The Corner of Bitter and Sweet Read online

  “ANNABELLE! OVER HERE!”

  “Annabelle, how does it feel to have to come bail your mom out of jail in the middle of the night?”

  “Annabelle, do you think this is because her career has totally tanked since she left the show, or was she always a lush?”

  Okay, that was just wrong. As much as I tried to follow my Thou shalt not look paps in the eye mantra, I turned to see which one had asked that last question. Just in time to see Ben pull up all five feet eleven of himself as if he was going to take a swing at the guy.

  Despite the fact that he drove a fancy car and lived in a million-dollar, famous-architect-designed house, Ben was a hippie at heart. He was Buddhist Lite and not into violence, but when people said mean things about Mom, something kicked in and he got all macho. “Just ignore them,” I murmured, pushing our way through the crowd. He settled down, and we walked through the doors of the police station.

  Each flash of the paps’ cameras was a reminder that the truth about my mother—the one that I had tried so hard to hide—was about to become public.

  Books by

  ROBIN PALMER

  Cindy Ella

  Geek Charming

  Little Miss Red

  Wicked Jealous

  For younger readers:

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 1: Girl vs. Superstar

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 2: Sealed with a Kiss

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 3: Vote for Me!

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 4: Take My Advice!

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 5: For Better or For Worse

  SPEAK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit www.penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

  Copyright © Robin Palmer, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  CIP DATA IS AVAILABLE

  ISBN 978-1-101-60862-3

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Nicole Dintaman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Immense gratitude, as always, to my editor Jennifer Bonnell, who never fails to get my characters . . . and me. Huge thanks to Eileen Kreit and Kristin Gilson at Penguin and Tina Wexler and Kate Lee at ICM for their ongoing support. Special thanks to Arianne Lewin, who initially helped me flesh out this idea. And, finally, to all those who have shared their experience, strength, and hope with me through the years.

  For more information about Alateen, please visit http://www.al-anon.alateen.org.

  Contents

  Also by Robin Palmer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  “Santa Monica Police Department” is not a popular check-in destination on FourSquare at L’École—the private school in Brentwood, California, full of Hollywood royalty, where I’m a junior.

  Especially at 4:15 a.m., which is where I found myself on Mother’s Day morning, staring at a ripped vinyl chair and wondering whether it was okay to swipe at it to remove any of the germs that had accumulated from the various butts that had been there before me, or whether that would make my assorted neighbors in various stages of consciousness peg me as some fancy white girl as they waited for their mothers or whoever they knew who was behind bars there.

  “Stay here,” ordered Ben when he deposited me in front of the bank of chairs. My mother’s entertainment attorney, Ben was the closest thing to a dad I had. Mostly because I never knew my biological father. My mother had gotten pregnant with me during a two-week stand when she was twenty-six; then she’d used the money the guy gave her for an abortion to buy a pair of Prada wedges at the Barneys Warehouse sale. Ben wrinkled his nose at the stench of stale cigarette smoke and burned coffee. “But try not to breathe too much.”

  Not a problem, I thought as he walked away. Not because I was worried about getting lung cancer from secondhand smoke and dying young because my life was so awesome. It was because over the last year, ever since People cover girl Janie Jackson, aka four-time Emmy Award-winner for Best Actress in a Comedy Series, aka my mother, had walked away from the hit sitcom that had made her so famous that women at Supercuts all around the country asked for “the Janie,” breathing was becoming harder and harder to do.

  Splitting the difference, I sat down with just the end of my butt on the chair and tried to avoid the stare of the African American woman down the row wearing a faded Beyoncé shirt and stretched-out jeggings.

  Finally, I flashed her a smile. “Hi.” Thou shalt be nice to everyone or risk being called a bitch by gossip bloggers and tabloids was one of the Ten Commandments when you were a Daughter Of Someone Famous.

  The woman raised an eyebrow before crossing her arms and glaring at the floor.

  Things to keep in mind when waiting to bail out your mother from jail. Number one: small talk in police precincts is not necessary.

  A few chairs down from her, a Hispanic guy in his twenties who was pretty hot snored away. I took out my iPhone and clicked on the Notes icon so I could continue my list of other things to keep in mind if I ever found myself in this situation again.

