Free Local Girls by Alice Hoffman Page A

this blind date, so my mother probably had reason to worry, especially since the guy was the ex-husband of Margot’s next-door neighbor. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and the man in question walked, talked, and breathed—what more could you ask for?
    â€œWell, you look great,” I told my mother, which was really the truth. Her hair was short and bouncy, and you’d never guess what she’d been through, how all summer she’d been so weak she could hardly get out of bed. When she left, I went into the kitchen to fix another sandwich, but Jason had eaten all the salami, so I stole two of the éclairs from the box in the fridge. Unfortunately, the cream inside tasted like glue.
    â€œWhat would you do if Terry got pregnant?” I asked my brother when he came into the room. I thought I was making idle conversation until I could go over and give Jill the address in New Jersey, but Jason went nuts. He accused me of spreading rumors, of listening to gossip and butting into his business.
    â€œIt was a hypothetical question,” I informed Jason when he had stopped shouting and sat down across from me. “Or so I thought.”
    Jason was wearing a white shirt and had forgotten to remove his Food Star name tag. He’d won every science award in the county, but here he was, sitting across from me in our kitchen, which still smelled like chocolate and flour.
    â€œTerry is driving me crazy,” my brother said. “All she wants is a commitment.”
    I understood. The capital C. The signature in blood. As if it meant anything. As if it ever could. As if fate couldn’t rattle and roll you however and whenever it pleased.
    Before I went over to Jill’s, I cleaned our kitchen. I used steel wool on the stove and mopped the floor twice. I scoured the sink, but it was pretty scratched up from those huge vats my mother and Margot had been using for Swedish meatballs.
    â€œWhat have you been doing?” Jill asked me when I got to her house. “You have dishpan hands.”
    She’d been waiting for me out on the front porch, and once I arrived we headed to the schoolyard, two blocks away, where we always went to talk.
    â€œWhen I live alone I’ll only use paper plates,” I said.
    â€œI want white china,” Jill told me. “Pure white with a gold band along the edge.”
    Spring was coming more slowly than usual that year; the forsythia came to bud, but waited to bloom. I thought of my mother, out on her date. I knew why she insisted on catering weddings. My mother still believed in true love. At this very instant, she was sitting across from a stranger in a rear booth of the steak house on the turnpike, wondering if it was happening to her right then and there. Was she falling for him as they ordered their salads? Were there stars in her eyes?
    â€œI bet I never get married,” I said as we opened the gate to our old playground.
    â€œOf course you will.” Jill had a dreamy look on her face. It was twilight and all the birds were singing.
    â€œNo,” I said. My hair was cut so short then that when a breeze came up behind us, the back of my neck became shivery. “I don’t think I ever will.”
    â€œThere’s someone for everyone,” Jill insisted.
    She was a romantic too. There was nothing you could do once a romantic was convinced fate was working in some mysterious way. I knew that for a fact. When I gave her the address my cousin Margot had scrawled, Jill smiled and placed it in her pocket, but I could tell she wasn’t interested. By then, she was already planning her wedding, the sort of affair that was much too elaborate for my mother and Margot to cater. There’d be a cocktail hour, with hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, and a sit-down roast beef dinner and a huge dessert table with elaborate pastries my mother and Margot had no hope of ever perfecting.
    I couldn’t help but think about the