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For the next half hour, I got to decide opening bids on luxury items. There was an aromatherapy session at a spa, which I thought about bidding on until I realized it was for a dog spa, and Theo was not the pampering type. There was also a basket filled with David Spade movies, and a surgical tummy tuck with a belly button reconstruction. Finally, something I could’ve used, but there was no way I was putting my real name down on that one.

I’d volunteered for three hours, but after two, I’d hit my limit. I walked over to where Heather was hanging up streamers. “You want to get out of here?” I whispered.

“They’re not going to just let us leave. We have to come up with a good excuse,” she whispered back.

“I’ll say my mother needs me to take her to the doctor,” I said.

“That’s good. I’ll say my kid’s throwing up in the school bathroom.”

Heather put down the streamers, and we loudly made our excuses to the coffee klatch. No one said anything or even acknowledged we were leaving, which was probably for the best, since when we got into the corridor, I noticed I was still holding three clipboards.

CHAPTER 2

Friday afternoons had always been my favorite time to spend with Gia. We’d see movies, get facials, or grab a late lunch. The only thing I hated doing was clothes shopping with her. It was like trying to tweeze a stray hair from your eyebrow, only to find it isn’t a hair, just a drop of mascara, and now you’re bleeding. Today was no different. In each store we went into, she tried on ten outfits before settling on one or two shirts. I could really have used a glass of wine. Or some chocolate. Or a glass of wine made from chocolate.

I fished my phone out of my purse and called Ellen. I had a feeling I’d be waiting for Gia for a while, but I got her voicemail. “Hi, it’s me. So, I’m stuck outside the fiftieth dressing room in two hours waiting for Gia … okay, maybe it’s the tenth, but I was hoping you were there to talk me out of running out and leaving her here, which I think is child neglect, but she’s going to be eighteen soon, so I’m not sure. I was also going to ask if you had any ideas of how I could get Gia to open up to me about her boyfriend, Jason, but I guess I’ll just have to go solo on this mission. Talk to you soon. Oh, and I also have a blister on the bottom of my big toe. Bye.”

As I hung up, Gia came out of the dressing room, giggling uncontrollably. “This is the ugliest shirt I’ve ever tried on.” She was wearing a peach shirt with large ruffles down the front. The ruffles moved up and down as she twirled around in front of me. I shook my head and laughed. “It looked better on the hanger,” she said.

“No, it didn’t,” I said.

As she headed back to the dressing room, a saleswoman told her how lovely she looked in the shirt. Obviously she was on commission.

A few minutes later, Gia came out with a pile of rejects. “I’m not sure where to put these,” she said. She handed me the clothes one by one, and I automatically began putting them back on hangers. Wait, what was I doing? I stopped and handed her everything back.

“You can hang them over there,” I said, pointing to a clothing rack that had half a dozen things hanging from it.

Gia walked over and hurled the clothes over the bar, dropping the hangers on the floor. “Maybe I should apply to work here over the summer. It might be fun,” she said. I was about to tell her that if she worked here, she’d be the one cleaning up those clothes, but I decided it would be more worth it to see her face when she found out. She walked through the store and found a rack that she’d missed the first time around.

If I was going to bring up Jason, now was the time. I needed to lead up to it very slowly. I had to be like a series of stealth missiles quietly soaring overhead ready to explode on her when she least expected it. I started by asking her how everything was in school, which seemed subtle. She gave me a noncommittalfineand moved on to a rack she’d already scoured, as if it were the first time she was seeing the clothes. While she was distracted, I asked how her friends were doing. Again, I got a noncommittal “fine.” I hated that word,fine. It gave you no real information. I still used it with my mother. Gia began to ogle a shirt. I looked at the price tag and almost had a heart attack. “Do you like that?” I inquired, as if a hundred dollars for a shirt was something we did every day.

“Yeah, but it’s really expensive.”

“It is, but I can think about it.”

“Really?” she said giddily, her eyes lighting up.

I was never going to pay that much for a T-shirt, but I wanted her to talk to me the way she used to. It was not my best parenting moment. “How’s Jason?” I held my breath and waited.

She held on to the shirt as if it were a newborn baby that she was afraid would slip from her grasp. “He’s good.”

Goodwas movement. I went in for the kill. “Are you guys doing something this weekend?”

She moved to the jewelry counter, and I followed her. “Yeah, he wants to take me to see some new horror movie.”

“Did you tell him horror movies give you nightmares?”

“Of course not. Besides, I don’t get nightmares anymore.” Three months ago, she wanted to sleep in my bed after watchingGremlins. She continued, “He loves horror movies. He takes all his girlfriends to see them.”

“Has he had a lot of girlfriends?” I tried to sound as though whatever she said was no big deal.

“I don’t know.” She tried on a choker and looked at herself in the mirror. “He dated a bunch of girls from school this year.”

A bunch of girls? School had only been in session five months. The only sane part of my brain was saying,Don’t lose it right now. This could be one of those teachable moments. I told her that relationships should be give-and-take, and if he was a good guy, he’d understand if she wanted to do something else, but all she cared about was whether he liked her. Red flags were waving wildly in my head, and I wasn’t doing a good job of hiding my displeasure.

“Why are you getting all crazy?” She put the choker back.

“I’m not getting crazy. It’s just that right before I met your father, I dated someone who decided I needed to learn about wine to be sophisticated. Even though I was only nineteen and didn’t like wine back then, I still did what he wanted. I learned about all the different types, how to harvest the grapes, and how to properly taste it. Before I found the confidence to tell him to take a hike, he dumped me for a girl he thought was more refined. They were married until he found out she was refined with every guy she met.”