Lost Girls by Robert Kolker Page A

brought it up, for fear of ruining a good thing. Maureen was throwing Sara fifty dollars just for driving her to the appointments. Most of the time, she would dart back out in ten or fifteen minutes; if she stayed the full hour, Sara got a hundred. Being paid for sitting and waiting seemed like a good deal to Sara. Moreover, every time Maureen got in the car, she filled the gas tank.
    It took a while for Sara to realize that life wasn’t going that well for Maureen. The red tape of Maureen’s life seemed exhausting: Sara got tired just watching Maureen juggle custody of two different kids with two different dads. Some days she had Aidan, other days Caitlin, other days both, other days neither. If she had the children and a massage appointment, the kids went to Missy’s, which sometimes prompted an uneasy negotiation. Despite the money she was making, Maureen’s life seemed to be closing in on her. She and her roommate had been a month or two behind on rent for a while. By spring, they were being threatened with eviction. She was constantly worried about Steve calling social services and arguing that their boy should live with him. Maureen knew he was waiting for a reason to try.
    Maureen couldn’t find a regular job, and not for lack of trying. She had answered want ads for receptionist positions, for a job greeting shoppers at Walmart, but wasn’t hired. Again and again, she turned to Sara and her car to make enough money to pay the rent. Their lives intertwined. Sara’s boyfriend did some dealing, and Maureen became a customer, buying ecstasy and pot and sometimes coke to stay awake. He was good to Maureen at first, charging just forty dollars for a gram of coke and allowing her not to pay up front. Maureen would give him her food-stamp Electronic Benefits Transfer card as collateral. That arrangement worked only as long as Sara and her boyfriend were together. As winter turned to spring, Maureen accused him of trying to take extra money off of her EBT card while he waited for her to pay. Sara didn’t believe Maureen at first, but he couldn’t hide what he had done forever, and when Sara learned the truth, she left him.
    That left Sara homeless for real this time. Maureen came to Sara’s rescue again, inviting her to stay on the couch at the apartment in Norwich. She didn’t charge Sara rent and even paid for all the groceries. Sara couldn’t believe it, though she soon learned that being a friend of Maureen’s meant being on the receiving end of an almost embarrassing amount of generosity. Turning a blind eye to whatever financial pressures she was under, Maureen had taken in other friends, including a girl named Penny. When Sara started thinking that Penny might be using Maureen, she realized she couldn’t talk, since she was freeloading, too.
    They all needed money, not just Maureen. As summer approached, no great solution seemed to be presenting itself. Sara wasn’t sure how much longer they all could stay together. It took until June for Sara to learn that Maureen had a plan. Both of their birthdays were coming up. Sara turned twenty-five on the eleventh, Maureen three days later. With whatever money she had made from appointments, Maureen booked a hotel room at Foxwoods and threw a party. The room overflowed with friends Maureen had made over the years at the casino. Sara got drunk, and not long before the sun came up, she and Maureen went back to the apartment. They were alone for the first time all night, and Sara noticed how Maureen’s expression had changed. She seemed serious—completely sober.
    “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
    “What?” said Sara.
    “You like to have sex. Why don’t you get paid for it?”
    Sara had always liked to think of herself as an operator—someone who could talk anyone into anything. Now she realized that Maureen was in a whole other league. She fell silent as Maureen explained that before Aidan was born, she’d been going to New York for a few days