She turned off Bluetooth and picked up the call. Grace missed the first thirty seconds while watching Alix shovel a spoonful into her mouth, close her eyes, and lean against the headrest. When she muttered a euphoric, “Oh, my God,” Grace allowed only a moment of self-satisfied glee.
“Wait, what?” Grace said into the phone.
“The Costco card,” her mother repeated unhelpfully. “She doesn’t have one.”
Grace allowed her pause to speak for her. To signal that she still had absolutely no idea what the hell she was talking about.
“It’s your cousin’s favorite pumpkin pie,” her mother explained like it was something Grace should have catalogued, or even known which cousin she was talking about. “And they’re closed tomorrow. But your Tia Sylvia is already here with the dog, and I can’t leave it?—”
“Ma, what do you need me to do? Pick up a pumpkin pie?”
“Yes.”
Grace glanced at Alix, who looked like she’d reached a previously undiscovered level of bliss. “I’ll get there before they close.”
“Where are we going?” Alix asked after taking a breath.
Grace opened her container, balancing it in one hand before diving in with a flimsy plastic fork. “It’s nothing. After I drop you off, I have to get the only pumpkin pie one of my cousins is willing to accept, apparently.”
“I’m going with you,” Alix replied.
Grace chuckled. “You do not have to brave the nightmare?—”
“What else am I doing? Let’s go! Show me your city.” She pointed her fork at the unappealing landscape. “You’re already killing it. What else you got?”
If Dante were revising his circles of hell for modern times, Costco in the afternoon before Thanksgiving had to be the new fourth. No one in the endless line took pity on Grace and Alix standing there with a single item. But the half hour they waited to pay was a blink thanks to Alix’s ability to make easy conversation.
They’d talked so long, in fact, that it was only when Grace was standing at her mother’s door holding a pie the size of a manhole cover that she realized Alix was about to meet her family.
She didn’t have time to panic before the aggressively decorated harvest-themed door swung open.
“You must be, Alix,” her mother said after ignoring Grace. She pulled her into the house and into a hug without stepping on her, so she was already doing better than Grace. “Come in. I’m Connie” was all her mother managed to get out before Tia Sylvia’s black Newfoundland dog barreled for the door.
“Don’t let him get out!” Tia Sylvia shouted from the family room as if Grace might somehow miss the two-hundred-pound bear-dog running at them.
Grace shut the door and braced for impact. At two years old, Baby was the size of a grown man and greeted everyone with a tackle. Stomping on her foot was an improvement from trying to rest his front paws on her shoulders to eat her face.
“Hey, buddy.” Alix scratched Baby behind the ear. “Aren’t you beautiful.”
“Oh, yeah, beautiful.” Connie scoffed. “You don’t have to get three tons of fur out of your AC filter.”
“Which fridge do you want this in? I want to get Alix back to Wynwood. Her hotel?—”
“Hotel?” her mother repeated like Grace had uttered an unforgivable curse. “No. She doesn’t need a hotel.” She looked at Alix. “You don’t need a hotel. I made up the guest room?—”
“Mom, no. She has a perfectly nice hotel and she doesn’t need?—”
“What need?” Her mother was undeterred and hell-bent on making things weird. She shouldn’t have picked up the stupid pie that was getting heavier by the moment. “It’s Thanksgiving. She’s not going to stay by herself in a cold hotel. And there’s no sense driving back and forth three hours round trip. Both of you stay. Alix, you want to stay, don’t you?”
Alix looked like she was about to let herself be guilted into moving right in and paying rent if Connie wanted her to.
Grace stood between Alix and her mother to block her view. “Don’t put her on the spot. She’s too polite to say no, but I’m not. She already has?—”
The sound of something shattering against the tile floor yanked everyone’s attention to the family room. To where her Aunt Sylvia was picking up the shards of a vase.
Her mother unleashed a tirade of curses that were mercifully in the Cuban Spanish Alix hadn’t grown accustomed to yet. While her mother and Sylvia, who were cousins and not sisters, argued, Grace saw her chance to flee.
“Don’t move,” Grace whispered to an incredibly amused Alix still standing by the door. “And don’t agree to anything,” she warned.
