1
One Strange Cookie
A short stranger will come into your life this year.
“That’s specific.” I wave the paper at my mother, who’s sitting across the table from me in our favorite Chinese haunt.
Golden Dragon is not the best or trendiest restaurant in Nashville, but we’ve been going to it since before I could wield chopsticks. I’m still not a pro. Half the time my dumplings slither out and plop into the sauce bowl, spraying the salmon-colored tablecloth with brown spots.
Mom tucks a short strand of blonde hair behind her ear. Her pixie cut makes her look like a rock star, but decorating houses for people in the music industry and paying for my music classes are as far as her involvement inthat worldgoes. She prays I’ll grow out of my aspirations, but music is my life.
“You don’t have any plans to make me a grandma, right?”
“Ew.” I wrinkle my nose. “Definitely not. Besides, I want a career.”
With or without my mom’s blessing, I’m going to be the next Mona Stone. Sometimes I think Mom doesn’t want me to become a musician because Dad was a musician, and even though she must’ve loved him at some point—the point when I was conceived—she no longer harbors fuzzy feelings for him. Anytime I listen to one of his songs, her lips thin. He’s not even alive anymore, but whatever went wrong between them has endured beyond the grave.
“What does yours say?” I ask.
She cracks her fortune cookie open and extricates the tiny white scroll. “Your shoes will make you happy today.”
“No way.” I snatch the paper from her fingers. Sure enough, that’s the message. “So? Do they make you happy?”
She stretches out one of her legs and scrutinizes her brown suede bootie. “You know what? Iamfeelin’ mighty happy right now.”
“And here I thought sharing spring rolls with your lovely daughter was the source of your happiness.”
“Nah.” She winks. “It’s the shoes.”
I fake pout.
Although she smiles, it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m gonna miss these weekly dinners next year.”
“Mom—”
“I want you to get out of this town and see more of the world.” In other words, she wants to send me away from the music scene. It’s funny that she thinks my passion is geographically induced. I simply take advantage of what my town has to offer.
Sometimes—especially when Mom wants to shove me out of Nashville—I wish I’d been born to Mona Stone. Like Mom, my idol’s self-made, but where Mom contented herself with settling among the stars, Mona conquered the freaking moon.
I want the moon, too.
Mom signals for the check and digs out her wallet. “I got one of my customers to write you a recommendation letter for Cornell. I’ll email it to you when we get home.”
I sit on my hands. “Not all singers become train wrecks.”
Her mouth flattens, then: “Angie…”
“Look at Mona Stone. She never got into drugsoralcohol, and she started at eighteen.”
“Mona Stone shouldn’t be your idol.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Because what?”
Miss Ting slides a plastic tray with our bill over one of the brown sauce spots. When I was younger, Mom and I played a game: if I could eat a meal at Golden Dragon without dirtying the table linen, I got to play DJ in her car the entire week. If I lost—which was the usual outcome—I was stuck listening to Mom’s favorite satellite preset: Classic FM. I don’t dislike Vivaldi, but I have a preference for songs with lyrics.
