A Clean Break

Sabine’s thumb worried the cover of the smooth, black notebook in her hands. It had been a gift from her father, a symbol of his acceptance—or perhaps just resignation—that his daughter was a writer. The way her mother had eyed it with those pinched ridges around her nose said she clearly had not approved of this gesture.

The older woman tapped her lacquered nails on the table, not the rhythmic clicking of one lost in thought, but more of a sporadic flurry of pecks from a dream-eating harpy. “Have you fixed your dishwasher yet?”

“No, but that’s fine. It’s cheaper to do them by hand.”

“Are you keeping up with your bills? Eating?”

Sabine’s thumb moved faster and faster. She tried to maintain eye contact, but her mother was surely part gorgon: every glance turned Sabine to stone. She kept her eyes on the table instead. “Sure.”

Her mother scoffed and took a long drink of coffee.

Sabine waited.

“Perhaps you should ask for money for those things, instead.”

“Mom, look, I know you don’t approve of my career choices—”

“It’s not a career.”

She raised her voice over her mother’s. “But it’s a very prestigious program. They only take a tiny percentage of applicants, and they chose me. Aren’t you even a little bit proud of that?”

People were staring now with a range of expressions from curious to amused to annoyed. She let her eyes slide over them. They weren’t who she needed to convince.

Those nails started pecking at the table again, and her mother stared out the window across the café. “Your sister is taking the bar this spring.”

Tears pricked at the corners of Sabine’s eyes, and she blinked hard to fight them back. How did this woman always make her feel so small? On the page Sabine was witty, omniscient, even powerful. She could create characters like Adelia, who was never left fumbling for the perfect comeback. Or Lilith who would have walked away from this conversation five years ago. But no. Her mother raised her nose just ten degrees higher so she could peer down the length of it and Sabine was reduced to submissive silence.

How would Lilith deal with her mother? Probably assassinate her. She flinched and reached for her water, but she’d already drunk it all.

“See there you go again, off in your own world, aren’t you? It’s time to wake up, Sabine, and do something worthwhile with your life. Or at least get married while you’re still pretty.”

Sabine tossed the notebook into her satchel and stood, pressing her hands up through her hair. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”

“Sit down, you’re making a spectacle of yourself,” her mother said, her voice languid and easy and commanding all at once.

She sat.

Her mother cleared her throat. “Listen, honey. If you want to go to school, your father and I would be glad to pay for it.”

Sabine’s hand fluttered to her chest, grasping at her heart. She could have sworn it had stopped beating. “Really? Mother, I don’t know what to say. Thank you so much. I—”

Her mother held up her hand, sipping her coffee with her eyes closed. When she opened them again, Sabine’s heart sank. There was a sort of masochistic pleasure dancing in them. “You had excellent grades, and I’m sure we can get you into a very lucrative program. How about an MBA? You could go to work with your father when you’re done.”

Sabine opened her mouth and then closed it again, unable to pull in enough breath to speak. What had possessed her to ask her mother, of all people, to give her money for writing? As if the scribbled words in her notebook held any sort of power. If they had, wouldn’t she be successful by now? Wouldn’t her parents have accepted her by now?

“I have to use the washroom.” She rose unsteadily to her feet and walked to the back of the café.

Bee-lining for the sink, she leaned over and took several deep, long breaths then splashed water over her face. She looked up into the mirror. Her masacara had begun to run, and she grabbed some paper towels to dab away the black smudges. Great. Now her mother would think she’d been crying. And her mother hated when she cried. Said it made her look weak. As if that wasn’t how she liked her to act in the first place.

She hauled herself up on the counter and hugged her knees. A collection of overstuffed armchairs sat pompously in the corner of the room. She briefly considered camping out in one and making her mother wait for her, but she was too miserable to sit comfortably. She eyed the toilet stalls, noting their tall, floor-to-ceiling doors, and she slipped off the counter to escape inside one. The door clicked shut and she was surprised to see a television embedded in the back of the door. Leave it to her mother to demand she meet her all the way across town at a ritzy café with TVs in the can just so she could rub it in her face that her sister was going to be a lawyer while she slowly starved to death in their grandmother’s old bungalow.

