St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets

by Annie England Noblin

  I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, yet another present from my mother I hadn’t wanted. I didn’t like to look at myself from top to bottom. The woman, Genevieve, was curvy in all the right places. And I was . . . I was curvy in no places.

  As long as I could remember, I’d been one of the boys. I was tall “for a girl” at five ten. I had long legs, my favorite feature. I had thick, stick-straight brown hair and eyes that were the same color. I got lots of compliments on my matching hair and eyes. But everything else about me just sort of hung there. I was gangly, even at thirty-six, and clumsy. I couldn’t walk in a pair of heels if my life depended on it. I was jeans and T-shirts and light beer on a Sunday afternoon before the big game. If Derek had wanted a woman like Genevieve, he should have said so from the beginning. I would have understood. I wanted to be a woman like Genevieve.

  I threw a dirty towel over the mirror and climbed into bed without bothering to take off my clothes. Maybe I’d wake up in the morning and realize that this whole day had been a dream. More than likely, though, I’d wake up still jobless, still boyfriendless, and still $32.11 poorer.

  Maybe the bum in the greasy Mariners hat was right.

  Maybe I was bad luck.

  I shook those thoughts from my head. If I wanted to feel better, I needed to stop drinking and go for a run. It was too late and too dark to go for a real run in the park like I preferred. The gym in the building would have to do. It smelled like sweat and protein powder, and the two meatheads who shared the apartment below me seemed to be permanent fixtures. Still—it was better than nothing. I’d been running since I was about fifteen and needed a way to deal with what my mother called “complicated female emotions.” Right now I was having lots of complicated female emotions. I pulled a clean pair of Nike leggings from the clothing pile on my bedroom floor and the least wrinkled tank top I could find. I was pulling my hair into a ponytail when I heard a rapid knocking on my front door. It sounded like a tiny jackhammer, and I knew at once that it was my best friend, Holly.

  She stood in the doorway, all five feet, one inches of her, looking me up and down and shaking her head. “Your pants are on backward,” she said, brushing past me. “They’ll evict you if you drunk exercise and puke in the trash can again.”

  “I’m going to get evicted anyway,” I said, closing the door behind her.

  “I heard about the Lantern,” Holly said, sitting down on my couch. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. “So it really doesn’t matter where I puke. Either way, I’m puking and I’m evicted.”

  Holly laughed. “You can always come work for me over at Bitch Rant.”

  I sighed and plopped down beside her. “Nobody gets paid at Bitch Rant.”

  “True,” Holly admitted. “But your mom would hate it.”

  “There’s an upside to everything,” I said.

  Holly had been my best friend since our first semester in college, when we’d been paired up as partners in our biology lab. She was a whiz in science and math and managed to drag me through the class, kicking and screaming. Now Holly worked as a geneticist in the lab at one of the local hospitals. In her spare time, she ran an underground feminist magazine called Bitch Rant. She lived with her wife and twin daughters in a gorgeous house in an affluent Seattle neighborhood that made my parents’ sprawling ranch in the suburbs look like a doomsday bunker.

  “Well, you know you’re always welcome to come and stay with me and Christine and the girls,” Holly said. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

  “I love you,” I said to Holly, picking up a half-empty bottle of wine and taking a swig. “But we tried living together once, remember? It did not work out well.”

  “Surely you’ve learned to take your dishes to the sink,” Holly replied. And then, glancing around my chaotic living room, added, “Okay, you’re right. That’s a bad idea.”

  “Speaking of your house,” I said. “Why aren’t you at home right now? Didn’t you promise Christine you’d be home in time for dinner on weeknights?”

  Holly touched my hand and gave me a look so sympathetic that I nearly burst into tears. “Christine saw the video,” she said. “She told me to stay as long as you needed me to stay.”

  “In that case,” I said, kicking off my running shoes. “Let’s order a pizza. I’m starving.”

  Holly grinned. “You order, I’ll pay.”

  I reached for my phone and replied, “As if I’d ever argue.”

  Chapter 2

  TWO WEEKS AFTER I LOST MY JOB, AND AFTER ATTEMPTING to pay my rent with a maxed-out credit card, I moved back in with my mom and dad. My parents owned a sprawling house in a suburb of Seattle—a bedroom community. They’d had the house built in the late 1970s, several years before I was born, and it was my mother’s pride and joy. She liked to talk about how it had been, for a time, the only house on the street—right at the end of the cul-de-sac, and she believed that every house built after it was built to model hers. During the summers, when most of my friends were taking family vacations to the beach, my parents were “working on the house.” One summer they remodeled the kitchen. The next they ripped up all the old shag carpeting and installed hardwood floors. The summer I was ten and Eli was six, my parents remodeled the den, and we got a big-screen television set and beanbags to sit on for when we played Nintendo. My very favorite summer, however, was the summer I turned sixteen.

  I’d been begging my mother for two things—my own phone line and to paint my bedroom. I’d long outgrown the pale pink walls and ballerina decorations, and despite my spectacular fail at my one and only ballet recital nearly a decade before, my mother was hesitant to give up on the dream that I would one day morph from the sullen teenager who wore too much eyeliner and listened to the Smiths into the frilly, lace-wearing daughter she’d apparently always wanted.

