Goober babies...
It all started when Lauren was two years old, Grandma Margaret insisted that Maggie pick herself up and begin looking for a new man. On Sundays Grandma would whisper into Emmy�s ear, telling her to nag her mom about taking them all down to the beach until she relented, then Grandma would pack them a lunch and insist that Maggie wear her two piece suite on her newly gaunt frame, compliments of the heartbreak diet. Grandma was hoping that Maggie would catch herself a new fish down at the beach, a new rich fish who would support the family. One Sunday it was little two year old Lauren who snagged the prize.
One of the rich summer �goobers,� as Maggie called them, was sunning her sinewy orange self a few feet from where the tribe of Spangler women had set up camp. The woman, decked out in pearls and a huge straw hat watched intently through her gaudy square glasses as Lauren threw globs of wet sand onto the beach towels. After an hour the woman got up from her folding beach chair and walked the three steps over to Maggie. It ended up that this particular goober was some big wig talent agent in New York City; she wanted to represent Lauren as a child model. It was true, Lauren was a beautiful baby with dewy white skin and an unusually full head of fiery strawberry blonde curls. Lauren looked nothing like her mother or her sister; she had bright green eyes and that strawberry hair. Emmy had the same dewy skin, but she had a mop of unruly brown hair and sad hazel eyes. Emmy was eleven, and the woman seemed to look right through her, uninterested in her awkward frame on the verge of puberty.
Maggie was hesitant about the long train ride into the city, but the goober woman offered to compensate them for their travels if they would just set aside a day to come in for some test shots. Maggie tried not to seem too excited about the possibilities as she agreed and set a date. That�s how Lauren became the cottage industry that would support the family for years and eventually send both the girls to college. Emmy would go with her mother and her beautiful little sister every weekend and all their summers into the city to watch her sister model until the day that she finally graduated from their little school and left Bellmar hoping never to return.