Mae nods. “He works for a data recovery service.” Then, small grin. “Ohhh, yeah, I get it. Chip.” The grin doesn’t last long, but it’s nice to see a flash of the old Mae come out of the rubble. “I didn’t know who to report it to.”
“The bank, for starters. The FBI. I think the FTC?”
Mae shakes her head. “I was too exhausted to figure that out. And ashamed. It’s humiliating, to think someone sent you a present—your dead mom!—and then you’re completely wiped out. What I had in there would probably be nothing to you guys, spare change or whatever, but it was all that was keeping me from basically not having a place to live.”
“The shame is common,” says Natalie. “I’ve read about people being extorted right in front of their family members but not telling anyone because they’re so far in it. I read an article about a lonely rich lady who lost, like, fifty thousand dollars when someone called pretending to be her grandson needing to post bond.”
“But I’m not a lonely rich grandmother,” says Mae. “I should have known better. I shouldn’t have fallen for it.”
“I might have fallen for it too,” says Natalie soothingly, even though there’s something in her expression that makes Mae think that she doesn’t really believe she would have.
“And besides that,” says Jordan, “you never should have been teetering on the edge like that without telling us!”
Mae realizes she’s feeling comforted by this, by the familiarity of the kitchen and her sisters’ voices, the strangeness of the late hour, the relief of having shared the thing she’s been carrying around. But the real problem is still there.
“None of this is the point, okay? All my rent money, everythingI had, was in that one account. So it’s gone. Now I owe Tony twelve hundred dollars.” Mae can feel it rising again, the sense of panic that has been with her for the last month, the feeling like she’s always on the verge of hyperventilating.
“We can lend you rent money,” says Jordan. “We cangiveyou rent money. You should have asked.”
Mae puts a hand on her chest to try to slow her jackhammer heart. “It’s not just that, though. I mean, that would help get Tony off my back. But I have nowhere to live, nothing to start over with. I was going to livehere. I thought I could ask Dad to let me stay here for the fall, while I figure things out, maybe get a job and save some money.”
“Ohhhh,” says Natalie.
“I moved my stuff out of Tony’s, and I can’t even pay the storage fees. I don’t have a security deposit or recent landlord references. I don’t have anything. I’m literally without a home. I don’t know what to do, you guys. I don’t know what to do.” She’s looking into the future, and all she sees is a dark, scary void, a black hole she will get lost in.
“It’ll be okay,” says Jordan.
Mae turns on her. “How’s it going to be okay? Like, specifically?” Her voice rises. “I know you want to be helpful but if you were, you wouldn’t just say it’s going to be okay and then be fine with Dad selling the house.” She screws her face up.
“Uh-oh,” says Jordan. “Uh-oh, here comes the Storm,” and something about this, about her perfect sisters with their put-together lives, their offers of help that aren’t really a solution, theircomplacency, so enrages Mae that she just can’t take it anymore. She slides off the stool, and, as much as a barefoot young woman in pajamas can stomp, she stomps upstairs.
“I’ll go,” Natalie says.
Jordan is half off her stool. “Should we both go?”
“Let me try first.”
Mae had always moved through the world as if with a gentle breeze at her back, Natalie thinks as she climbs the stairs. But she hasn’t been like that for a long time, maybe not since Theresa’s death. Even the fact that she’d gone home to their father and Kara’s wedding without telling them, which just a few hours ago Natalie and Jordan considered to be an impeachable offense, was a sign, a plea. A cry for help. Mae needed her family.
Natalie used to scroll through the comments on her videos, and if she saw one from Mae (slayyyyy, Mae might comment, orlove this so much!) she’d smile and heart it, but did she wonder what Mae was doing right then, how she was feeling? Did she wonder if anyone had broken her heart or stolen her money, left her blowing in the wind like a sheet on a clothesline?
Mae is lying in Jordan’s bed, her eyes open. The lights are off, but she can see her sister’s face because of the moon. Natalie smooths Mae’s hair back from her forehead and pulls the sheet up and tucks it in along the sides, the way their mother used to when they were little. Mae watches her.
“Mae,” says Natalie. “So what. You made a mistake.”
“There’s something wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you! Mistakes are what your twenties are for.”
“How come nobody told me that?”
“We don’t talk about it enough. Your twenties can be hard. You have so much collagen still, and that’s a blessing, but in every other way, these years aren’t always so great.”
Mae doesn’t say anything, but Natalie can see that she has her attention, so she goes on. “You’re used to traveling along the samepath as your peers, because you’ve been doing it forever, and then,boom, you’re all going at different paces. You feel like you’re the only one who isn’t engaged or hasn’t found your career or bought a house.”
“I literally cannot imagine ever buying a house,” says Mae. “That seems so complicated.”
“It is and it isn’t,” says Natalie. She considers. “Actually, it is pretty complicated. But the point is, this shitty thing that happened to you, it sucks, but you’ll recover from it. You’ll move on. You’ll grow up. When I was twenty-two, twenty-three? I was ahot mess. I was having fun, sure, but it was messy.”
