“Sounds like fun, sexy lady,” Fred said, adding a mouth click and a wink.
Riley’s stomach let out a plaintive growl.
Burt barked.
Daisy mooed again from the deck.
“Nick, you mind letting Burt out to play with Daisy?” Roger asked from the foot of the table, still clinging to his invisible cutlery. “She’s feeling left out.”
“Sure.” Nick uncurled himself from the kids’ table and opened the door. Burt joyfully romped outside, most likely to tell his cow friend how weird their humans were.
From her vantage point, Riley watched the cow and pony-sized dog play chase around the overgrown yard.
“We will begin our hour-long silence. If anyone utters a word, we will start over. The silence begins now,” Elanora said, ringing a tiny bell.
The tone hung in the air until Riley’s stomach growled over it. She shrugged when her grandmother glowered in her direction.
An hour of sitting and staring at each other. And not eating.Great.
While Nick made faces at her nieces and Burt and Daisy sprinted around in circles outside, Riley tried not to make eye contact with anyone.
Need to ask Rye Bread if there’s a safe way to Google getting rid of mother-in-laws.
Awesome. Now she was picking up on her father’s thoughts.
She gave herself a few minutes to wonder if it was “mother-in-laws” or “mothers-in-law.” Until she was distracted by some R-rated thoughts that were coming from the direction of the kids’ table. Her cheeks flamed pink when Nick shot her a look that told her exactly what they were having for dessert that night.
Her grandmother cleared her throat imperiously, and with a guilty conscience, Riley looked past Nick to where Daisy was rubbing up against the fence, scratching an itch on her hind quarters. Burt followed suit, and the fence wobbled dangerously.
She opened her mouth to say something until a sharp kick landed against her shin. Her mother looked her dead in the eye.
Geez.Fine. If the fence fell down, it fell down. It wasn’t her fence, and her parents were the ones who would have to deal with the consequences.
Next to her, Gabe was statue-still. Eyes open and unblinking. He was sweating profusely.
Her father was glaring at Elanora like he wanted to stab her with his invisible knife and fork.
Someone farted. Her money was on Fred.
Cabbage casserole would have been a godsend in comparison to this disaster.
With no place else to escape, Riley closed her eyes and called up her spirit guides.“Hey, guys. It’s me. Is there anything you want to show me for the next ohhhhh fifty-five minutes or so?”
The pink and blue clouds slowly swirled into her mind’s eye. They pulsed with warm light, and she allowed herself to relax into them. Maybe she could take a psychic nap on these things, she mused, squishing a cloud between her hands.
“Do you have anything to show me regarding Bianca Hornberger or Larry Rupley?” she asked the clouds.
They pulsed again and then slowly began to rotate like a tropical storm with her as the eye.
When the clouds parted, she saw nothing but sparkling particles. Like a craft store had imploded during a scrapbooking tutorial. She blinked, trying to clear her vision, but there was only more sparkle. Glittering in a rainbow of colors.
“Okay. This is fun. But I don’t know what this means,” she told the clouds.
In response, she felt a gust of air against her face and the stinging of tiny particles hitting her skin.
“Are you saying I need to schedule a microdermabrasion?” Her friend Jasmine was big on facials and was always trying to get her to go along.
Again, she felt the whoosh of air and the blast of tiny shards of something dusting her skin. This time though, it was accompanied by a blast of heat. She shook her head. “Sorry, guys. I’m not getting what this is. What else do you have?”
