Page 1 of Don't Go
1.Sabrina
Following the medical review committee’s quarterly review, Bonnie Vela’s surgical date has been moved. We now anticipate performing the procedure in late autumn. We know waiting is difficult, and we thank you for your continued patience.
I read it three times.
I was standing in a hotel ballroom’s back hallway, wearing expensive three-inch heels I couldn’t buy and a borrowed black apron tied twice around my waist because its straps were too long for someone who hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch. My hair was in a bun I’d given up on halfway through. A pen was tucked behind my left ear. I always kept one there, even though I didn’t know why I needed it at a wine auction.
I'd take it out and gesture with it. Then put it back and repeat.
Late autumn. Just thinking those two words made me feel like they'd already sliced my daughter's chest open, then sewn it shut for six more months of waiting.
The hallway smelled like the kitchen—garlic, warm bread, and the faint metallic tang of someone polishing flatware aroundthe corner. I started to lean my shoulder against the wall, then straightened right away. The wallpaper was velvet. Of course it was. Everything in this building was velvet, marble, or wood you weren’t allowed to touch.
We thank you for your continued patience.
Patience. Sure. I'd been patient my whole damn life.
I'd been patient when a drunk man hit my parents. I'd been patient when I was nineteen and saw two lines on a pregnancy test, and everything I’d planned for my life, written down inside a notebook cover, fell apart. I'd been patient when Bonnie's father—and I refuse to call him that,deadbeat assholefits better—looked at the test, looked at me, and said, "I love you. I'll always love you. It's you and me against the world, baby."
By the next week, he was on a flight to Phoenix before I could keep down a piece of toast.
I'd been patient for over a year on the Cross Foundation's surgical waitlist.
And now they wanted six more months.
My fingers had started shaking. I closed my fist around the phone and pressed it against my hip until they stopped.
Sabrina, Sabrina, don't cry in the back hallway. You cry, your eyeliner runs, and Janelle will see it. She will tell everybody in the kitchen. Then you're gonna be the bartender who cried at the Cross Foundation auction, and that's not a reputation you wanna walk out the door with tonight.
I tipped my head back and stared at the chandelier in the ceiling.
How was I going to tell Bonnie?
Because Bonnie would definitely ask. She always did. She'd come down off the couch with her water bottle in one hand and her Pickles plush in the other, and she'd put both hands on her hips and say, "Mommy, when's my surgery?"
I didn't have an answer that wasn't alie.
"Soon, baby." Lie.
"They're working on it." Lie.
"Don't worry about it." Worst lie of all, because Bonnie always worried about it. Bonnie worried like a forecast.
I shoved the phone in my apron pocket and pulled myself together.
I had a job to do.
I came out into the corridor and crossed past the pass-through window where the catering captain was loading tarts onto a tray. He nodded at me. I nodded back. Janelle looked up from the prep table. I gave her a thumbs-up because it’s the universal hospitality sign fordon't ask me anything right now.
When I pushed through the swinging door, the ballroom hit me with its full smell—cologne, different perfumes layered on top of each other like a war crime, and the waxy sweetness of the white lilies on every fifth table.
I took my place behind the bar.
It was an extravagant place.
The bar was a long zinc slab at the back of the room, lit from underneath in a soft blue that made everything feel a little too polished to be real. Behind me, on a tiered shelf, was every bottle the foundation thought made them look like people who knew about wine. Just pretentious bottles of wine—wines that had a year, a region, and an opinion. I’d be pouring into glasses I could never afford to own, let alone drink from.
The room was moving. A man in a dove-gray suit was turning a paddle in his hand over and over but not lifting it. Two women near the front were laughing too loudly at something one of them had just said. A waiter threaded between tables, balancing a tray of canapés over his head like he was rescuing a litter of kittens from a flood.