  I was a big list girl. They made me feel safe. At first, I just made them in my head as I was lying in bed before going to sleep. I started about a year after the series began, when I noticed Mom was drinking more than usual. The lists were pretty random back then: things I had eaten that day; what I had watched on television; what I would name a kid if I ever had one. But recently, in the last few months, it felt important to start writing the lists down. There was something about seeing the words on paper or a screen that made me feel a little safer; a little more grounded; a little more tethered to the earth, like I wasn’t going to blow away. First in a few Clairefontaine graph notebooks I had gotten at Monoprix (the French equivalent of Target, my favorite store) during the Let’s-celebrate-the-fact-that-for-the-first-time-in-seven-years-I-don’t-have-to-go-to-work-on-Monday! Paris trip that Mom had booked after she left the show. When I had filled those up—all written with a Pilot Super Fine SW-R Razor Point II Marker Pen (they looked better and more official when written with a Super Fine versus a regular Razor Point II)—I started using my iPhone for the lists. (Not only were the Super Fines difficult to find, but the
y were also expensive.) I preferred the notebooks to the iPhone—something about the shiny covers made the lists a little less pathetic and a little more elegant—but it was easier to pass as normal with the smartphone. As if, instead of listing the people to call in case my mother fell into an alcohol- and prescription-drug-induced coma, I was jotting down must-have spring accessories or something.

  Trying not to cringe at the string of drool that had begun to dribble out of the sleeping guy’s mouth (from “hot” to “not” in seconds flat), I clicked on one of the lists I had made a few days earlier during gym class, after using the excuse of period cramps to get out of volleyball for the third week in a row.

  THINGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL SAFE

  Lists

  Most chain stores, i.e., Targets, Walmarts, 99 Cent Stores. Basically any store where, if I wanted, I could buy a Diet Coke with Lime, a pair of pajamas, and a lawn mower. (Maybe I couldn’t get a lawn mower at the 99 Cent Store, but I could get a baby Jesus action figure.)

  The rubbery plastic smell of the inside of a Barbie’s head. I have one stashed in a box in the back of my closet—the entire Barbie, not just the head, so that I don’t come across as some sort of Barbie serial killer. When I’m feeling nervous, I just pop the head off, take a whiff, and then pop it back on.

  The smell of Play-Doh. Which, when I’m feeling really nervous, I have been known to huff from the can.

  My camera. When it comes to talking about how I feel about something, I often find myself rendered mute, and photos help me to express things I can’t put into words.

  Ben.

  So basically, a perfect day for me would be a trip to Target with Ben and my camera, where I would buy a Barbie and some Play-Doh.

  Sitting in the lobby of the Santa Monica Police Department in the middle of the night? Not on the list.

  Luckily, I had one of those mini Play-Doh cans in my purse. I got up and headed for the ladies’ room, which, from the smell of it, hadn’t been cleaned since about 2002. With one hand on the door to hold it closed (the lock was broken, and although as far as I knew huffing model clay wasn’t a crime, I didn’t want to take any chances), I took three quick sniffs, holding the smell in my lungs for a bit the way I had seen kids do when they smoked pot. I waited for the relief to kick in—the feeling that everything was okay, and I was just overreacting—but it didn’t come. All that happened was that my foot slipped on some mysterious substance next to the toilet and made me drop the lid of the Play-Doh can in the toilet.

  Once back in my chair, balancing on my left butt cheek, I closed my eyes to try to bring up the vision of myself walking into Target. I tried to conjure up the soft whoosh of the automatic doors, but I couldn’t—maybe because of the stream of angry Spanish that was coming from over near the vending machine along with the sound of someone pounding on it. So I switched gears and instead tried to go back in time a few hours and hear the soft trickle of the fountain that lived outside my bedroom window and often served as a sort of aural sleeping pill on the nights I was really worried instead of just kind of worried about my mother. The really expensive antique fountain from China that Mom’s decorator had insisted she buy because it was good feng shui and would protect us from bad things.

  The one that, given the fact my mother had been booked for drunk driving as she sped the wrong way down the Pacific Coast Highway, was obviously defective.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was nothing about the forty-eight hours leading up to my balancing on a germy ripped vinyl chair that made me think that life as I knew it was about to be over.

  That Friday had been a typical one.

  TYPICAL FRIDAY IN MY LIFE PRE–ARMAGEDDON

  Wake up.

  Make sure Mom is still alive and hasn’t choked on her own vomit or accidentally overdosed on Ambien or Klonopin, two of the many prescription-drug bottles she keeps on her nightstand.

  Throw on silky Indian-y shirt that I sneak from her closet while she’s passed out because it’s Friday, which means I don’t have to wear the itchy navy-blue L’École school uniform that makes me look like a flight attendant.

  Text Mom to get out of bed as I listen to my best friend Maya go off on our other best friends Olivia and Sarah during the drive to school in her powder-blue BMW convertible. She was pretty sure they were total homophobes, as evidenced by the fact that ever since Maya announced she was a lesbian, the two of them wouldn’t get undressed in front of her in gym class.

  Call Mom during lunch to see if she is out of bed or if this is one of her depressed days.

