Would it surprise you (whoever you are) to know that Peggy is the most complicated of my children? If she has fluttered into your orbit for a short amount of time, as her four fiancés have done (I liked the second guy well enough, but the rest were self-indulgent twats), your impression of her might include the following: pampered baby of the family, takes nothing seriously, shallow, out for a good time.
You would be...right.
But that’s because you’ve only been allowed to see the top layer.
Look closer.
Peggy is a Rubik’s Cube. Just when I think I’ve got one whole side fashioned into a solid red block, a white square twists into place and throws off everything. Where I could predict Aaron, Rita, and Belmont most of the time, Peggy would be the type to send me a selfie as she jumped from a plane, parachute strapped to her back.
After college, her unpredictable nature changed, however. It became more frantic. Less about having fun and more about…distracting herself from something with an adrenaline rush. I didn’t try hard enough to find out what high she was chasing and then the appropriate window grew smaller and smaller. I worried she might find my concern forced or, worse, phony.
Fuck. This is getting pretty heavy, isn’t it?
Bottom line: I sucked at momming. Thankfully, being mediocre in the parenting department didn’t preclude me from seeing beneath the caramelized top layer of Peggy’s crème brûlée. Someone took a fork and dragged it straight through the middle, leaving division among Peggy’s already split personalities.
Sweetness used to exist at the forefront, but now it battles for visibility among the other components, the hurt and confusion, and self-doubt.
Peggy the bombshell. Peggy the liar. Peggy the mediator. Peggy the grief-stricken. The angel. The devil. The baby. The old soul.
You never know what you’re going to get.
Especially now.
But look closer. She’s not what you’re expecting.
Once, when hanging a picture of Audrey Hepburn in her bedroom, Peggy had smashed her index finger with a hammer, leaving a permanent black spot beneath her fingernail shaped a little bit like George Washington’s silhouette on the quarter. She put on a coat of nail polish every day—usually red—to hide it.
She stared in confusion now at the nails she’d covered in varnish only this morning, while waiting for food at the drive-through. How could it be chipped already? The metallic taste in her mouth suggested she’d chewed off the polish, but she would have remembered that, right? George’s dark silhouette slowly turned his head and winked at her, so smug in his founding fatherness. Oh man, I’m losing it.
It was the sign that had gotten to her. Welcome to Ohio. They’d passed it a mile back and she’d been sparring with the urge to throw up ever since.
“Pull over, Bel.” Peggy shot forward in her seat, giving a series of taps on the back of her brother’s headrest. “Can you just pull over?”
Belmont’s eyes were steady on her in the rearview mirror, holding for a too-long handful of seconds, before he nodded, pulling the Suburban into the next rest stop. She tried to open the door before the vehicle even stopped rolling, but Belmont hit the lock button, as if predicting her move, earning the driver’s seat a frustrated kick. As always, her brother took his sweet time locating a space, allowing a family of three to pass, before parking and shutting off the ignition.
At the absence of the ever-present engine rumble, their third and final traveling companion, Sage Alexander, stirred, her mouth opening wide on a yawn. Peggy watched Belmont and Sage exchange a “good morning, oh, center of my gravity” look,