  This fact had become something of a feud between the two of us—a fight that carried over into every single conversation we had for months. One weekend, after I’d flounced off in a huff to a friend’s house, I returned home that Sunday to find my bedroom completely bare—even the ceiling fan was gone.

  My mother stood in the doorway of my bedroom and held up a finger. “Before you say anything,” she said, “why don’t you follow me downstairs.”

  Reluctantly I followed her downstairs. Two brand-new walls now partitioned off what had once been a large, open room. There was new vinyl flooring, and I audibly gasped when my mother led me into the room on the left.

  “Your father and I have been working on it for a few weeks,” she said. “I knew you’d never come down here and see it before we finished, since you absolutely refuse to do any laundry.”

  I glanced around the room. My bed and dresser were there, and so were the posters I’d hung in my closet, because my mother wouldn’t let me hang them on my walls. There was the television set that had been in my parents’ room and one of those clear phones I’d been asking for since Christmas.

  I dropped my overnight bag and gave my mother a hug. “I can’t believe this,” I said.

  “This doesn’t make you any less grounded for storming out of the house the other night,” my mother replied. “The television and the phone will both be turned on in two weeks. You’ll just have to stare at the ceiling until then.”

  I hugged her even tighter. “Thanks, Mom.”

  I now found myself back in my old bedroom staring at a faded picture of Morrissey and a useless clear plastic phone. My parents left me alone for a few days, allowing me the space I needed to wander around the house in an oversized T-shirt and stare aimlessly into the refrigerator.

  After a week of this, however, my mother was over it. She started waking me up for breakfast and demanding I shower. She started sending me emails full of links for job openings.

  One morning she swanned into my room at ten a.m. and said, “Today is lunch with the girls. You can go with us!”

  I groaned.

  The “girls” she was r
eferring to were her two best friends, Carol and Melissa. The two of them and my mother were retired public schoolteachers. They both had daughters a few years older than me, and those daughters were both wildly successful. One of them was a lawyer like her father, and the other one, Kate, was married to a dentist who also happened to be my brother, Eli. In my mother’s world, being married to someone successful also equated with personal success. Eli was successful because he was a dentist, and Kate was successful because she was married to him. I didn’t want to go to lunch with them and spend the entire time explaining why I was thirty-six and back at home with my parents.

  “You can take a couple of hours out of your day to go to lunch,” my mother replied. “It’ll be fun! And maybe they know someone who could give you a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  My mother shrugged. “I don’t know, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Am I at beggar status?” I asked. “Besides,” I continued, “I was thinking about, I don’t know, maybe going to graduate school.”

  “For what?” my mother asked. “Your one degree in English literature wasn’t enough? You know English literature majors are only qualified for one thing—door greeters at Walmart.”

  “That’s not true,” I protested. “I could also clean off greasy countertops at McDonald’s.”

  My mother sighed. “Oh, Maeve.” That was her favorite expression—Oh, Maeve. She’d been saying it since I was old enough to talk. “Do you really want to go back to school?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe.”

  “Well,” she said. “I guess it beats nothing at all.”

  My mother looked around my bedroom. “Look at this as a new start,” she said finally. “Your options are limitless.”

  “I feel like my options are completely limited,” I muttered.

  My mother ignored me and walked to the closet, examining its contents. Finally she pulled out a pair of gray knit slacks and an aqua blazer—both items she’d given me and that I never wore—and said, “This will do, I suppose.”

  “For what?”

  “For lunch,” my mother replied, sighing deeply, a sign she was through asking me and was now telling me what I was going to do. “I’ll iron these pants, and you can wear one of my shirts under the blazer.”

  I rolled over in bed and pressed my face into my pillow.

  “And for God’s sake, take a shower and wash your hair,” she said on her way out of the room.

  Two hours later, I was squeaky-clean and sitting beside my mother at her usual lunch spot. My sister-in-law, Kate, and her mother walked toward us, mirror images of each other in their tailored suits, shiny chestnut hair, and perfect posture. My mother gave me a look that told me to sit up straight, and I slumped down in my chair and scratched at my leg through the wool trousers. I was pretty sure they were giving me a rash.

  My mother stood up and gave them both an air-kiss on each cheek. “Carol and Meredith are running a bit late,” she said to them. “They said to go ahead and order when we’re ready.”

  Kate sat down beside me and said, “I heard you were coming today, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “Well, I for one am thrilled,” Kate’s mother, whose name was Melissa, added. “Your mother says you’ve just been moping around the house for the last couple of weeks. It’s good for you to get outside and get some fresh air.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “It’s way more fun to be depressed in the sunshine.”

  “She’s joking,” my mother said quickly, waving the waiter over to our table.

  The waiter scurried over, and the other women proceeded to order white wine or some variation of it, and when it got to be my turn, I said hopefully, “What do you have on tap?”

  Beside me, my mother cleared her throat, and I sighed and said, “I’ll just have white wine.”

  “Any preference?” the waiter asked. There was a slight twitch playing at his mouth, as if he might want to smile but knew better.

