I looked for Jay. When I didn’t see him or Marissa, I got a glass of water at the bar, sat down at a table for ten that had emptied once the music started, and surreptitiously kicked off my boots. I was rubbing my right foot and flexing my left when someone walked up and said, “Hi, Rachel.”
It took me a minute to recognize the woman, and when I did, it took a considerable effort not to gasp. Bethie Botts was wearing a dress. Short-sleeved, dark blue, made of jersey that skimmed over her body, showing off her bare arms and creamy skin. Her hair, which wasn’t the least bit greasy, was pulled back in a bun. She wore dangly earrings, a beaded comb in her hair . . . and on her left hand, I saw a tiny diamond flash.
“Bethie?”
“It’s Elizabeth now.” I saw her little teeth, the ones I remembered from high school, like kernels of corn. Hardly anything else was the same. At some point, either she’d swapped her glasses for contacts or she’d gotten the surgery. Her eyes were blue-green, and she had a genuinely pleasant expression on her face.
“You look beautiful,” I blurted.
“Thanks,” she said, and then looked at my bare feet. “Are they swelling? Mine got so big when I was pregnant I couldn’t even lace up my sneakers by the end.” She touched her belly with one shapely hand.
“You’ve got a baby?”
“A little boy. Gabriel. He’s six months old. He’s with Grandma for the night, so my husband and I could come.” From the shyly proud way she said my husband I could tell that she, like me, was still getting used to having one.
I stared at her, trying to align the perfectly normal-looking woman with the snot-and-tear-plastered horror show I remembered. I wanted to ask what had happened, how she’d transformed herself, who she was now, but instead, I ended up babbling about random classmates.
“Isn’t this crazy? First I think that everyone looks exactly the same or even better, and then I’ll see, like, Pete Driscoll, who’s entirely bald . . .”
Bethie smiled—a real smile, not the fake, simpering thing she’d worn when I’d known her. It was like seeing an entirely new person, Bethie but not Bethie. Elizabeth now.
“And you!” I said. “You look spectacular!”
“Thanks,” she said. “But let’s be honest. I looked so awful in high school that all I would’ve had to do was comb my hair to look about a thousand times better.”
I looked at her. “You want to know what happened, right?” I nodded, and she said, “Remember when we went to Atlanta and Melissa Nasser’s mom was one of our chaperones?”
“Right.”
“Mrs. Nasser—Diane—she’s a therapist,” Bethie said. “After the trip, she would call me or she’d find me at school or she’d drive to my foster home or she’d corner me at synagogue, and she’d say, ‘Let’s talk.’ I think it was a year before I even spoke to her, and that was just to tell her to go away, until I finally said, ‘Okay, fine,’ to get her to leave me alone.” She twisted her ring. “I didn’t think it would work. You know, how was talking about what happened going to help me get over it? But she had some skills that she taught me. Things I could do to distract myself or reframe a situation or break the pattern when I was thinking about the bad times. So it wasn’t just talking.”
I thought about Dante, Brenda’s little boy, and how, in spite of everything that Amy had told me about professionalism and boundaries and not getting too attached, I would think about him more than the rest of my clients’ kids combined. Bethie must have been Mrs. Nasser’s Dante.
What happened? I wanted to ask. What were the bad times? What happened to you? I didn’t ask, because I already knew the answer . . . or at least a version of it. What happened to Bethie was the same thing that had happened to so many of the women I’d worked with over the years. Different specifics, same story. Probably if I’d made myself think about it back then, if I’d wanted to think about it, I could have figured it out.
Bethie said, “I aged out of my last foster-care placement when I turned eighteen. I lived with the Nassers for a year, and I got a job at a dog-grooming place and started taking classes at St. Petersburg College, and I just, you know . . .” She lifted her eyebrows. “Cleaned up my act. I’m in rabbinical school, if you can believe that. Paying it forward.”
“You’ll be great,” I said, and Bethie smiled.
“So what are you up to besides growing a person?” she asked.
I told her that I’d become a social worker, and we talked about work for a while, about what the recent federal budget cuts meant for schools and for services to women and children, and whether President Bush’s faith-based initiatives would be enough to close the gaps.