Donna Has Left the Building Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Susan Jane Gilman

  Cover design by Brian Levy. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: June 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gilman, Susan Jane, author.

  Title: Donna has left the building / Susan Jane Gilman.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018048056| ISBN 9781538762417 (hardcover) | ISBN

  9781549175879 (audio download) | ISBN 9781538762448 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Families--Fiction. | Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.I45214 D66 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048056

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-6241-7 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-6244-8 (ebook)

  E3-20190514-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20190510-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20190430-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20190401-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20181030-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Three Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Discover More

  Also by Susan Jane Gilman

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  Part One

  Chapter 1

  The morning of my forty-fifth birthday, I woke up to a cop knocking on my windshield. My Subaru was parked in the dunes by a low concrete building scribbled with graffiti. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but after driving all night—fifteen, sixteen hours maybe—crying, downing Adderall and Ativan, talking aloud to myself, punching the rim of my steering wheel—shouting along to the Ramones at one point—Hey-ho! Let’s go!—blah, blah—you get the idea—I’d passed out in the passenger’s seat, reclined all the way back like a dentist’s chair. A brand-new guitar—a cheap Rogue Dreadnought—sat propped in my lap like a shotgun. I had only a dim recollection of buying it.

  “Morning, Sunshine,” the cop said drily. His nametag read GONZALES. When I lowered my window, he looked surprised: Clearly, he hadn’t expected to see a middle-aged woman with pearl earrings in an ANTHRAX hoodie. “Everything okay in there?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he took a perfunctory glance around the interior of my car. I felt a sudden kick of panic.

  I’d fled in a frenzy—jamming items willy-nilly into my purse—forgetting my coat—my scarf—even my shoes. At first, I’d torn along the access roads without any particular destination in mind—driving recklessly around the grim, nickel-gray industrial parks and balding woodlands of southern Michigan—ruminating, weeping—having just left my husband, Joey (with his sexual malfeasance and his misuse of cosmetic dentistry)—and our son, Austin—whose emoji I saw more than his face now—it was like he communicated only through hieroglyphics—and our neurotic, drooling dog, Mr. Noodles, a Labradoodle with “issues” who wouldn’t stop yelping at 3 a.m.—costing us upward of $2,500 in pet psychiatry so far (a doggie shrink: really?)—and our overmortgaged house with its perennially unfinished “finished” basement—the kitchen circa 1982—our contractor, a reservist, apparently in Iraq or Kabul somewhere—so we couldn’t exactly sue—wires were sprouting from the drywall like the unwanted hairs on my chin.

  With the heat cranked up, my Subaru had grown increasingly yeasty over the miles, encrusted with crumbs from granola bars and gummy bran muffins purchased at gas stations. The foot wells had clogged with cellophane wrappers and coffee cups like a landfill. In the backseat lay the curvaceous coffin of my new guitar case, along with a jumble of boxes from a discount shoe outlet, and an ominous, glinting pair of industrial scissors, and some hacked-up pleather, and a bottle of Listerine Zero, and about a hundred balled-up Kleenex littered about like so many paper roses from all of my crying. There was also, I realized, a large cache of other people’s prescription medication stashed in the glove compartment.

  It occurred to me then that there might be a missing persons report out on me, or even—possibly—an arrest warrant.

  But Gonzales stepped back from the window. “Ma’am, there’s no parking here,” he said wearily. “You gotta move.” He motioned to a sign I’d missed when I’d arrived in the dark: PARKS DEPARTMENT ONLY. Beyond it, to my right, I became aware for the first time of the New York City skyline rising across the water like a distant fortress, the great pistons of it glittering in the morning sun. Before me stretched the vast, heaving Atlantic, tumbling and scraping…tumbling and scraping…its surf sounding like applause. As the patrol car pulled away, I glanced down at my long-dead phone—then out at the unfamiliar, mesmerizing ocean—and realized that nobody on earth knew where I was. I had literally driven to the edge of America. I was wholly untethered. I could be anyone, do anything, or completely disappear. I had nowhere left to go.

  My name is Donna Koczynski, and I’m an alcoholic. A lush. A drunk. A founding member of the Margarita Mafia, as a bunch of us on the PTA at my daughter’s middle school in Troy, Michigan, once christened ourselves. Now, I’m a dried-out alkie. That’s not how you’re supposed to say it, of course. The more correct term these days is “in recovery.” “In recovery” sounds so much more benign and generic and suburban. But a lot of the reason I drank was to get away from being benign and generic and suburban in the first place.

  We’ve all heard addiction stories before. Some Bambi-eyed hopeful takes a snort or a swallow, then another—until we watch with smug fascination as her life spirals downward like a jet-fighter shot down over the Pacific
(“corkscrewing” would actually be an excellent verb in my case, come to think of it). There’s her spectacular plummet, but then—of course—after the splat—redemption. Slowly, phoenix-like, she gets herself clean, piecing herself back together like a gorgeous mosaic.

