Free Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos Page B

mother-daughter Lilly Pulitzer dresses that made Clare and her mother roll their eyes at each other and say, “I wouldn’t be caught dead!” There was a bakery with fragrant breads and the world’s best birthday cakes (Clare’s mother had once gotten her one shaped like a castle), and a real Italian gelateria featuring flavors like persimmon, cinnamon, espresso, and rose. You could get pepperoni at the pizza place, Pizza by Edie, but you could also get toppings like caramelized onions, prosciutto, shaved manchego, and a sauce made of yellow heirloom tomatoes.
    Clare knew that even ordinary downtowns almost didn’t exist anymore, that they stood around like abandoned movie sets, falling apart, and here it was as though someone had taken an ordinary downtown, waved a magic wand, and made everything a little bit or several times better-made, fresher, lovelier, costlier than ordinary. If Clare had been a few years older, she might have felt guilty about this. At newly eleven, she just felt lucky to live in such a nice place.
    Naturally the diner Clare went into, called Lorelei’s Down Home, served diner food made beautiful and interesting. Clare had been there many times with her mother for dinner. Her favorite was turkey meatloaf stuffed with sharp provolone and fresh basil served alongside potatoes smashed with garlic and cream. Today, it was Sunday—brunch served all day. Clare recognized one of the waitresses, who nodded at her and pointed toward a window table set for two. On the table was a cream pitcher, a sugar bowl full of pale brown chunks of raw sugar, and a vase of gerbera daisies.
    When the waitress came with two menus, Clare said in a clear voice, “It’s just me.” The waitress paused for a moment, a puzzled line between her eyes, and Clare started to make up an excuse in her head. “My mother’s shopping, and I got hungry” is what she was about to say, but the waitress smiled and said, “Good enough, love. Coffee? Hot chocolate?”
    Clare smiled, “Hot chocolate, please.”
    After the hot chocolate arrived and Clare had given her order, a “Farmer’s Frittata” with smoked ham and buffalo mozzarella, and after Clare had asked the waitress if buffalo really lived on farms and the waitress had laughed, Clare got out her notebook and began to make a list. CLARE’S TO-DO LIST she wrote in bold letters at the top of the page. Under it, she wrote:

Call Josie’s mother. Ask for ride to and from school. Tell her M starting to work mornings. Tell her M not calling herself because she’s in the middle of cooking dinner. Be sure to call around dinnertime.
Bring note to school giving permission for me to go home with Josie’s mother. Type note on computer so only have to forge signature.
Call Jordan’s Grocery for delivery. Get pasta, sauce, canned vegetables, peanut butter, jam, butter, Quaker oats, things that won’t go bad. Get Parmalat milk in boxes. Can get bread and put in freezer. Maybe get cookies, too. Multivitamins to stay healthy. Ask them to deliver early in morning before I go to school. And before M wakes up.
Call Max. Cancel again, so she won’t see M sleeping on sofa. Say going out of town. If she asks where, say New York City. Don’t say seeing show because Max might ask about it.

    Between bites of frittata and sips of hot chocolate, Clare broke her life into twenty-four hour pieces and drew up a plan that she hoped would get her from one day to the next.
    And it worked. It worked more or less. There were a few glitches. Once, Sissy Sheehan, who ran her mother’s business, worried that her mother had been out of touch and had failed to return the phone call of a client they’d worked with for years.
    “It’s so not like her, Clare, you know? Is there something going on with her I should know about? I mean, you’d tell me if she were sick, right?”
    Yes, I know it’s not like the her that you know, but it’s exactly like the her she is now; yes, there’s something going