Sage raises her eyebrows. “Yes.”
“You want to take a leather-handbag-making class?”
She laughs and shakes her head. “No, Teal. You’re taking the class.”
I scoff. “No, I’m not. Come on, Sage. What was it that you wanted me to get for you?”
She grabs the paper and shakes it around. “This! This is what I wanted. I want you to take this class. For me.”
My eyes are still unnaturally big and I can’t seem to relax my face in any capacity. “Why?”
Sage raises an eyebrow and gives a big sigh, like for all the world, she doesn’t understand whyI’mnot understanding. But that’s preposterous. I want to make things up to her, and she wants me to accomplish this by my signing up for a useless class?
She counts on her fingers as she responds. “In the last four or five years, you’ve knitted, crocheted, bound books, and made candles. Am I forgetting anything?”
“Whittling,” I mumble, looking out the window.
“Whittling. But none of those stuck. You know why?”
“Because I’m a lazy bitch?” I mean the words to come out likea joke, but instead they are as sour as the strongest synthetically flavored cough syrup.
Sage doesn’t miss my tone. “You’re not lazy. Or a bitch.”
I’m not going to argue with her. I don’t want to prove her wrong, even though she’s rather enormously and stupidly wrong. Which is the whole reason I’m trying to buy her shit to begin with.
Sage blows air out of her mouth so her cheeks hollow. “Our whole lives, you have loved handbags. Do you remember when we were little, how you carried around those straw Easter baskets? You put Nadia’s old credit cards in a sandwich bag, and that was your ‘wallet’?”
I snort mirthlessly. “I was just a dumb kid.”
“And now, whenever we go anywhere, you should see the way your eyes light up when you check out what people are carrying.”
I shrug. “That’s just normal curiosity.”
“And when we helped you move. My God. I had no idea you owned that many. But you insisted on bringingevery single oneto Carter’s.”
“A woman needs options,” I respond as primly as Amá Sonya would, because that’s exactly something she would say.
“Teal.” Sage looks at me with big, tea-brown eyes. “Your passion is purses.”
My cheeks heat. “No, it’s not. And that’s a stupid passion. It’s shallow and dull. And who cares about handbags that much, anyway?”
A memory comes to me in that moment, back when I was still with Johnny. It was before he had hit me for the first time, but after nearly a year of near-constant emotional and verbal abuse. He had seen me touching a male client at work. And by that, he meant he’d “caught” me “cheating.” What had actually happened was Isaid to the guy, “Hey, is it okay if I put your hand on the right spot on the machine?” because verbal dictation wasn’t working on him. And once he said sure, then I did it without thinking. Because that was myjob. Neither I nor my happily married client gave the action a single blink.
I didn’t even know Johnny was there, much less watching. And when he and I went to dinner that night, he acted one hundred percent normal—charming, attentive, and slightly douchey after a couple of drinks. We went to his place after. I’d locked myself in the bathroom to freshen up, because Johnny insisted on daily sex, whether I was into it or not. His nasty temper showed up whenever I denied him anything sexual, which he felt, as a man, he’d had a right to, so best to just get it over with, I’d figured out early on.
And when I got back out, he was holding up a pair of scissors, scissors that were big and orange and ugly and buried in my purse, which was already half shredded.
The Dooney & Bourke small Florentine satchel in the color natural was my first grown-up handbag that I’d saved up for and bought myself. A lot of people don’t consider D&B all that fancy or luxe—when Amá had seen my bag for the first time, she scrunched up her nose as though I’d stuffed it with a live turkey—but it was the first purchase I’d made that I was legitimately proud of. Not to mention, the bag wasgorgeous—smooth, warm brown leather, with fancy matching tassels and all the compartments a girl could need, in a sophisticated yet casual silhouette.
Johnny knew how much I’d loved it.Silly, he’d called me when he saw me taking selfies with it to send to Leilani. Come to think of it, Johnny called mesillya lot. Once upon a time, I thought it meant he found me enchanting or something. Now I know he meant it like he saw me as a dumb, childish girl.
Anyway, he knew how I felt about that bag, and he decided to punish me for being good at my job by ripping it to pieces.
I lose my temper a lot. I know that’s not news or anything. But when I get mad, I tend to yell and scream and generally lose my shit. But I didn’t do that with Johnny, not even when he was doing basically the meanest thing anyone had ever done to me. On some level, I must’ve realized it wasn’t safe to be one hundred percent myself around him—especially if that version of myself wasn’t smiling, pleasing, giving in to him in any way he demanded, verbally and otherwise.
Instead I cried like a little kid. I wept under his smirking, smiling face, drawing down a torrential, loud rainstorm he didn’t even deign to notice. “How could you do that?” I’d asked in a painfully embarrassing, midsob gasp. “Whywould you do that?”
He laughed. “You’re so superficial, Teal. God. It’s just a handbag.” He picked up the torn bag and put on a high-pitched, effeminate voice. “Look at me! I’m just a girl who saved too much well-earned money to buy an ugly purse. So I could impress the men I work with like the slut I am.”
