Free Girls In White Dresses by Jennifer Close Page A

mom acted like she’d been expecting her. Abby had never been able to shock her mom. Once, in college, Isabella had said, “Can you imagine if you had to tell your mom that you were pregnant?” She shuddered after she asked this and Abby made a sympathetic noise, but she couldn’t really relate. Abby could have told her mom that she’d been arrested for heroin possession while carrying on a lesbian affair, and she would have taken it in and then suggested that they talk about it.
    “So, will we still have the party then?” her mom asked. They were sitting at the kitchen table with their tea, and it took Abby a minute to realize that she meant the wedding. She and Abby’s father were never officially married, of course, so maybe she thought they just decided to skip the legal part and live together forever.
    “No, Mom,” Abby said. “No party, no wedding.”
    “So you and Matt are …”
    “Done. We broke up.” She nodded and blew on her tea.
    “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “That’s a shame.”
    Abby wanted her to scream or cry or jump on the table. Tears of frustration came to her eyes, and she shut them tightly.
    “Oh, sweet pea. Oh, Abby,” she said. “Come here.” Abby let her mother pull her onto her lap like she was a little girl. She cried for about two minutes and then felt like an idiot sitting on her mom’s lap, and so she got up and went back to her seat.
    “I’m fine,” Abby said. “It was for the best.”
    “Then this is the right thing to do,” she said.
    “Mom, I don’t think we’ll be able to get much money back,” Abby said. “It’s only three weeks away. I don’t know what they’ll do.”
    Her mom was already waving her hands at her. “That is not for you to worry about. Money is just money.” Abby wondered, not for the first time in her life, if her mom would still think that money was just money if she didn’t have so much of it.
    “I have to stay here for a couple of days while Matt moves his stuff out of the apartment,” Abby said.
    “Of course,” she said. “Do you need help with anything else?”
    “Not now,” Abby said. “But I have to start calling people soon, I guess, to tell them that the wedding is off. I guess that’s what I should do.”
    “I can do that,” her mom said. “These things happen all the time. No big whoop. We’ll get it all straightened out.”
    “Thanks,” Abby said. “Can I have a real drink?”
    “Sure, honey. Wine or vodka?”
    “Vodka,” Abby said. “I think this calls for vodka.”

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    The next morning, Abby walked downstairs to find her dad making eggs in the kitchen. He saw her and gave her a hug. “Your mom told me what happened, kiddo. I’m really sorry about that,” he said.
    “Thanks, Dad.”
    “Do you want some eggs? Sunny side up or scrambled?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Scrambled, I guess.”
    Her dad nodded and turned back to the stove. He whistled while he cracked the eggs and beat them with a fork. “If you like, you can help me feed the birds when you’re done,” he said as he put the plate in front of her.
    “Sure, Dad,” she said. She waited until he walked out of the kitchen, and then got up and scraped the eggs into the garbage.
    Abby put on rubber boots that were by the back door, and borrowed her mom’s winter jacket. Still in her pajamas, she slogged through the snow to the chicken coop. She thought about brushing her hair, but there was really no need to. She pushed open the door to the coop and smelled the coop smell of poo and bird dirt.
    “Dad?” she called.
    “Back here, kiddo.”
    She walked past the cages, wrinkling her nose at the dirty birds. Abby’s parents had started raising birds when she was twelve. “We eat so much poultry,” her mom explained. “And people are starting to talk about the way these birds are raised. This is much more humane, Abby. We know that the birds are fed right, and treated right.”
    Her parents didn’t kill the birds themselves.