The Last Good Day of the Year Read Free Page A

over—here she comes.” Mike looks disappointed by his wife’s arrival at the back door.
    â€œI told you to leave them alone until this afternoon, Mike. I
told
him to leave you alone until later,” Susan explains, giving my mom a quick half hug.
    â€œDon’t worry about it. We know how excited he gets.” My mom winks. I wonder if she realizes how awkward other women feel when she starts oozing charm. Even Susan probably doesn’t appreciate it.
    Susan was always pretty—not beautiful—and I know my momwill say later that her old friend has “let herself go,” as though it’s the worst thing a woman can do. Today, Susan wears a shapeless yellow dress that’s seen the inside of a washing machine a few dozen times too many. Her brown hair is starting to turn gray. She’s tried to cover it up with a bad dye job—she probably does it herself in front of the bathroom mirror—and there are narrow bands of color starting at her scalp that vary slightly in shade and intensity, like a tree’s rings. She still teaches music at the local high school, and looks every bit the part.
    If you look at them side by side, my mom and Susan don’t seem like they could ever be friends. My mom has always been a high-maintenance kind of woman when it comes to her looks. She was an honest-to-goodness beauty queen in her younger days. She won the title of Little Miss Pittsburgh at age twelve; at seventeen she was Miss Pennsylvania; and by nineteen she was a top-ten finalist at the Miss America pageant. She went right from appearing at local supermarket openings and corporate ribbon-cutting ceremonies to marrying my dad. That wasn’t the order in which she’d planned to do things—she’d wanted to go to college, then get married, and then have kids, which was the way everyone was supposed to do it. But things don’t always go according to plan; crazy how that works, isn’t it? She got pregnant, got married, and had Gretchen three months later. She liked being a mom so much that she hung up her sash and tiara for good, but her looks stuck around. Even now, she’s a knockout at forty-eight, prettier than I could ever dream of being. Men still stop her on the street sometimes and say, “Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Christie Brinkley?” She loves the attention. She’ll bat her eyelashes and pretendto get flustered, but she doesn’t let them get the wrong impression: “That’s so sweet. My husband says the same thing all the time.”
    â€œOh. My. God. This cannot be Sam,” Susan says, clapping a hand to her mouth. “Little Samantha? Is that really you?” When she goes to smooth my hair with her fingers, I instinctively duck away.
    â€œSam, honey, don’t be shy.” My mom then talks about me as if I’m not even in the same room. “Samantha is our little misfit right now. She’s very underwhelmed by adolescence. She was such an early bloomer—”
    â€œ
Mom
!”
    â€œHa! And she’s so shy! I don’t know where she gets it from. She spent the entire car ride with her nose buried in a book. She loves to read. Don’t you, Sam?”
    â€œSharon. You’re embarrassing her.” My dad gets it. He never does much about it, but he gets it.
    â€œAw, relax, Sam.” Mike Mitchell slings an arm around my shoulders. “You can’t be shy around us! Hell, I’ve seen you naked!”
    â€œ
Michael
. Jesus. Could you not?”
    â€œSusie-Q. Gimme a break. She’s a gorgeous young woman.” He takes a step back to get a better look at me. “We all get older, Sam, but not everyone gets better. You’ve got yourself a winning lottery ticket when it comes to looks, though.”
    â€œHa, ha, ha!” My mom actually tosses her head back as she laughs, showing everyone her mouth full of silver fillings. “You’re so