When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books to read now .TXT) 📗

I put the phone down, put out my cigarette. On the TV, they show the news footage of Teresa and Joe’s federal fraud sentencing in between scenes of their crying family members following the news on their phones. Teresa will serve a year while Joe takes care of their little girls, then he’ll “go away” and do four years when she gets out. It’s devastating. Some asshole reporter shouts at Teresa, “Have you been watching Orange Is the New Black?” as she walks with her husband, head down. They cut to Rosie, Teresa’s cousin, in the kitchen with her family reading a prayer off her phone: “God, my family needs your help today. Give us strength and compassion to help one another…”

“Help me too,” I say while she prays, reaching for my wine bottle, crying for Teresa.

Crying for myself.

London, September 2015

I put my tray with the Big Mac and large fries down on the table of the two-person booth in the back corner of McDonald’s. It’s a small, out-of-the-way McDonald’s, with counter space for some stools and a few booths near the registers within earshot of the fryer.

Charlotte’s on the other side of the table with her usual black coffee and today it’s one—no, two—apple pies. Something’s up.

“Charlie, you OK?” I ask her, sliding my way into the booth.

“No.” That was the answer I expected. That’s how we always opened our proceedings at McDonald’s.

“Bad night last night?” I ask, knowing what the answer will be as I unwrap my burger with morning sickness rolling over me. Looks like I have the kind that’s going to last the whole pregnancy and persecute me every day. Just like the Duchess. I try to draw strength from the Duchess.

“I was up every hour from 12 till 4, and then the baby was up for the day at 5:30.”

“Fuck. Didn’t Pete help?” I say, taking a sip of my lukewarm Coke.

“Oh, please. Fuck Pete.” She bites off half an apple pie, smearing the cinnamon sauce off her face with the back of her hand. “You look terrible,” she says.

“Threw up three times already today, and it’s only eleven,” I said, stuffing fries in my mouth.

“Fuck. Did Harry not do the school run for you today?”

“Oh, please. Fuck Harry.”

And now that we had gotten our reasons for being there out of the way and did our usual fuck-Pete/fuck-Harry routine, we sat there quietly, eating shitty food, each knowing how precious a moment of quiet here was for the other woman.

Even before I discovered that McDonald’s was the only food that I inexplicably didn’t throw up with my morning sickness, I would come here whenever I got tired of being the foreigner in the office and I couldn’t keep up with the banter and the references anymore. I just wanted to sit somewhere familiar and American, where I understood how shit worked. Except for the warm soda without ice. No ice in your drinks in England. It’s not like I loved McDonald’s in America. It’s just one of those things I do sometimes, like wearing a Yankees cap even though I never owned a baseball hat before or standing over the Oreos in the cookie aisle just to look at the logo.

About a year ago, when I was still new in the office, I had a whole conversation about how nice Scotland was with a client whose Liverpool accent I mistook for Scottish—and sidebar, if we can just be honest here, neither one of them can speak English in any kind of way that the outside world can understand so what the fuck’s the difference—and everyone in the office had a huge laugh at my expense. After performing my self-deprecating, wisecracking New Yorker routine and shrugging my shoulders good-naturedly to reaffirm everyone’s opinion that Americans are lovable but ignorant, I came here, to my usual booth. And there was Charlie. One of the brightest young associates at the firm.

I said, “Hey, are you OK?” She was sitting with two apple-pie wrappers on her tray and a chocolate-chip cookie on standby.

“No,” she said, not looking at me, sipping her coffee.

“Neither am I,” I said.

“Sit down, then,” she said, so I did. And we sat there, in silence, sharing our understanding of the sacredness of this place. The noise of the kitchen. The click of cups pressed against the soda dispenser. The smell of french fries. The bright lighting. We were here because we knew no one else from the office would ever find us. We worked in a liberal-leftie-Whole-Foods-Oxbridge-vegan-Guardian-reader kind of office. Everyone was friendly, kind and socially conscious but their deep concern for the problems of the proletariat meant that they could never lower themselves to actually crossing the threshold of a McDonald’s. But not me and Charlie because we’re both mothers. And we know what all mothers know, which is that—unlike husbands or your family or even your friends—McDonald’s is always there for you when you need it.

Charlie is five years younger than me. She has a three-year-old boy and a little baby. Unusually for a British woman, she went back to work after only three months of mat leave because she’s ambitious and driven. She’s also the only associate at the firm who isn’t white and I wonder how much that had to do with it too. Charlie’s half Jamaican, half French, tall, beautiful, smart and serious. She married the very English and very white Peter, who loves her very deeply, although, like everyone else’s husband, he never does enough and doesn’t know it.

I asked her once if she felt pressure to come back sooner because she was the only Black associate. Actually, first I said, “Uh, mixed race,” and then I said, “Uh, um, I mean bi-racial?” with a question in my voice and she said, defensively, “What do you mean by racial?” My face dropped and I went red before I got the joke and she laughed and said, with a smile, “Relax, darling, I’m Black. My mum’s