Cody lifted both arms and shouted, “Mom said you’d laugh! Then I get my new iPhone!”
The room fell silent.
My sister Drew slow-clapped from beside the gift table. “Honestly, Maggie, you should thank him,” she said. “He made this boring little party memorable.”
I am Maggie Barrymore, forty-one years old, a divorced mother and owner of a small bookkeeping firm above a bakery on 86th Street. For six years, I had been covering the tuition for Drew’s three children at St. Catherine’s Academy. Five thousand three hundred fifty dollars every month, quietly, because Drew always had a crisis and I was always “the responsible one.” Thirty-two days earlier, I had also agreed to send her eight hundred forty dollars a month toward a loan so her car would not be repossessed. Mother’sDay gifts
My son wore clearance sneakers. Her children wore private-school uniforms paid for by me. That was the part no one in my family ever wanted said out loud.
I looked at Cody standing in my son’s cake, then at Drew’s pleased smile, and something inside me finally went still.
