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ask how this girl had lost her soul, and instead babbled
     enthusiastically about how right I was for the job. What I liked best about Rachel
     was her claim that my piles of prose and action-packed résumé had won her over. She
     didn’t even mention the fact that my mother was once the scariest gossip columnist
     Washington had ever known.
    For a couple of decades, my parents had been raising horses in Virginia, but in her
     former life my mom had penned the Washington Post ’s scandal sheet. She ruled the rumor roost even when she was dragged to Middleburg,
     but she grew out of it when people became “sober and boring.” Somehow she had managed
     to keep a friend or two in town, but her enemies probably outnumbered the allies.
     Once, when I was twelve, a woman pouredtwo gallons of milk on my mother’s head in a supermarket while screaming that she
     was a fat bitch who had ruined her marriage. It was extremely awesome and the exact
     moment I decided to become a writer.
    But I still appreciated the fact that Rachel was not explicitly hiring me for my mother’s
     golden Rolodex. Our interview was interesting. I was completely overdressed, even
     though I was interviewing for the Style section, but Rachel and her quick-draw mind
     seemed to like me anyway. And I liked her. She had a white streak in her hair and
     laughed at my nervously rehearsed jokes. She had me take a two-day writing test and
     meet with the higher-ups; she then called me to say, “Okay, welcome to Style. You
     start in three weeks.”
    Three weeks? Fantastic. I spent what would have been next month’s rent on a case of
     really good champagne, boarded a friend’s chopper to Sag Harbor, and did the naked
     lambada with a man named Dan (Stan, was it? Okay, Stan) for seventy-two hours. And
     then my time ran out. My New York years were over. After I had packed seven years
     of East Side living into boxes, I opened an email that read, “Why don’t you come in
     at 11 A.M. on October 15 and we’ll take it from there.” Eleven sounded perfectly civilized.
     I had worked 10 A.M. to 7 P.M. during my days at Town & Country and was happy to cut that down a smidge. A girl needs time to do glamorous things
     like groom her parents’ horses for pocket money and meet someone to have sex with.
    In a rented Chevy van packed to the brim with my shabby chic furniture and the free
     luxury goods I had amassed working in fashion journalism, I drove Beverly Hillbilly
     style behind the moving truck I had soundly rented. The pollution of Elizabeth, New
     Jersey, turned into the concrete skyways of the New Jersey Turnpike and then, finally,
     the cold, glistening water under the Delaware Bridge. When I crossed into Maryland
     and the Dixieside of the Mason-Dixon Line, I blew a goodbye kiss to the northern lights. And when
     my rented moving truck squished a raccoon three blocks from my parents’ house, I knew
     I was really home.
    In the twilight I could see my mother rushing out of the big wooden front door with
     the brass pineapple knocker to open the white gate onto the driveway. She had blond
     hair like mine, but hers had a hint of red in it thanks to the miracles of modern
     hair dye. It was perfectly straight at the top, curled under at the bottom and swishing
     across the thick roll neck of her white cashmere sweater. Both Payton and I were a
     little taller than her, having inherited our height from my father, Winston Brown’s
     side of the family, but my mother had the same pale—though slightly freckled—skin
     and lean limbs. She often liked to point out that at my age she weighed 114 pounds
     and didn’t I want to think about giving up my addiction to carbohydrates? I could
     hear her green Hunter boots crunching on fallen leaves and she waved energetically
     in my direction. That’s when it hit me. I was going to live with my parents.
    “Here you are! You penniless, squatting ingrate,” my mother said as she walked toward
     me with open