“Oh, that’s good to know. She’s so happy about that. Now honey, we’re almost at half an hour. Do you have more questions for me? Do you want me to stay on the line with you?”

Now Diandra was walking back to the staircase and Ruby watched her go. The house was so old. It had belonged to her grandparents, and her grandfather’s parents even farther back, and though there’d been changes, wallpaper and paint and a wall-to-wall carpet in the living room that was supposed to be beige, there was still old stenciling on the walls in some of the rooms. Around the inside of the front door, for example: a row of misshapen pineapples. Those pineapples had never made sense to Ruby, at least not until her class had gone on a day trip to some early American museum and she’d seen the exact same thing in one of the buildings there. Apparently, the pineapple symbolized hospitality, which made it about the last thing that belonged on the wall of their home, because Diandra’s entire life was the opposite of hospitality. She couldn’t even remember the last time somebody had stopped by with a misdelivered piece of mail, let alone for a cup of her mother’s terrible coffee.

Ruby returned to her test. The tabletop was sticky from that morning’s breakfast syrup, or maybe the mac and cheese of last night’s dinner, or maybe something her mother had eaten or done at the table while she’d been at school. The two of them never ate at the table together. Ruby declined, as much as was possible, to place her nutritional well-being in the hands of her mother, who evidently maintained her girlish physique—literally girlish: from the back, mother and daughter looked absurdly alike—through an apparent diet of celery sticks and Diet Dr Pepper. Diandra had stopped feeding her daughter around the time Ruby turned nine, which was also around the time Ruby had learned how to open a can of spaghetti for her own damn self.

Ironically, as the two of them grew ever more physically similar they had less and less to say to each other. Not that they’d ever enjoyed what you might call a loving mother-and-daughter relationship; Ruby could remember no bedtime cuddles or pretend tea parties, no indulgent birthdays or tinsel-strewn Christmas mornings, and never anything in the way of maternal advice or unsolicited affection, the kind she sometimes encountered in novels or Disney movies (usually right before the mother died or disappeared). Diandra seemed to skate by with the barest minimum of maternal duties, mainly those related to keeping Ruby alive and vaccinated, sheltered (if you could call this freezing house a source of shelter), and educated (if you could call her unambitious rural school a source of education). She seemed to want it all to be over every bit as fervently as Ruby herself did.

But she couldn’t want it as fervently as Ruby herself did. She couldn’t even come close.

The previous summer Ruby had gone to work for the bakery in town, off the books, of course. And then, that fall, she picked up a Sunday job for a neighbor, watching a couple of the younger kids while the rest of the family went to church. Half of whatever she made went into the house account for food and the occasional repair, but the other half Ruby wedged into an AP Chemistry textbook, which had to be the last place her mother would ever think to look for it. The chemistry had been a necessary slog the year before, a deal she’d made with her advisor to let her move ahead in her school’s bare-bones science track, and it hadn’t been easy to manage alongside her humanities classes at the community college, the independent French project, and of course her two jobs, but it was all part of the plan she had formed around the time she’d opened that first can of spaghetti. That plan was called Get-The-Fuck-Away-From-Here, and she’d never deviated from it for a single second. She was fifteen now and an eleventh grader, having already skipped her kindergarten year. In a couple of months she’d be able to apply to college. A year from now, she’d be gone for good.

She hadn’t always been this way. She could recall, without too much mental heavy lifting, a time when she’d felt at least neutral about living in this house and in the orbit of her mother, who was pretty much her only extant family member (certainly the only family member she ever saw). She could recall doing the things she supposed most other children did—playing in dirt, looking at pictures—without any accompanying grief or anger, and she knew enough by now to recognize that as unpleasant as her home life and “family” might be, there were endless versions of worse out there in what she had come to understand as the wider world. So what had brought her to this bitter precipice? What had made her normal child-self into the Ruby huddled over her at-home history test on which so much—in her mind, at least—depended, who (literally) counted the days until her departure? The answer was inaccessible. The answer had never been shared with her. The answer was no longer of any concern, only its attendant truth, which she’d figured out years ago and had never once questioned: her mother loathed her, and probably always had.

What was she supposed to do with such information?

Exactly.

Pass her test. Ask Mr. Brown to write a teacher recommendation (for which, with luck, he’d regurgitate this very anecdote about the girl who insisted on being assigned extra work). And then, take her clearly superior brain out from under that canopy of old pineapples and into a world that would at least appreciate her. She had learned not to expect love, and wasn’t even sure she wanted it. This was the most profound wisdom she’d managed to glean from the fifteen years she had spent in her mother’s presence. Fifteen down. One—please, God, only one—to go.

Jake set the pages down. Mother and daughter, closely confined, somewhat isolated but hardly hermits (mother shops at supermarket, daughter attends high school and has a teacher interested in her welfare), with obvious and extreme tension between them. Okay. Mother is gainfully (if dubiously) employed and keeping a roof over their head and subprime food on the table. Okay. Daughter is ambitious and aiming to leave home and Mom for college. Okay, okay.

As his own writing teacher in his own MFA program had once said to one of the more self-indulgent prose writers in their workshop: “And … so what?”

A plot like mine, Evan Parker had called it. But in fact, was there even such a thing as “a plot like mine”? Greater minds than Jake’s (and even, he was willing to bet, than Evan Parker’s) had identified the few essential plots along which pretty much every story unfurled itself: The Quest, The Voyage and Return, Coming of Age, Overcoming the Monster, et al. The mother and the daughter in the old clapboard house—well, specifically the daughter in the old clapboard house—looked pretty likely to be a Coming of Age story, or Bildungsroman, or maybe a Rags to Riches story—but compelling as these stories could be, they hardly acted as stunning, surprising, twisting and hurtling stories, so compelling in themselves that they could be immune to bad writing.