Now a Major Motion Picture (44 page)

“You’re not eating the cupcakes, are you?” Marcus was hissing at his client that the dryer was the coldest it could go, and did she want to be here until August?

Ever since junior high I’d been a stress baker, one of those people who found order in assembling ingredients into something fragrant, homey, and delicious. After my dad had left, I’d baked something every day, which had accounted for my rather ample frame. “I’m running out of homeless people.”

“In New York?”

“I’m not heading into the Tenderloin. I’d rather gain a few than get stabbed.”

“Box everything up, and take it to a women’s shelter. Seriously.”

“That takes care of tomorrow. Now what about the rest of my life?”

“You’re not going to like what I have to say, but you do have to listen. Home is where they have to take you when nobody else will.”

“Is this something off one of your plaques?” Marcus had the most nauseating collection of plaques—homey sayings on pastel-painted wood. The kind of things cluttering up pharmacy walls, bought by women named Marge or Eunice, whose idea of a hot night was a thimble of sherry and drooling over Dan Rather.

“You should work to live, not live to work,” he said.

“You’ve summed up my life with something printed on a coffee mug.”

“A pillow.”

“Here’s one for you. Don’t lose your shit over a pregnant woman.” I was buzzed from the chardonnay that I’d just discovered paired nicely with cupcakes and misery.

“No, wait, it’s coming to me. When you’re being recorded, be decent.”

Wow. I’d fallen below decent.
Now that was a sad realization. “Where were you when I needed you?”

“Busy explaining the facts of life to a fifty-eight-year-old housewife who thinks she’s one haircut away from being Jennifer Lawrence. Come home. That’s not a plaque. Well, it probably is, but I don’t own it. Yet.”

I could not share a roof with my mother. She wouldn’t even say, “I told you so.” She’d be open and nonjudgmental, offering lentil stews with organic sweet potato slurry. She’d joyfully introduce me to the offspring of my long-lost avian siblings—Dottie, Spottie, and Lottie—sharing her hilarious chicken anecdotes.

“Can I stay with you?” Marcus was silent, so I added, “Please?”

“Donny has moved back in.” Bam. There it was.

Donny was to love what syphilis was to commitment. His whole life was one pyramid scheme away from being a gay Donald Trump. Obsessed with fame, he talked incessantly about the time he’d bumped into Brad Pitt at the airport or had stood in line next to Simon Cowell at an ATM.

“Oh.” The one drawn-out syllable conveyed disapproval. I didn’t care about slim pickings in a small town. What about standards? I put the butter in the microwave. Peanut butter chunk brownies were next. My thighs swelled at the thought.

If I kept eating like this, I’d be unemployed
and
fat.

“Don’t start,” Marcus said quietly. He must have gone into the break room. The background noises were distant.

My lips tightened. Donny was a forty-five-year-old in Sean John jeans. He had one of those little triangles of hair under his lip. If those things have a name, I didn’t want to know it. “I can’t take my mother right now.”

“No one can take their mother right now. You don’t have any other options.”

I licked frosting from a spatula. “Thank you for that. How many cats should I get?”

“Lease your condo, store your furniture, and come back for the summer. You need some time off.”

Wow, so easy for someone else to say! Time off? What was that? “No, I don’t. I need an income. I need to get back into the game. I don’t know what to do with time off.”

“Exactly. You need to find out what you do when you don’t work.”

“I sleep.”

“Come home.”

“Those are the two most terrifying words in the English language.” On second thought, they weren’t. “You’re fired” were worse.

50 ACTS OF KINDNESS

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