The Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Read The Corner of Bitter and Sweet Online
Authors: Robin Palmer
“ANNABELLE! OVER HERE!”
“Annabelle, how does it feel to have to come bail your mom out of jail in the middle of the night?”
“Annabelle, do you think this is because her career has totally tanked since she left the show, or was she always a lush?”
Okay, that was just wrong. As much as I tried to follow my
Thou shalt not look paps in the eye
mantra, I turned to see which one had asked that last question. Just in time to see Ben pull up all five feet eleven of himself as if he was going to take a swing at the guy.
Despite the fact that he drove a fancy car and lived in a million-dollar, famous-architect-designed house, Ben was a hippie at heart. He was Buddhist Lite and not into violence, but when people said mean things about Mom, something kicked in and he got all macho. “Just ignore them,” I murmured, pushing our way through the crowd. He settled down, and we walked through the doors of the police station.
Each flash of the paps’ cameras was a reminder that the truth about my mother—the one that I had tried so hard to hide—was about to become public.
Books by
ROBIN PALMER
Cindy Ella
Geek Charming
Little Miss Red
Wicked Jealous
For younger readers:
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 1: Girl vs. Superstar
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 2: Sealed with a Kiss
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 3: Vote for Me!
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 4: Take My Advice!
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 5: For Better or For Worse
SPEAK
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit www.penguin.com
First published in the United States of America by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013
Copyright © Robin Palmer, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
CIP DATA IS AVAILABLE
ISBN 978-1-101-60862-3
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For Nicole Dintaman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Immense gratitude, as always, to my editor Jennifer Bonnell, who never fails to get my characters . . . and me. Huge thanks to Eileen Kreit and Kristin Gilson at Penguin and Tina Wexler and Kate Lee at ICM for their ongoing support. Special thanks to Arianne Lewin, who initially helped me flesh out this idea. And, finally, to all those who have shared their experience, strength, and hope with me through the years.
For more information about Alateen, please visit http://www.al-anon.alateen.org.
Contents
PROLOGUE
“Santa Monica Police Department” is not a popular check-in destination on FourSquare at L’École—the private school in Brentwood, California, full of Hollywood royalty, where I’m a junior.
Especially at 4:15 a.m., which is where I found myself on Mother’s Day morning, staring at a ripped vinyl chair and wondering whether it was okay to swipe at it to remove any of the germs that had accumulated from the various butts that had been there before me, or whether that would make my assorted neighbors in various stages of consciousness peg me as some fancy white girl as they waited for their mothers or whoever they knew who was behind bars there.
“Stay here,” ordered Ben when he deposited me in front of the bank of chairs. My mother’s entertainment attorney, Ben was the closest thing to a dad I had. Mostly because I never knew my biological father. My mother had gotten pregnant with me during a two-week stand when she was twenty-six; then she’d used the money the guy gave her for an abortion to buy a pair of Prada wedges at the Barneys Warehouse sale. Ben wrinkled his nose at the stench of stale cigarette smoke and burned coffee. “But try not to breathe too much.”
Not a problem
, I thought as he walked away. Not because I was worried about getting lung cancer from secondhand smoke and dying young because my life was so awesome. It was because over the last year, ever since
People
cover girl Janie Jackson, aka four-time Emmy Award-winner for Best Actress in a Comedy Series, aka my mother, had walked away from the hit sitcom that had made her so famous that women at Supercuts all around the country asked for “the Janie,” breathing was becoming harder and harder to do.
Splitting the difference, I sat down with just the end of my butt on the chair and tried to avoid the stare of the African American woman down the row wearing a faded Beyoncé shirt and stretched-out jeggings.
Finally, I flashed her a smile. “Hi.”
Thou shalt be nice to everyone or risk being called a bitch by gossip bloggers and tabloids
was one of the Ten Commandments when you were a Daughter Of Someone Famous.
The woman raised an eyebrow before crossing her arms and glaring at the floor.
Things to keep in mind when waiting to bail out your mother from jail. Number one: small talk in police precincts is not necessary.
A few chairs down from her, a Hispanic guy in his twenties who was pretty hot snored away. I took out my iPhone and clicked on the Notes icon so I could continue my list of other things to keep in mind if I ever found myself in this situation again.
I was a big list girl. They made me feel safe. At first, I just made them in my head as I was lying in bed before going to sleep. I started about a year after the series began, when I noticed Mom was drinking more than usual. The lists were pretty random back then: things I had eaten that day; what I had watched on television; what I would name a kid if I ever had one. But recently, in the last few months, it felt important to start writing the lists down. There was something about seeing the words on paper or a screen that made me feel a little safer; a little more grounded; a little more tethered to the earth, like I wasn’t going to blow away. First in a few Clairefontaine graph notebooks I had gotten at Monoprix (the French equivalent of Target, my favorite store) during the Let’s-celebrate-the-fact-that-for-the-first-time-in-seven-years-I-don’t-have-to-go-to-work-on-Monday! Paris trip that Mom had booked after she left the show. When I had filled those up—all written with a Pilot Super Fine SW-R Razor Point II Marker Pen (they looked better and more official when written with a Super Fine versus a regular Razor Point II)—I started using my iPhone for the lists. (Not only were the Super Fines difficult to find, but they were also expensive.) I preferred the notebooks to the iPhone—something about the shiny covers made the lists a little less pathetic and a little more elegant—but it was easier to pass as normal with the smartphone. As if, instead of listing the people to call in case my mother fell into an alcohol- and prescription-drug-induced coma, I was jotting down must-have spring accessories or something.
Trying not to cringe at the string of drool that had begun to dribble out of the sleeping guy’s mouth (from “hot” to “not” in seconds flat), I clicked on one of the lists I had made a few days earlier during gym class, after using the excuse of period cramps to get out of volleyball for the third week in a row.
THINGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL SAFE
- Lists
- Most chain stores, i.e., Targets, Walmarts, 99 Cent Stores. Basically any store where, if I wanted, I could buy a Diet Coke with Lime, a pair of pajamas, and a lawn mower. (Maybe I couldn’t get a lawn mower at the 99 Cent Store, but I could get a baby Jesus action figure.)
- The rubbery plastic smell of the inside of a Barbie’s head. I have one stashed in a box in the back of my closet—the entire Barbie, not just the head, so that I don’t come across as some sort of Barbie serial killer. When I’m feeling nervous, I just pop the head off, take a whiff, and then pop it back on.
- The smell of Play-Doh. Which, when I’m feeling really nervous, I have been known to huff from the can.
- My camera. When it comes to talking about how I feel about something, I often find myself rendered mute, and photos help me to express things I can’t put into words.
- Ben.
So basically, a perfect day for me would be a trip to Target with Ben and my camera, where I would buy a Barbie and some Play-Doh.
Sitting in the lobby of the Santa Monica Police Department in the middle of the night? Not on the list.
Luckily, I had one of those mini Play-Doh cans in my purse. I got up and headed for the ladies’ room, which, from the smell of it, hadn’t been cleaned since about 2002. With one hand on the door to hold it closed (the lock was broken, and although as far as I knew huffing model clay wasn’t a crime, I didn’t want to take any chances), I took three quick sniffs, holding the smell in my lungs for a bit the way I had seen kids do when they smoked pot. I waited for the relief to kick in—the feeling that everything was okay, and I was just overreacting—but it didn’t come. All that happened was that my foot slipped on some mysterious substance next to the toilet and made me drop the lid of the Play-Doh can in the toilet.