Previously, Mia began filming her interviews with the local artists, reminded us that Calendar Girl hashtag supports the troops, and discovered the last artist was her estranged mother. We were all very surprised.
Calendar Girl (December): Chapter 5
Unintentionally hilariously, the chapter kicks off with Mia’s new assistant Kathy making her way inside and horrendously misreading the room.
Kathy finally made her way in, shaking the snow off her jacket and lifting her hand out to my mother. “Hello, I’m Kathy, and this is Mia Saunders and her fiancé, Weston Channing. Thank you for having us. Sorry if we’re a bit late…”
“Fiancée?” my mother gasped, her eyes taking in all that was my soon-to-be husband. “Um, congratulations”
I like that her mother is still taking the time to be shocked specifically about the fact that her daughter she abandoned as a ten-year-old child is now engaged. It feels like only a few lines of dialogue ago she was still processing “still exists”. Possibly because it was. Big afternoon for Mia’s mom! “You’re all grown up and you found me? Wait, hold up, and you’re engaged?! Hang on, I need to start writing this down.”
Mia isn’t here to fuck around.
“What are the odds that I’d walk into this very gallery to interview the woman who destroyed me fifteen years ago?” My words held enough malice to cut glass. Indeed, I hoped they would cut right through her black heart.
She inhaled sharply, as did Kathy. The entire room went silent.
“What are the odds that…” is one of those phrases that’s amazing because it only ever appears in fiction when the odds were more or less guaranteed.
Wes tells Kathy to take the film crew and call it a day. Kathy tells me that she’ll “be available tonight if you need a friend”. Don’t forget that Kathy went temp to perm as Mia’s assistant, like, today. I can’t stop thinking about how, if I were Kathy, the rest of my day would just be me curled up in a ball in my room, hyperventilating, moaning “this is my life now”.
Alone, the three of us stood. My mother licked her lips again, glancing around—probably looking to see if someone someone else would enter and save her from this nightmare.
This is one of those moments where I can’t help but notice that, while it’s not like there’s anything else I’d expect for this character to do in this moment, Mia’s mom has existed in this story as less than a plot device. She’s not really even a loose end, just a detail in Mia’s backstory. Her character suddenly showing up here, confronted by the narrative, looking around for an escape is kind of the clearest manifestation I’ve seen of a story literally writing itself into a corner.
“Uh, how about we go sit down over here and talk?” […]
In a moment of sheer weakness, I lifted my hand and slapped her across the face as hard as I could. […] Her own tears fell like big fat watery lies I didn’t believe for a moment. […]
“I g-guess I deserved that.”
Think about it: Mia’s mom is such a blank slate that your own reaction was probably also “yeah, I guess she did”.
“You deserve worse than that. So much worse,” I growled through clenched teeth.
She cleared her throat and pushed back her hair. “Please, Mia, I’d like to explain.”
I scoffed. “Explain? You’d like to explain.”
I mean, I can’t imagine what she’s doing in the plot all of a sudden at the eleventh hour if not just to start explaining things, just so Mia has closure about every single thing under the sun in what by now has to be a remarkably emotionally exhausting year. Mia’s (very understandably) too angry to hear any of it and spends most of the chapter calling her mom out on how she (still very understandably) doesn’t want to hear any of it, but now we’ve got a story where everything else is resolved and so we’re basically just waiting for the new characters in this scene to explain why they’re in this scene.
“You don’t understand!” she cried. “I didn’t want to leave.” […]
“After you left, Pops turned into a raging alcoholic. At ten years old, I took care of him and my baby sister!”
Her eyes widened.
“Oh, yeah. Bet you didn’t plan on that. Because you abandoned us, my father went off the deep end. Half the time he forgot he even had children. Maddy and I went days with no food. Days!”
Mia’s mom is at fault for a lot of things, but the dad’s addictions and substance abuse are not among them. It certainly doesn’t make it a “bad” story that Mia’s misplacing some of her anger while venting the rest of her very much earned anger – hell, that makes her human; to a certain degree those flaws are what make the story engaging – but if these fucking books end with Mia forgiving her dad in a single goddamn scene but not her mom, that’s some real bullshit.
Mia’s mom falls to her knees, crying, only offering snippets of whatever’s going on from her side of the story, talking about how she “thought I was doing the right thing”, how she left “to keep you safe”, and how she wanted her dad “to move on”. It’s vague enough where it could go in pretty much any direction. Was she a free spirit whom no man could tame? Was she also under threat by the mob? Is she a time-traveling secret agent from the future who was supposed to take out Mia’s dad but got too personally involved in her mission? Does it really affect the story much which of these scenarios it turns out to be?
“Yeah, well, what did you expect? Did you expect him to respond the way Jackson Cunningham did?”
Her head shot up. “You found Jackson?” she gasped.
“Jackson’s dead,” I responded deadpan.