  I gritted my teeth. “Whatever you recommend.”

  He nodded and turned to leave just as Carol and her daughter Meredith rushed toward us. They gave him their drink orders (more white wine), and then filled the remaining places at the table.

  Carol was a small woman with a pinched face and a mop of dark hair. She and my mother had been friends since high school, and I didn’t have many memories from childhood that didn’t involve Carol and Meredith in some way. I liked Meredith. We’d never been the kind of bosom buddies that my mother and Carol would have liked, but we had a mutual respect for each other. We’d been roommates for a semester in college before Meredith joined a prelaw dormitory, and she’d helped me out once when a creditor threatened to sue me. Meredith didn’t look a thing like Carol. She looked more like her father, who’d been an offensive lineman for the Seattle Seahawks before a knee injury ended his career. Meredith was nearly six one, and as a lawyer, I figured she was a pretty intimidating force in the courtroom.

  Meredith looked up from her phone and over at me. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “You never come to lunch.”

  Carol shot her a look. “We discussed this on the way over, Mer, remember?”

  Meredith shrugged and looked back down at her phone. “You said a lot on the way over.”

  I stifled a giggle and looked down at the menu. I knew from experience that from the lunch menu my mother would order a dainty salad with a vinaigrette dressing on the side. I also knew that she would be starving before we got home, which meant that dinner in the evening would likely consist of pork chops or some other savory dish. I decided to humor my mother by ordering a salad as well. I’d have ranch dressing, though. With God as my witness, I wouldn’t allow that to be taken from me.

  There was sporadic conversation while we waited for our food—the kind of discussion that is polite but not too intrusive. I wondered if my mother had pulled each of her friends aside before meeting and asked them not to ask me any questions about my job or my love life. If she had, I was grateful. I smiled at her from across the table, and she gave me a little wink.

  I was just going in for my second bite of ranch-covered happiness when Meredith looked over at me and said, “So, Mae, how is the job search going?”

  I put the fork into my mouth and chewed as slowly as I could, while the entire table watched me. “Well,” I said finally. “There’s not a lot out there for a journalist these days, except for a little bit of freelance work.”

  “Your mother says you’re thinking about graduate school,” Meredith said. “What would you go for?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ve always really liked the idea of marketing, but since my degree is in English literature, I’d probably have to go back and take some undergraduate courses before I could apply for any program like that.”

  “Sounds expensive,” Kate’s mother said.

  “Nothing’s been decided yet,” my mother replied, shooting Kate’s mother an annoyed glance.

  “Eli can always train you at the clinic to be a hygienist,” Kate said. “We never can keep anybody, it seems.”

  I bit at the insides of my mouth to keep from telling Kate that the reason they couldn’t keep any help was because she was the office manager and completely unbearable to work for. I knew firsthand what that was like, having played receptionist for them when the clinic first opened several years ago. Instead I said, “I don’t think I’d be very good at that. You know teeth freak me out.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Kate’s mother interjected.

  “I’m not begging anyone for anything,” I said. Why did people keep suggesting that term applied to me? I mean, sure, I’d lost my job and my apartment and my boyfriend, but that didn’t mean I was desperate, did it? I certainly didn’t feel desperate. What I felt, at the moment, was annoyed. “Besides,” I continued, “Holly offered me a job writing for her magazine.”

  My mother almost choked on her salad. She shot me a warning glance
from across the table, which I chose to ignore.

  “Holly who?” Meredith asked. “Oh, Holly. I remember her. She has a magazine?”

  “Bitch Rant,” I said, not looking at my mother.

  “Bitch Rant?” everyone at the table said in unison.

  “It’s a feminist magazine,” I replied, and then I gulped down the rest of my wine. “It’s very well respected in some circles.”

  “In some circles, I’m sure,” Kate’s mother said.

  Kate’s mother wasn’t looking at me. She was staring over at my mother with such a look of pity that I was almost ashamed for mentioning Bitch Rant.

  Just as I opened my mouth to smooth things over, my phone began to ring. I pulled it out of my purse and stared down at the screen. I didn’t recognize the number. I sent the caller to voice mail and put the phone facedown on the table.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” my mother asked. “It could be about a job.”

  I rolled my eyes. She and I both knew that nobody was calling me about a job. She also knew I wasn’t in the habit of answering numbers I didn’t know. And random numbers flashing across the screen almost always meant one thing—debt collectors.

  My phone started to ring again, and we all stared at it. When it began to ring for a third time, I snatched it up off the table and hurried out into the lobby to answer it, annoyed that whoever it was wouldn’t leave me alone.

  “Hello?” I said impatiently into the phone. “It’s rude to call someone over and over, even if I probably do owe you money. I lost my job, though, so good luck squeezing anything out of me.”

  There was silence on the other end, and I felt triumphant that I’d likely scared off whoever it was. Then, after a few seconds, there came a timid, “Hello? Is this Maeve Stephens?”

  I sighed. “This is she.”

  The person on the other end cleared her throat and continued, “My name is Alice, and I’m, well, I know your birth mother, Annabelle.”