baby book that my mom got at the hospital, but she never wrote down his last name and she always claimed that she didn’t know it. I think that’s crapola, though, because she had married him. How do you do that and not know his name? Of course, she hadn’t really married him, but it was before we knew about the bigamy stuff.”
“The what?”
I gave her a short rundown on that topic and her eyes got huge. “I also used to have an aunt, I think,” I said. “I always wanted one, just like how you wanted sisters and brothers, but I would have said ‘ahhhnt’ instead of ‘ant’ like the little bug. It reminds me of being engaged.”
“To your aunt?”
“No, I mean how I like the word,” I explained. “Engaged. Doesn’t it sound classy to you?”
Cadence was nodding. “When I was a teenager, I had dreams about getting married and I was so excited about an engagementring. I drew different designs for that and for my wedding dress. But I never really considered the aftermath of the wedding, the marriage. I would have needed a groom and he was pretty nebulous.”
Good word. “I never considered any of that for myself. My mom liked the idea of being married so much because she wanted someone to take care of her and solve her issues. We had a lot of issues,” I said. “I think she also got swept up in the idea of a wedding and a party, but she never did all the fancy parts, like a big dress and band. She did have tons of booze.” I thought about Nolan getting married sometime in the future and how his wedding would have to be dry. Except he’d also said that he didn’t have any appetite for sex and I couldn’t imagine that most women would sign up for that…personally, I could easily imagine a life without hands pawing at me and all the mess afterwards. It sounded pretty great.
“Vivi?”
“Sorry.What?”
“I asked, why don’t you know if you have an ahhhnt?” She said it the fancy way, too. “My mother hasn’t talked to her sister since I was little, but we would still know if something happened to her.”
“Well, my mom grew up in foster care,” I explained. “She used to say that she had a sister but they got separated. Getting into the system really does a number on family ties because they can’t always keep siblings together. Then we were always moving around and she was always changing her name. It would havebeen pretty difficult for my ahhhnt to find us even if she was looking, and who knows? It’s also possible that my mom was lying about having a sister. She liked to tell stories. Or maybe she’s real but she hates my mom like Patchouli hates me.”
“What do you mean that patchouli hates you? Are you talking about incense?”
“That’s my sister,” I explained. “Before my mom got into foreign names like Vivienne, she was interested in plant essences and oils.”
“My Lord in heaven, did you get lucky,” Cadence said, shaking her head. “We hear some unusual names at the library and Andie in Reference keeps a list.” She shared a few and I was happy that Vivi wasn’t on it. I didn’t mention the middle name that my mom had originally picked for me, which she’d also thought was French. She had heard the word and decided that the meaning didn’t matter since it was so pretty and unusual for a baby.
I sent another mental thank you to Claire, the nurse who had saved me from becoming Crudités Fellatio O’Keeffe.
You could never tell if Nolan was home because he parked in his garage, but we saw a different car sitting in the driveway. “His friend Beau is visiting,” I said. “He just had a baby and maybe you could give him a card for your portrait business.” She carried them in a special case in her purse.
“Then I would only have forty-six more!” she said excitedly. “I gave one to you, I put one on the bulletin board at the library,you hung one in the ice cream shop for me, and this would be the fourth card gone.”
Beau and Nolan were sitting in the back yard on some metal lawn furniture that I’d never seen anyone use and sadly, the baby wasn’t with his dad today. Cadence and I spotted them through the kitchen window before I gave her a quick tour of the house, just the ground floor where I lived.
“Wow,” she kept repeating reverently, and she was right. This place really was a wow. She checked herself in the mirror of the bathroom that I used before we went outside to the patio, and I thought that she looked very pretty. The idea of seeing Nolan had put some color into her face, not the embarrassed red she’d turned when she’d had to throw me out of her house, but a nice pink.
