YOU HAD TO GIVE IT TO HER. LANG TRIED. BY HERSELF SHE took Chloe to apply for a passport. Turned out both parents had to be physically present to sign the application. Chloe, of course, knew why her mother would prefer her father not come, but said nothing.
With Jimmy in tow, Lang quickly filled out the application form while Chloe, bored and hungry and anxious because her mother was anxious, tried to distract her father. The scene would’ve been funny if her mother wasn’t so stressed out. Her dad, bless him, was barely paying attention to the words Lang was writing down, but when it came time to sign, he moved Lang’s hand away from the paper so he could sign his name by the X at the bottom, and casually glanced over the document.
“Mother,” he said, “why are you so careless? You’re as bad as the incompetents in the school records department. Look, you’ve misspelled her name.” He turned to the postal clerk. “Dave, get us another application. My wife here doesn’t know her own daughter’s name.”
“Sure thing, chief.”
“Thanks, buddy. Careful this time,” Jimmy told Lang. “Want me to do it?”
“No, your handwriting is terrible. I’ll do it.”
“At least I know how to spell.”
“Who can tell? No one can read it.”
He watched her.
Lang gestured to Chloe, who once again tried to distract her father with idle chatter about the upcoming prom, graduation, her dress, a limo, a chaperone. Lang said her pen was running out of ink; could Jimmy go get her another?
He went, but as soon as he returned, he peered over the top of her rounded shoulder.
“Lang! You did it again. What’s the matter with you? I don’t know what’s wrong with your mother today, Chloe. Dave, sorry, I need one more application.”
Lang sighed and straightened up from the counter. Chloe stepped away. She made eye contact with Dave and shook her head, as if to signal him to wait, but also to scram because all kinds of crap was about to go down inside the peaceful Fryeburg post office on a weekday afternoon.
Lang placed her hand on her husband’s chest, on Chloe’s father, Jimmy Devine. “Jimmy,” she said mildly. “Wait.”
He waited.
“I didn’t misspell it, Jimmy,” Lang said. “Look.”
She thrust Chloe’s birth certificate into his face. Jimmy stared, perplexed. Plain as noon, printed in black, with a raised seal from the state of Maine confirming the official nature of the words was “Divine.” Preceded by “Chloe Lin.”
Jimmy understood nothing. “For eighteen years you knew the registrar’s office misspelled our kid’s name and you never told me?”
“Oh well.” Lang patted him. “Nothing we can do about it now. Let’s sign and go.”
“Nothing we can do about it?” he bellowed. “Of course there’s something we can do about it.”
“Not in time for her to get her passport for Europe.”
“She can’t have a passport with her name misspelled in it, Mother,” Jimmy said in his best no-arguments-will-be-entertained chief-of-police voice. “A passport is good for ten years. But a mistake like this is forever. No.”
“Jimmy.”
“No! I said we will fix it and we will fix it.”
Lang did not raise her voice. “It’s not misspelled, Jimmy,” she said. “That’s what I told the lady to write.”
“What lady?” He was dumbfounded.
“The lady at the hospital who came to take the baby’s name for the birth certificate. I told her to write Divine.”
“Well, the idiot clearly didn’t hear you correctly. She needs to be fired. Chloe is not going to have the wrong name on her passport because of a typo.”
“It’s not a typo, Jimmy. I spelled it out for her. I told her to write D-I-V-I-N-E.”
There was commotion at the post office. A man was taping a box shut, the plastic ripping off loudly. The metal door to the postmaster’s quarters slammed, a phone trilled, somebody laughed.
Jimmy was mute.
“It’s not a typo,” Lang repeated. “I wanted her to be Chloe Divine.”
“You made a mistake.”
“I wrote Divine on purpose.”
“But our name is Devine! With an E!”
“I know that. But not her name.”
Jimmy stammered. “What are you saying, woman? That you deliberately gave my daughter a different last name from her father?”
“Same name. One letter different.”
“That’s a different name!”
“No. Just one different letter.”
“A different name!”
“Jimmy.”
Jimmy was hyperventilating.
Chloe hid her amusement. She knew her mother was being disingenuous, for no one knew the power of a letter or two better than Lang, who could have been Lin, which meant beautiful, or Liang, which meant good and excellent, or Lan, which meant orchid, but instead she was Lang, which meant sweet potato. Lang knew the difference between Devine and Divine very well, which is why she changed it in the first place, why she wrote it with an I, why she kept it from her husband for nearly eighteen years. She knew. Divine: altogether marvelous and lovely, celestial and glorious, of the gods, with the gods, exquisite, heavenly, limitless and great. Divine.
AT THE END OF JUNE, CHLOE WENT TO HER PROM. IT WAS held in the glass ballroom at the Grand Summit Hotel in Attitash, at the foot of the White Mountains. All the boys dashing, all the girls beautiful. Chloe tried not to judge through her mother’s eyes: who was on parade at a bordello? A few would’ve fit that description. Mackenzie O’Shea in particular. The trouble with Mackenzie was that she thought herself to be quite a tasty morsel. Chloe couldn’t figure out why Mackenzie annoyed her so much. Plenty of girls at the prom were dressed much sluttier.
Mason did his best to match his cummerbund to Chloe’s funky pewter jewelry and silk silver dress, but he was more granite than metal. Hannah, of course, was a tall glass of water in a clingy mango dress, almost like a slip, with shoulder straps and a bare back, but Hannah had nothing to reveal under her dress except skin, no folds, no fat, no breasts, no sags, nothing unseemly, nothing out of proportion, nothing to make her self-conscious. Her dress was low-cut, but because she was so slim, she didn’t look slutty, she looked royal. Chloe, on the other hand, couldn’t wear anything low-cut for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t wear anything too high-necked because then she looked like a retiring female politician. She couldn’t wear an open-back dress because she required a full-back bra to contain what she normally contained under three or four layers of clothing. Summer was always a challenge. She