“Cat room again?”
She wiggled her hair out of the tabby’s mouth. “It’s coming together so well. We’re close to opening.” After my parents divorced when I was thirteen, my mom started an animal welfare nonprofit. Last year they’d finally raised enough money to build their first shelter-slash-vet clinic, Happy Homes, on a plot of farmland outside Houston. It was basically a luxury hotel for pets, entirely devoid of cages, with plenty of outdoor space for dogs to roam and elaborate rooms with trees for cats to climb. Launching Happy Homes was a dream come true for her and I was proud, but work also dominated her life, much like Lee’s. Meanwhile, I spent my evenings working through five-hour Julia Child recipes and marathoning Reese Witherspoon movies. The two Stone workaholics and me. One of these things was not like the others.
“I’m really happy for you,” I said. “Can’t wait for the big launch.”
Mom pitched forward as a tiny gray kitten scaled her back and stood, victorious, atop her head. “Thank you, but I didn’t call to talk about the shelter.” She extracted the kitten and pressed him to her cheek. “Gandalf and I called to squeal about your boyfriend! We saw you on TV. Logan Arthur, honey—that’s fantastic. I’m so happy you’re happy.”
Ah. The news had reached Houston. “Sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean for you to find out that way.” I clutched my hands and winced when onion juice made my fingers stick together. “I was kind of ambushed by the press conference.”
She waved. “If I had a nickel for every time I learned about Lee’s life through the news, I’d have a hundred Happy Homes by now.”
I let out a deep breath. Thank God Elise Stone wasn’t easily offended.
The sound of purring grew louder in the background. “So tell me about Logan,” she said, raising her voice. “You know he was a commissioner here in Houston before his campaign, right? I always thought he seemed pretty great, and then I met him at one of Lee’s rallies and convinced him to join our donor list. So obviously, I was right.”
“You did?” An image of Logan scowling at a troop of kittens popped unbidden to my mind. He didn’t strike me as the cuddly type. Maybe Nora had arranged the donation as a PR thing. How strange that he’d intersected with my life yet again—first with Lee’s campaign and now my mom’s nonprofit—and still, I’d never registered him. I was starting to think I’d been living with blinders on. Maybe there were certain things—certain people and possibilities—I hadn’t allowed myself to see, simply because they’d seemed so wildly outside my comfort zone.
“Tell me how you met,” my mom urged. “I’ve got to say, honey, I’m thrilled you’ve put Chris behind you.”
A tidal wave of guilt hit me at the thought of lying to my mom, probably the person most genuinely invested in my love life. “It’s still early days,” I said, fiddling with the handle of the knife and then scrambling back when I accidentally pointed the stabby end at my stomach. “It’s not like we’re getting engaged or moving in or anything.”
“Mischief!”Mom shouted, throwing the phone down and startling me. “Oh, no,badMischief. Hold on a sec, Mischief got into the bag of catnip. I’m about to have a dozen stoned cats on my hands.”
I went back to dicing onions, listening to the sounds of my mother shooing the kittens, then apologizing to them for using her loud voice, then sweeping catnip. Finally, she huffed back on-screen. “Crisis averted.” She blew a strand of hair out of her mouth. “Speaking of moving in, I forgot to tell you Ethan asked me to move in with him a few weeks ago.”
I dropped the knife with a clatter. “Hedid?” Ethan was my mom’s serious boyfriend, her first in a very long time. He was so kind I’d taken to him immediately, and eventually even Lee’s hackles had gone down. “That’s exciting, Mom.” Maybe they’d get married. I felt a complicated rush of feeling at the thought—ninety percent joy, ten percent vestigial loyalty to my father, though they’d been divorced even when he was alive.
“Oh, I told him no,” she said airily. “I’ve finally gotten my house exactly the way I want it. Plus, Ethan’s house is so big and drafty. Not for me.”
“Mom.” My heart beat faster. “You can’t say no. What’s he going to think? He’s going to break up with you.”
My stomach dropped like I was on a roller coaster. Suddenly I was twelve years old again, devastated by the news that my father had cheated and my parents were splitting up. Before that, our family had been happy. Just months earlier, I’d had my big birthday sleepover that, against all odds, had turned into a success. I could still remember my dad wrapping his arms around my mom while they sang me “Happy Birthday” before the girls from school arrived, both of their faces glowing in the candlelight, the picture of bliss. Fast-forward six months and everything had fallen apart: Dad was moving out and Lee was angry all the time and home was filled with icy silence.
One night when I was too upset to sleep, I’d crawled into bed with my mom and cried against her shoulder. She’d held me, rubbing my back, telling me everything would be okay. I asked her the question that burned hottest inside me:Whywas this happening—why had dad cheated, why was he leaving? Mom had stroked my hair and said, in a bone-tired voice, “I don’t know, honey. Maybe I just couldn’t give him what he needed.”
As I lay there, pressed to my mother’s side, the fear sank in. You couldn’t count on anyone to stick around, it turned out, not even your family. Before that night I’d been naive enough to assume there were some people in life you never had to worry about, that you didn’t have to work to win over. Some people who would always just love you and be there. But everything was more fragile than I’d realized. No love was free: you had to constantly earn it, or else lose it. The epiphany had stuck with me, the lesson solidified a decade later when my father was killed in a car accident and I learned what it felt like to lose someone in a way more profound than divorce.
Yes, you had to work hard to keep the people you loved with you; but sometimes, no matter how hard you worked, it simply wasn’t enough. That was the greatest anxiety simmering under the surface of my heart.
My mom laughed on the other end of the phone. “Ethan’s not breaking up with me anytime soon, Lex. Trust me. I’m the only person who knows how to make his favorite lasagna.”
I bit my tongue, resisting the urge to bark at her that it wasn’t a joke. That of all people, she should know not to make this mistake again.
She must’ve seen the concern on my face because she said, “Ethan understands where I’m coming from, baby. We’ve both been on our own for a while. He gets it.”
“Okay,” I said, though worry tugged at me. “If you say so.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you!” Her face brightened. “Happy Homes is making our first commercial!”
I swallowed deep, willing the tendrils of anxiety to unclutch my mind. “That’s great. Sounds like you’ll be on TV soon, too.”
She waved. “Oh, I don’t want to be in front of the camera. I’m more of an ideas person. And I’m thinking, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You know that SPCA commercial with the sad animals in cages?”
“The one with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background?”
She snapped. “Exactly. It’s so popular.”
I frowned. “I don’t know if I’d call it popular, Mom. Emotional terrorism, maybe.”
