Every couple of months, my mother and I would get together for coffee. We used to try to go out to a restaurant and get a meal, but we were seldom able to spend that much time together without getting into some sort of argument. Getting coffee could take as long—or as short—as you wanted, and that seemed to work out far better for the two of us.
It was a little sad, though. We both lived here in the same city—shouldn’t we be able to get together more than every few months? There were girls I’d gone to college with who were best friends with their moms. They hung out all the time, they confided in their mothers, they went shopping together or out to the movies. I wanted something similar but wasn’t sure how to go about getting it. Also, I wasn’t sure if my mother would be on board with that.
She was a formidable woman, my mother. She had a way of walking into a room that people would notice, though she wasn’t doing it for attention. She was tall, which might have had something to do with it, but it was mostly because she was incredibly self-assured. And people like that exude that sort of confidence, and it’s something that those who lack it will notice. Ian was the same way.
When I showed up to the café, my mother waved me over to the corner table she was sitting at. I ordered a mocha and then made my way over and sat down.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Sorry I’m late. I got held up at work.”
“Busy day at the salon?”
I was about to answer when the barista called my name. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I went over to the counter and got my drink. I could feel my mother’s eyes on me the whole time. I knew she thought I was wasting my time at the salon. Maybe she’d be glad to hear that I had a new job. I took a tiny sip of my drink and then walked back over to the table and sat down again.
“I actually started working at a new place,” I said. My mother raised her eyebrows.
“Oh?” she said. “I didn’t realize that you’d left the hair salon.”
“Yeah, I did. I was ready for a change.” I hadn’t mentioned any of that to her; I wanted to wait until I had a new job before I told her I’d left.
“I thought you were pretty happy there.”
“I was.”
“So where is this new job?”
“It’s at Hard Tail Security.”
“Hard Tail Security? What is that, exactly?”
“It’s a security firm. I’m handling the administrative work there mostly. This guy I know from the gym, Jonathan, he’s the manager there and he got me the interview.”
Mom nodded. “Does it have potential for growth?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure. “Probably,” I said. “I haven’t really talked to them about that though, since I just started. I wanted to get used to everything before I began asking about moving up.”
“What about going back to school?”
“I don’t think now’s the right time for that.”
Mom pursed her lips. A few tables over from us, a girl who was probably just a few years younger than me sat with her laptop, textbooks open on the table in front of her. She had that focused expression of someone who was deeply involved in whatever she was studying. Mom cast a sidelong glance her way and then looked at me pointedly. “You’re not getting any younger, Daisy. The longer you stay away from school, the harder it’s going to be to get back into it when you finally decide that you want to go back.”
“But what if I don’t want to go back?”
“What are you talking about? You’re going to work in offices for the rest of your life?”
“It’s a job, Mom. And there’s nothing wrong with working in offices. It’s the sort of low-stress work environment that will let me focus on my writing when I’m not there. I don’t want a job that comes home with me every night; I don’t want to work at some high-stress company.”
“How is your writing going, anyway?”
I bit my lip, not wanting to lie to her, but not wanting to admit that I hadn’t worked on anything in at least a month. Maybe more. This whole thing with Noah was just completely taking my focus away from pretty much everything else. What made things worse was the fact that she was working on a book of her own, though a nonfiction one, something about the effects of women’s empowerment on economic growth. In other words, something that I’d never write about, but there was now a rather unpleasant competitive underpinning whenever she asked me about writing.
“I’ve had a lot going on lately,” I said, purposefully not asking her about her own book, which I was sure was going swimmingly. “I’m . . . I’m thinking about moving to a new place.”
She had been about to take a sip of her coffee, but after I spoke, she put her cup down before it had the chance to reach her lips. “You’re what?” she said.
“Thinking of moving.”
“Daisy—you live in a rent controlled apartment. Do you have any idea what people are paying these days for a one-bedroom? It’s insane. It’s simply unaffordable. There’s no way your salary as a secretary is going to be able to cover it.”