The After Party Read Online Free Page A

asleep in the home I’d known since birth, Joan next to me, lightly snoring (you wouldn’t think a girl like Joan would snore, but she did), when the doorbell rang. At first I thought it was my mother. I sat up in bed, disoriented, my mouth dry from the sweet white wine we’d drunk late into the evening. The line from the song we’d been listening to all fall circled my brain:
That’s when I’ll be there always, not for just an hour, not for just a day.
    Of course it wasn’t my mother. My mother was dead.
    â€œCece?” Joan sat up beside me. Her voice was slurred from sleep. She rested her warm cheek on my shoulder, and for a moment we were still. The doorbell rang again, but I made no move to stand. There was no one in the world I wanted to see. I just wanted to sit there, with Joan next to me, and forget all the things that awaited me. My mother’s lawyer had been calling to make an appointment. There were her things—things upon things upon things, Limoges boxes and antique perfume bottles and an endless wardrobe—to sort through. My father, at his permanent room at the Warwick, might as well have been in Switzerland. Hewas with his mistress, I knew. A woman named Melane, whom he would marry and take to Oklahoma as soon as the ink had dried on my mother’s death certificate. I didn’t blame him, but I didn’t want to see him, either.
    Joan rose at the third chime. “Let me,” she said, and picked up her robe from the floor.
    She returned a moment later with Mary, who surveyed the room, lifted the empty bottle of wine from my bureau, and made a face. Joan, out of Mary’s line of vision, imitated her, and I stifled a laugh.
    Mary was now the secretary of the Junior League; next year, my mother had said, she would be president. My mother didn’t understand Mary Fortier: Mary wasn’t beautiful, didn’t come from money, and yet she was powerful. A woman like Mary didn’t fit into my mother’s worldview. Mary should have been uncertain, full of doubt.
    â€œIt’s time to go,” Mary said. Of course I didn’t call her Mary. After I’d lived in her home for a few weeks she would tell me to call her by her first name, tell me that we no longer needed to stand on ceremony. But the offer didn’t strike me as genuine, so I avoided saying her name at all.
    I sat on the bed like a child and watched them sort through my things, nodded or shook my head when Joan held up a purse, a blouse, a pair of flats.
    â€œOf course we’ll come back later,” Mary said, “and pack up the rest, but this will do, for now.”
    I knew that I would never come back. Strangers would boxup my remaining possessions and bring them to me; everything else, except for the family Bible and my mother’s jewelry, would be sold at an estate sale.
    â€œFred’s day off,” Mary said, when she opened the driver’s-side door, which was what she always said when she drove. It might or might not have been true.
    Mary liked to drive, even though it was far more acceptable for a woman of her station to be driven.
    I got into the backseat, and Joan, instead of riding up front with her mother, sat next to me. I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until Joan touched my knee.
    We were turning onto Evergreen’s red gravel drive; I felt the crunch of the pebbles beneath the tires.
    â€œYour new life,” Joan said.
    â€œYes,” I said. “Thank you.”
    Joan laughed, but when she spoke, her voice was serious.
    â€œYou don’t ever have to thank me, Cee.”
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    A week later Joan convinced me to go out. I hadn’t been around anyone my own age besides her for months. Darlene, Kenna, and Ciela had come to my mother’s funeral, but I’d barely spoken to them.
    â€œIt’ll be good for you,” Joan said, dabbing on the lightest coating of