  Realize from her groggy voice that it’s one of her depressed days.

  Make her promise to be out of bed and showered and dressed by the time I get home and to please call her psychiatrist to see if he can up her meds to deal with the depression.

  Hold the phone away from my ear as she yells at me that she’s not depressed—she’s just tired—and there’s a difference. (Mom gets very upset when anyone brings up the D-word. You would’ve thought they were accusing her of drinking too much. Which, you know, she does.)

  Rinse and repeat.

  Ever since Mom had left the show in order to be a big movie star, only to not have that happen because she ended up doing romantic comedies so stupid that even Jennifer Aniston and Katherine Heigl turned them down, she had gotten more and more “tired.” Tired to the point that sometimes her hair went unwashed for so long it left grease marks on the couch pillows. Tired to the point that I would hear her crying into her pillow through her closed bedroom door. Tired to the point that I had stopped making a hash mark on the Ketel One vodka bottle in the freezer to compare it to the one I had made the night before with a Sharpie because she was going through them so fast. (Semi-useless bit of trivia: because of the condensation from the freezer, Sharpies are the only thing that work.)

  That Friday, I held my breath when I walked into the house after school, not knowing what I’d find. But when I heard the TV on in the den, I relaxed a little. She was out of bed—that was progress.

  “Bug? Is that you?” Mom called out. Bug was Mom’s nickname for me because of the way I apparently flailed my arms and legs in my crib when I was a baby.

  I flinched. It probably wouldn’t have been noticeable to most people, but I could hear a slight slur in her voice. Dogs and their extra-sensitive hearing had nothing on me and my ability to tell from just one word when someone was wasted.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Come say hi,” she said.

  I cringed. Mom was sprawled on the white slipcovered couch in a black silk nightgown and a ratty pink chenille robe, a toe sporting chipped red polish peeking through the L.L. Bean slippers she had had since I was little. As if that wasn’t bad enough—and it was—she was eating gherkin pickles straight from the jar. The sight was not exactly in line with the elegant-yet-inviting-beach-house-chic decor that Architectural Digest had written about in the cover article about our house a few years earlier.

  When I got to my room, I was going straight to my closet for the Play-Doh. The blue kind because for some reason it gave off the strongest, most calming odor.

  With a pickle between her fingers like a cigarette, my mother opened her arms. “Come give me a hug,” she demanded.

  I sighed. And the Barbie’s head. Definitely needed some of that. Trying to say no would get me nowhere. Even when she was drunk—especially when she was drunk—Mom had a way of getting what she wanted.

  I walked over and leaned down so I could be swallowed up by her, sucking in my breath and holding it so I didn’t have to smell the alcohol or BO. I looked at the ninety-two-inch plasma TV. “Are those . . . kittens?”

  Mom nodded as she pushed me away and began to crunch on a pickle. “Uh-huh. It’s this show called Too Cute,” she said with her mouth full as she fished another pickle out of the jar. “Kittens are so . . . life-affirming. I wonder if the
re’ve been studies that show that they raise your serotonin level.” She turned to me. “What do you think, Bug? Do you think we should get a kitten?” Her eyes got all misty. “You know, when you were a baby, before I started calling you Bug, I used to call you ‘puppy.’”

  That didn’t even make sense. But when Mom was drinking, lots of things didn’t. I wasn’t sure there was enough Play-Doh in the world to fix this.

  “You promised you were going to be dressed when I got home,” I said.

  “I am dressed. This nightgown, Bug? It’s La Perla.” She sniffed. “Forgive me for wanting to relax a little after spending eight years working my ass off.” She hiccuped. “Excuse me.”

  I shook my head. “And you wonder why I never want to have people over anymore,” I muttered under my breath as I stomped back to my room. Back when Mom was on the show, my house was ground zero for hanging out, but over the last few months I found myself constantly coming up with excuses as to why I couldn’t have friends over: The painters are there. The kitchen is being retiled. It’s raining. It’s sunny. It’s Tuesday.

  “I’m your mother, Annabelle,” she called after me. “I will not let you speak to me like that!”

  She was in luck. I wasn’t interested in speaking to her, period.

  I was in the middle of a new list titled Ways to Support Myself If I Ever Emancipate Myself and Move Out (I knew you needed a master’s degree to be a psychologist and I hadn’t graduated high school yet, but I put it down as an option anyway) when there was half a knock on my door before it opened. A closed door meant nothing to Mom. Even if you were in the bathroom on the toilet.

  “I know you’re mad at me, but I needed to share something with you.” She sniffled. It was a good thing she hadn’t gone to the trouble of putting makeup on today, because if she had, it would have been all cried off.