“If you had only listened to Granny, you could be off to college, too,” Audrey chided as gently as she could.
“If I wanted a degree in nursing or teaching or business, yeah.”
“Those are perfectly respectable careers.” Audrey pushed the pantsuit into her daughter’s hands.
Cara groused. “But they’re not me. I want to be on stage. I want to sing. Dance—”
“Sleep on a grate in Center City.”
“Mom!”
“I never said you couldn’t sing and dance and get on stage.”
“Granny did.”
“Mm-hm. Because she don’t want you sleeping on that grate. And neither do I. You need a fallback.”
“And scrubbing old people toilets in Mason Hall is a fallback?”
“Until you find something better. And maybe it’s enough. But I can’t have you melting into my sofa with no job, no career, no hope. So until you make a plan, Mason Hall it is.”
Audrey had given her daughter a week after graduation to enjoy her newfound freedom, then snatched it away with a word from her sometimes-friend Beatrice. Cara’s classmates had gone to Temple or CCP, but her friends—what few she kept up with—had mostly entered a desperate post-pandemic workforce where jobs were plenty but living wages scarce. A few of them had already made the arrest columns in the Inquirer or the Daily News. One was already in his grave.
“You can’t do an interview dressed like a hobo,” Audrey insisted.
“It’s ragamuffin,” Cara corrected acidly. “Check with Granny.”
“Your grandmother just wants what’s best for you.”
She looked away so that her rolling eyeballs wouldn’t cause a fight. She was already treading on dangerous ground. “It’s just a part-time job. Housekeeping.”
“It’s still a job,” Audrey insisted. “At Mason Hall.”
“My jeans are fine for Mason Hall.” Some part of her had given up, willing to fulfill the ragamuffin description.
Audrey hauled her only child to the bedroom. “No. Beatrice says you could be a shoo-in for this. You leave nothing to chance.”
Now as she sat in the car, she found a new worry. “The torrential rain is going to dash Audrey Baker’s hopes,” Cara muttered.
Sheets of water battered the windshield, smearing her view. The red bricks and black shutters of Mason Hall, a mansion-turned-assisted living facility, were geometric splotches of color masked behind white and bright green streaks of young summer birch trees. The scene ebbed and flowed with the downpour.
Cara could not have felt more out of place, dressed in her mother’s second-hand navy pantsuit and battered pumps the color of mud. Well, that might actually be mud, thought Cara, as she reached down and brushed at her leg. It was a dash from their row home across the puddles to the ’83 Chrysler Malibu Audrey had inherited from her late father and that Cara, in turn, had come to own.
“Pappy’s car. Mama’s clothes. You really are a wreck.” She twisted around, searching the back seat for an umbrella. The jacket was tight where she wanted it loose; loose where she wanted it tight. No umbrella.
A shadow filled her driver’s side window. A rap on the glass. She turned to see the smiling face of an old man under an oversized red and white umbrella. She rolled the window down slightly.
“Can I help you?”
“Saw you pull in,” he said. “I’m guessing you’re short an umbrella?”
“Yeah.”
There was a twinkle in his eye. His hair was close cropped and gray. He smelled strongly of aftershave. His tie was wide and his topcoat old. He reminded her of pappy. “May I escort you inside?”
“Thank you,” she said and rolled up the window. He stepped back so she could exit, and together they braved the weather.
Nicanor Abbott 