The Leftover Club Read Online Free

didn’t have time to pull my daughter from her 12-hour coma in time for the first day of school.
    I tried the knob, but it was locked. So I pounded harder. Finally the door was wrenched back and my fifteen-year-old daughter glared at me from under a mop of tussled black hair. “What is your malfunction, Mom? Geez!”
    “Today is the first day of school,” I reminded.
    “Duh!” she shot back. “I’m not a child. I can get myself ready for school, you know.”
    I glanced over her rumpled shortie pajamas and mussed hair. “No, I do not know,” I snapped. “Do we really have to dig out all the letters and emails I got from your teachers last year for failing to make your first and second classes?”
    “Whatever,” she grumbled before she turned away from the door. I glanced in her room, which looked like a set from a disaster movie. She waded through the clothes that littered her floor, both dirty and clean, as she made her way to the closet to dig out a suitable outfit for the first day of school. There was no thoughtful deliberation, she just grabbed a top and a pair of jeans, determined to make them look cute instead of the other way around.
    My lanky daughter was able to make that kind of choice. She was tall for her age, towering over my 5’ 7 frame. She had long ebony hair that obeyed her every command. She could wear it curly or straight, it didn’t matter. She looked like she stepped off a magazine no matter what she did.
    I envied her prowess.
    She was also slender, like her father. She had the necessary curves in all the right places, but as a natural athlete she was more focused on being toned than being thin. She had loved to run almost by the time she mastered walking, so her years of training made her lean and coltish.
    Our differences were so stark, I often wondered if she’d been switched at birth.
    She made being feminine and pretty look so effortless, I felt like I should give up on the whole woman thing, pick out a moo moo and get some curlers for my hair and just be done with it.
    I was just a mom, and if you asked Meghan, not a particularly good one. But she was fifteen, and contractually bound to hate everything I said or did just out of principle. “Do you need a ride?” I asked as I picked up the discarded laundry closest to the door. I didn’t necessarily have time to make good on my offer, but was at a loss these days on how to connect with my daughter.
    And it was always worse after she returned from spending the summer with her dad.
    “Erin is picking me up,” she dismissed without even looking at me.
    I sighed as I watched her approach. “I guess I’ll see you tonight.”
    She shrugged. “Maybe.” In fifteen-speak, that meant I’d be lucky to see her before curfew. Despite her surly behavior, she generally wasn’t disobedient. She got good grades, she made it to class on time more often than not, and she had managed to get to the grand ol’ age of 15 without getting pregnant or arrested.
    In my book that counted as a win.
    “Want me to pick something up on my way home? How do you feel about Thai?”
    “We’ll probably go for pizza after school,” she said.
    I nodded. “Do you need money or anything?”
    “Dad gave me plenty,” she said with a direct look of pure loathing. She didn’t add that he had paid for her clothes and was going to buy her a car and a million other things I had to scrimp and save to satisfy her insatiable appetite for more. She always seemed to want what she didn’t have. And when she got it, she just wanted more. I had never quite instilled in her an attitude of gratitude, to be blessed for those things she did have.
    Perhaps it was a lesson I needed to learn myself. I spent most of my time divvying up my income between several savings accounts to ensure that the next time things went bad I was better prepared for it. Yet the numbers in the account were never enough, because there was just no telling what the next bad thing would