  Yeah, well.

  My life fell apart after I got sober.

  No one expects their personal implosion to be ridiculous. Certainly, I never did. Growing up in Detroit, I’d witnessed lives falling apart due to big, serious events: Wars. Plant closures. Illnesses. Yet my own epic unraveling seemed to be precipitated by a single trip to Las Vegas and a bacon-wrapped fig.

  The Las Vegas part itself actually isn’t as significant as you might think. An annual marketing conference: bleh. But I had been sent there—all expenses paid—because I’d been nominated for an award. For twelve years, I’d been one of the top “culinary ambassadors” for a company called the Privileged Kitchen. Maybe you’ve heard of it: “foie gras quality kitchenware at chopped liver prices.” (Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist.) Instead of a physical store, Privileged Kitchen reps open pop-up cafés in shopping malls or come directly to your home—and prepare an entire gourmet meal for you and your friends using only PK products—which, of course, we pitch the hell out of to you as we cook.

  So, in other words, yes: I was a salesperson. Me, Donna Koczynski, “culinary ambassador to your personal world of flavor.” I can see you rolling your eyes now, shifting in your seat. It’s okay. I get it. No one gets hot and bothered by some chirpy kitchen shill. No little kid grows up saying, “Gee, one day, I’d like to do cooking demos in strip malls and subdivisions.” But in my own defense, working for the Privileged Kitchen enabled me to set my own hours—be home for my kids after school—keep our mortgage afloat—which, given how the financial crisis hit Michigan, was no small feat, I can tell you. And I liked the PK gig well enough. It allowed me, in my own small way, to perform again.

  The honor I was nominated for in Vegas was the company’s prestigious “Platinum Spatula Award.” The Platinum Spatula had begun in the early 1990s as a joke, really—a giggle among sales reps: a surplus plastic spatula wrapped in tinfoil and awarded to someone based on some inane, made-up category. Best Recovery from a Kitchen Disaster. Greatest Resemblance to David Letterman in a Hairnet. That sort of thing. But over time, it had morphed into an actual trophy—an oversized pewter-colored spatula with the recipient’s name engraved on the handle—accompanied by a check for $1,000. Colleen Lundstedt, the Privileged Kitchen’s CEO and founder, awarded it to the rep with the highest revenue each year.

  The annual conference always took place in Las Vegas—though, really, it just as easily could’ve been held in Disneyland, Branson, or Des Moines. We Privileged Kitchen sales reps were a stupefyingly wholesome bunch. (I suppose we had to be if we were regularly going to get invited into strangers’ homes.) Most of us were women with kids, juggling all the parts. Three of my colleagues were actual Sunday school teachers. My colleague Victor and I were the only two who even swore on a regular basis. With the Privileged Kitchen crowd, there was no adultery in Vegas. There was no white powder chopped up on mirrors removed from the bathroom wall, or college funds gambled away at the craps tables at 3 a.m. My cohorts’ idea of fun was karaoke (“Copacabana” and “Shake It Off,” my God) and playing tipsy games of “Celebrity” in the lounge. With us, what happened in Vegas was never anything that needed to stay there.

  Still, you’d think Las Vegas would be a dangerous place for someone like me—and you’re right. Except that I’d developed little strategies. I brought jumbo bags of sugarless gummy bears from Costco and carried Austin’s Traveler Guitar with me. I’d gotten it for him for Christmas after he’d complained that my old Stratocaster was too “bulky” to practice on. “Why should I have to, like, stand and hold a guitar, when I can just compose on my iPad?” he’d said. His shrug of indifference was like a blade in my gut.

  The Traveler Guitar was lightweight, just a truncated neck and frets, essentially. It was nearly as portable as a laptop, and I’d held out that misguidedly optimistic, idiotic parental hope that Austin would be thrilled by its novelty, that this new-generation hybrid would magically inspire him to want to keep practicing. (And let’s face it, make him love me more!) Obviously, though, I’d missed the memo: Almost by definition, no sixteen-year-old boy wants to play the same musical instrument as his mother.

  And so, the Traveler Guitar that I’d ordered specially for him sat propped in his room behind his hockey equipment until I’d finally decided to liberate it for my trip to Las Vegas. The afternoon I arrived, I sat on the edge of my hotel bed, tuning it, strumming through a few light riffs as they came to me. Random stuff, stuff I hadn’t played in decades: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” “In Between Days.” Inexplicably, the theme from The Munsters. It was odd what I recalled, what I seemed to channel, the muscle memory in my now-uncalloused, stinging fingers. But it felt surprisingly good; it kept me occupied.