I’m not a good person – I cheered at this cheap shot, like, “Yeah, Mia, drag her!” In my defense, though, I’d argue that it’s easy to side with Mia despite her cruelty here because the story actually spent time on her learning about all of this, so we’re more grounded in how she’s turning the pain she experienced into pain she’s choosing to inflict in a moment of weakness. It’s dark, but it’s a way more interesting space to play in than “character vents about backstory at other character we’ve never seen before”.
Her body jolted as if she had been shot in the chest. “What?” […]
“Imagine my surprise when my brother, Maxwell Cunningham, came calling.”
“Max…” she whispered, her face contorting into one of unguarded pain.
I nodded. “Yeah, I know about Maxwell…my brother. And we also know that Maddy is Jackson’s.”
Her eyebrows narrowed. “That is not true!” She shot back.
“You think we didn’t check? Madison is not Michael Saunders’s biological child. She’s Jackson’s. We have the paternity tests to prove it.” […]
“No, no, no, no. I don’t understand. I don’t remember any of this,” she cried out.
“Bullshit!” I screamed
Before we can get any clue what “I don’t remember any of this” could possibly mean, Kent Banks (the client who sponsored this whole tv segment) runs into the room to remind us that he’s part of this story too. In the most perplexing way possible.
Kent Banks stormed in. […] “What the hell is going on?” He growled.
“You tell me. You’re the one who brought us here! You had to know she was my mother!”
He jerked his head up to meet my gaze. Kent’s nostrils were flared and white, his mouth a deep scowl. “Yes, I knew you were her daughter.”
Whaaaaaaat you mean when he said he didn’t pay one red cent for Mia to interview his wife, just for the program to do a segment on her art totally just for exposure that’s it just exposure no untoward secrets here THAT WAS A LIE?
Why does everyone in Calendar Girl have such weirdly manipulative schemes for secret family meetings? I really hope everyone in the family is like this. Planning family gatherings must be a fucking nightmare. “Honey! We got an invitation from my sister for a college graduation. No, it doesn’t say whose it is. Just cryptically says ‘We think it’d be good for you to be there.’ Think we should we go?” *three months later* “I HAVE A NEPHEW?”
“She confided that to me when she saw you on TV. Told me about you, your sister, and your brother. I thought I was doing something good. Bringing the family back together…”
I snorted. “Are you insane?”
“This woman abandoned my siblings and me. Hell, my sister and I didn’t even know we had a brother until a few months ago. It would have been nice to learn that from our mother!” I sneered.
“Get out!” Kent roared.
Hearing that tone from Kent, Wes pushed me behind him. “I’m not sure that my fiancée is done talking to her mother.” […]
“There’s a lot you obviously don’t know.”
Yep, I’d say we just got upgraded from “mysterious” to “too mysterious”.
I huffed. “Don’t bother. I have nothing more to say to this pathetic excuse for a human being.” On that, I turned and stormed out of the gallery.
Wes catches up with Mia outside, struggling with a whirlwind of emotions, and they decide to just go home and call it a day. Later, Wes asks her how she’s doing and she admits that she’s not ok. Calendar Girl pulls off a more shocking twist than Mia’s mother’s mysterious return: dialogue I actually like.
“Why does it hurt so badly?” Tears formed in my eyes and slipped down my cheeks.
“Because no matter what she did, how bad she hurt you, she’s still your mom. You love her.”
I inhaled sharply. “You can’t love a ghost.”
“Oh, baby, but you can.”
Holy shit, we got to book 12 and Carlan finally wrote something really good!
“and you know what?”
“What?” I sniffed. I didn’t want to give that woman even one more tear.
“It’s okay to love her.”
Ok, that was nice. Let’s get back to the garbage now.
Growing up, a girl needed her mother […] most of all [to] teach her how to be a mother, how to care for another soul more than her own.
Ah, Calendar Girl’s garbage gender politics. Thanks for showing up! Guess dad got off the hook for his alcoholism so easy because it was ultimately a woman’s fault for not taking care of him well enough!
To be fair, Wes actually points out some of this same criticism about how Mia’s misplacing some of her anger. Who knows if the story will actually follow through on any of it though.
“Your dad had a hand in that, sweetheart. If you’re throwing down blame, he’s earned it, too.”
I huffed. “She singlehandedly destroyed him.” I shook my head. […]
“Something doesn’t sit right [with me]. She seemed surprised to see you, apologetic, and kept mentioning you not knowing the whole story.”
“Probably because she doesn’t like having to face what she’s done.”
Wes sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
The chapter ends with Mia calling Max to tell him that their mother is in Aspen, and they have a touching moment where they talk about how they’re not sure how to deal with this development, but promise to deal with it together. More importantly, Max’s baby son provides some comic relief by shitting all over himself.
“Kid shit himself up his entire back. His back, Sis. Shit all the way up to his hairline. Now how the hell did he do that?” Max yelled through the phone.
You’re doing the lord’s work, baby.