“I’ve never thought of it like that.” I purse my lips, think about all the other ways Dad has set the bar high. When I think about my parents and their relationship, it’s always as a unit, not individually.
“That’s what we’ll work on tonight. After whatever you have planned, so you have what? An hour or so to think about what you are looking for in a boyfriend and how you want them to treat you.”
“Okay.” I open my folder and sift through the documents, finding the one I need. “Wait, your dad sends you a twenty too?”
“Learned from the best, I guess.” He turns his chair and body to face me. “So, what’s this?”
I start to explain to him everything I researched. The shifted and new plan for our study—I can’t think of it as only mineanymore. We both have a lot riding on this. Cooper, maybe more.
Excited, tangents turn to word vomiting. Minutes pass by before I need to take a sip of water. I’m not positive that he understood a word I just spewed, but when I curiously peer over the lip of my glass at him he’s staring at me with a vintage Cooper Carmichael smile. Eyes starry and attention engrossed as if he’s hanging on to every word I say.
I set my glass down. “What?” I ask incredulously.
“Keep going.” He smiles bigger, and flips the page to more of my notes.
Meave hasher phone propped up against a plastic cup facing her. She’s on her art stool, one leg balanced on the top, tucked into her butt. The other bouncing up and down.
Her chestnut brown hair is tied up into a messy bun with two paint brushes pinning it together. Baby hairs and loose strands stick out everywhere.
The biggest show of her career is coming up. Some fancy schmancy studio in the Chicago hired her as an art studio assistant when she graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design. They’re starting a new up-and-coming series; and Meave is the first to be spotlighted.
She’s been working on these newer pieces since October. Honestly, she’s more together than I had anticipated when she answered my video call two hours ago.
“I still can’t believe you applied to be on a dating show.”
“That’s what you don’t believe? I can’t believe they are wanting to do a casting interview.” She laughs, dipping her brush in the water. Meave picks up a new, thinner brush. “Whenmy friends and I all agreed to submit applications, I was thelastone they thought would make it on. I didn’t take the ninety second video seriously. I filmed it after a bottle of wine. When we get off the phone, remind me, and I’ll send it to you.”
I change my position on my bed. Unfolding my legs and rolling over to lie on my stomach.
“If they ask you to be on it, are you going to do it?”
Meave shrugs, dropping her head one way, then the other.
“Seriously?” I exhale. “Mom and Dad?—”
“Would laugh. It’s not like I’d fall in love with anyone, or that I’m ready to. Plus…” She pauses.
Besides wanting to check in on her show, I called my sister because three weeks ago she broke up with her long-term boyfriend. They’d been doing long distance since high school, and when she moved to Chicago after college she realized they weren’t the same people they were at sixteen. Their break up was ‘mutual’, but Meave still cried for seventy-two hours straight, held up in the second bedroom of her industrial loft apartment that she uses as a studio.
Can’t wait to see the art that came out of those days.
The tip of her tongue sneaks out the corner of her mouth. It’s always done this when she’s concentrating—homework, art, painting her nails, it never mattered. Meave leans into her easel, nose about to touch the canvas.
“If I did go on the show, it’d be for the wrong, I mean selfish, reasons. I’d gain all the followers just to yap about my art. They’d be highly disappointed to find out that I am in fact an old woman trapped in a twenty-four-year-olds body.”
“You are not an old woman.”
“Sure,” she says humorously. “The two cats, an enthusiasm for needlepoint, carrying hard candies in my thrifted purse, playing Mahjong, volunteering at the community garden, and abedtime that is occasionally before the sun sets. Nope, not an old woman.”
“I think you’re interesting.” She does have a mature palette. I snort quietly. She gives me a placating smile. “But you are okay? You are doing better?”
“You sound like Mom.” She turns to face the camera. “Yes, Sutton, I’m okay. Leland and I had lunch the other day. We are going to be friends.”
“Friends.”
She swirls the paint brush in front of her, accidentally painting a lavender streak across the lens. “You have zero room to talk.”
“Uh. How?”