  When I ran out of songs, I went into the bathroom and undressed. I told myself that I was just going to bathe, yet inevitably, I scootched down in the tub so that my pelvis was directly beneath the faucet and spread my legs. As the water tongued against me, I imagined Zack, my boyfriend from when I was sixteen, and then the cute, bed-headed guy who’d assisted me at the Hertz counter earlier that day at the airport. Okay, I’m not proud of this. But what can I say? Joey and I, we’d been married twenty-three years already. And since hitting forty, my hormones? Well. Nobody tells you that perimenopause is like puberty in reverse. Just a snow globe of emotions all over again, and some days, I was in so much sexual heat, I was sure it was boiling off me in a vapor. Other times I was just, well, sweaty.

  The Platinum Spatula was awarded on the second day of the convention during the final plenary session—a time chosen, I suspected, to allay that hypoglycemic funk of late afternoon, when everyone started yawning and stretching and secretly checking their phones. Two other sales reps had been nominated alongside me: Amelia McCorkle, a high-strung dog breeder from Boston; and Brittany Chang, a twenty-seven-year-old fireplug of a girl from Corpus Christi who’d once broken her ankle auditioning for The Next Food Network Star.

  Colleen Lundstedt called us all up onto the stage. We had to stand there like beauty contestants as she chimed from the podium: “Don’t they all look great, folks? Big round of applause, please, for the top culinary ambassadors of 2015!” With great fanfare, she introduced each one of us (finally pronouncing my last name right. Koczynski—Koh-zhin-skee—it’s not that hard, people). Then, she held up the “secret envelope”—which was just plain silly, really, because everyone knew that Colleen herself selected the winner. “A drumroll, please!”

  The only time I’d ever been awarded something was for my sobriety—the one-year token, then two, and most recently, five. Joey and the kids had attended each ceremony and hooted and applauded. The first year, we’d had a sheet cake afterward at home, studded with candles and buttercream roses. The kids had made cards: Austin’s a crayoned picture of me holding a big glass with an arrow pointing to it saying “Diet Coke” and Congrats, Mom on 1 year sober!!! Thank you for not getting drunk!!! I am so proud of you!!! (Good God, that alone nearly killed me.) The next year, we’d gone to dinner at a Mexican restaurant the kids loved, with an insipid mariachi band and virgin strawberry margaritas all around. Yet in the end, we were always celebrating, in effect, something I’d stopped doing, not anything I, myself, had ever managed to achieve or create.

  Colleen paused dramatically, her head thrown back, her spray-tanned wrist pressed against her forehead. Playing along, Brittany Chang clasped her hands together and jumped up and down campily and squealed “ohohoh!” There was a smattering of laughs from the other reps—though I didn’t think Brittany was fooling anybody. It seemed obvious to me that she really wanted to win.

  So did I, frankly. A thousand bucks—with one kid in college already, and us finally dug out of bankruptcy? P
lus, I deserved it. I’d been with the Privileged Kitchen longer than either Amelia or Brittany. I’d worked harder than either of them, too. I know that selling kitchenware sounds like a joke, but do you know how stressful it is to prepare an entire three-course meal (tuna crudo with avocado mousse; ginger-glazed duck breast; pineapple panna cotta) while shouting like a carnival barker inside a shopping mall—trying to capture people’s attention as they meander aimlessly from Yankee Candle to the Sunglass Hut, their eyes glued to their phone screens? It’s not easy to cook in front of thirty skeptical invitees, either, in some stranger’s kitchen—pets, toddlers, hostesses clattering underfoot—their ringtones playing snippets of “Born to Run” and “La Cucaracha”—all while you’re chopping and sautéing and smiling and keeping up the friendly patter as the oven overheats and olive oil spits up from the skillet, freckling your wrists with tiny first-degree burns.

  As a PK rep, I’d gone to places on weekends that no one else ever bothered with. My hometown, the ruins of Detroit—whole neighborhoods sitting burned out and discarded like shell casings in weedy fields. I’d driven with my wares past miles of ghost gardens, collapsed factories, abandoned skyscrapers, meeting on Saturday mornings with young artists and hipsters striving to revive the city with little farm-to-table restaurants in the trashed storefronts of Corktown. Joey hated when I went downtown—he insisted on accompanying me whenever possible—it was still one of the carjacking capitals of the US—but sometimes, I braved it alone myself.

  I drove over to Dearborn regularly, too. There was a huge Arab-American community out there—completely untapped. They tended to lie low, especially since September 11—twice they’d had to cancel their heritage festival because of protests and threats—and a lot of folks tended to be leery of them, but I’d figured: Hey, they cook, right? And so I taught myself how to make labneh and kibbeh and pilafs—easy enough—really delicious, actually—and the women were appreciative and welcoming—they even taught me a few words in Arabic, though I think this was just for their own amusement—most of them were American-born to begin with—and even I could tell my accent was a nightmare—and they tended not to buy a lot of stuff in the end. But still. Royal Oak, Inkster, Sterling Heights, Livonia: I did them all. No potential customer within a fifty-mile radius of me went unpitched. Utensil by utensil, I moved that inventory. I was intrepid.