That familiar pricking started up again at the corners of her eyes and she ground her teeth in frustration. She would not cry in the bathroom.

“Come on, Adelia, what would you do?” she whispered to herself.

Her undergraduate professor said she had a knack for “building empathy,” so she’d written a plea to her mother in her notebook. When spoken out loud, words always failed her, but flowing from a pen, they took on a life of their own. So she’d let her characters take over, explaining why her writing was important, how she’d seen it impact others, the connections it could build. But the moment her mother had seen the book, her had expression had decimated any notions that Sabine’s vulnerability would be embraced. In the end, she hadn’t even cracked the spine.

Adelia wouldn’t have been so nervous. Adelia would have read it while standing on the table for the whole café to hear.

Maybe it was time to be a little more like Adelia.

Her hands balled into fists at her side. It wasn’t too late.

She unlatched the door to the stall, moving slowly, gathering courage with every step.

Her mother was waiting outside the bathroom with her satchel, and she dangled it at Sabine. “There you are. What took you so long? Never mind. It’s getting late, and I need to be on my way. I suppose you had to take a bus again, didn’t you?”

“I—” She was caught off guard again, as always.

“Well hurry up. I really don’t have the time, but I’ll drive you home.” She dumped the bag into Sabine’s arms and strode toward the door.

It took Sabine a moment to scramble after her. “Mom, wait. I wanted to show you something before we leave.”

The bell over the door tinkled as they passed beneath it, but her mother did not slow down. She kept her steady march across the parking lot, her heels rapping out a rhythm on the pavement. “I was going to help your sister with her studying tonight,” she said over her shoulder. “You’ll have to show me in the car.”

Sabine stopped walking, refusing to be waylaid. She wanted to read this to her before she lost her nerve. She rifled through her satchel, but the book was nowhere inside. Hadn’t she thrown it in there? “Mom, wait. I think I dropped my notebook.”

She turned to go back inside the café, but her mother grabbed her wrist and tugged her backward.

“No, Sabine, leave it behind. It’ll make for a clean break.”

Her mother’s voice was firm, authoritative. The type of voice that demanded Sabine drop her eyes and mutter, “yes ma’am.”

But not Adelia. Not Lilith. And what were they if not pieces of her own soul?

She yanked her wrist from her mother’s grasp and took a step back, full of certainty. “Did you take my notebook?”

The lines around her mother’s mouth drew together, furrowing as she puckered her lips.

“Give it back.” Sabine’s body shook, but mercifully her voice did not.

“I don’t have it.” She looked smug. It was the truth, then.

Turning on her heel, Sabine began to sprint across the parking lot.

“Sabine.”

Her mother said her name as if calling a dog to heel, but it got tangled up with the pounding in her ears and she kept running.

The door gave a mighty jangle as she burst through it, and a few pairs of eyes looked up and narrowed at her while she stood there panting, scanning the café for her notebook.

There. On the table next to her empty glass of water.

She wound her way through the tables and scooped it up, her hand closing around the smooth, familiar warmth of the cover. The heft of it was off, and it felt bulky in her palm. She turned it so she could see what had made it so awkward. Something nearly an inch thick had been crammed between the pages. Her heart began to pound. Had someone read it?

Tugging off the elastic closure and opening it to the page where she’d written her plea, she saw a thick, white envelope. She pulled it open to look inside and immediately shut it again, scanning the room. Couples chatting, groups laughing in corners, a smattering of people with their heads bent over computers or notebooks of their own. No one met her eyes or spared her so much as a glance.

She peered back inside the envelope.

Money. More money than she’d ever seen in one place. A whole thick wad of hundred-dollar bills.

She ran her thumb through them, their musty smell wafting up to tickle her nostrils. She sat down in the chair so she could count them out; there were two hundred. Twenty-thousand dollars. Who on earth had shoved twenty-thousand dollars into her book?

A note had been stuck to the last bill, and she pulled it out with trembling hands. “Don’t give up,” it said. “You’re closer than you know.”

Her eyes stung afresh, and this time she let the tears fall.