The One That Got Away Read Online Free PDF

though not sure what I was looking for. Thieves? Meth-heads on the hunt for drugs? A neighbor, already drunk from happy hour, mistaking our house for his and passing out on our couch? (That had actually happened once before; we gave him a cup of coffee and drove him home.)
    And then upstairs I heard voices and the sound of water running.
    “Jimmy?” I whispered as I crept up the steps, feet moving quietly on the worn runner.
    And then another sound, a high-pitched giggle. But this I recognized.
    As I opened the bathroom door, steam flowed out, revealing my daughter, Gloria, sitting on the toilet with a white towel wrapped tightly on her tiny frame and a second towel wrapped atop her head, framing her rosy-pink face. And standing just in front of her, someone even more sinister than a burglar, a desperate addict, or a drunken neighbor—my mother.
    Roberta Eleanor Owen DiSiano was not your typical grandmother, or your typical mother. Hell, she wasn’t your typical woman.At sixty-two years old, she had short, fluffy blond hair, layers of makeup, and long, dangly earrings that touched her shoulders. In the summer, she lived in tennis skirts and halter dresses, but on a cool fall day like today, she sported tight jeans, a fuzzy sweater, fur-trimmed boots, and plenty of turquoise and silver jewelry. Next to my tiny daughter wrapped in giant white towels, she looked like a slutty Eskimo hovering over the world’s smallest igloo.
    I had to admit Roberta looked good for her age—fit and firm and painted and plucked—but for decades now she had embarrassed me with her choice of attire. Day or night, her clothes were always a little too tight, a little too short. She said she dressed to match her “tiger spirit,” but I had no idea what that meant and wasn’t about to ask. All I knew was that she was desperate for attention: from men, from women, from bank tellers, from bartenders, from Gloria, from me, from anyone with a pulse.
    “What are you doing here?” I asked, catching my breath. “And what is Gloria doing with you?”
    “Relax, Abigail,” she said, her eyes not straying from the nail polish, the exact flame-red shade as her lips, she was carefully applying to my five-year-old’s toes. “I got off work early, so I thought I’d pick up Gloria from school and show her my new car.”
    “Mom, you can’t do that. They have rules,” I said, exasperated. “I have to let them know in advance if we change the pickup person.”
    “It’s just elementary school; it’s not the Pentagon.”
    Gloria chimed in, emboldened by her new nails and an hour spent with the tiger spirit—“Yeah, Mom, it’s not the Pentagong.”
    I closed my eyes and took a breath, trying to remain calm. “I really don’t want Gloria wearing nail polish, and you know this. She knows this. Mom, I wish you would respect—”
    “Well, us girls just have to look great on a Friday night, don’t we?”she asked, steamrolling over me, then turning back to her granddaughter. “And when we’re done we can go downstairs and eat ice cream and talk about boys!”
    “Eeeewwww,” shrieked Gloria, jumping off the toilet and racing out before I could say no to the ice cream, the nails, the fun.
    I reached in and turned off the shower, then started picking up Gloria’s discarded clothes.
    “Mom, how many times do I have to tell you? My life is
not
an episode of
Sex and the City
, and my five-year-old daughter is
not
one of your girlfriends,” I said. “I am not Miranda, Gloria is not Charlotte, even if
you
are Samantha.”
    “Of course not, Abigail,” she replied, her eyes locking with mine for the first time since I entered the room. “Even Miranda wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit.”
    After the kids were asleep, the dishes washed, and the laundry folded, I carried a cup of herbal tea up to bed. I padded carefully into the room, trying not to wake Sam, sleeping profoundly, as only a toddler could, just a few feet away. We kept his crib