“Didyou?”
Mom pulls back, evaluating the state of me. “No, I had a brunch.”
“Same.”
She narrows her eyes. I narrow mine back. Then she smirks and turns, making a gesture with her red-manicured fingers to usher me inside.
“Do you want some coffee? I’ve been playing around with one of those pour-overs.”
I leave my suitcase in the hallway and shut the door behind me, following her into the house. I glance sideways and briefly note she’s updated the dayroom. Every time I come home something’s been remodeled.
“I’d love some coffee,” I call to her. “Do you have anything baked?”
“Of course, darling, I went to Brightside Bakeshop and picked you up one of those stratas you love. What time is your flight?”
In the kitchen, I take a seat at a barstool. “Eight.”
She perks up. “So you can stay for dinner?”
“If it’s an early dinner.”
I catch her smile as she turns and reaches into a cabinet for two mugs. “Lovely. Now, tell meallabout the bachelorette party.”
I do; I tell her every detail. Where we went, what we ordered, who fell over and scraped their knee. It took me a long time to understand this is how she wants it: a vicarious experience. When I was in high school, I’d shut her out. Give her a disgruntledFine, great, pretty, boring.But at some point during my freshman year of college, I realized she wasn’t being nosy. Hearing the little details of other people’s lives is what makes my mother happy.
“Did you have fun?” Mom asks.
I sip on my coffee as I contemplate.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly.
EvenbeforeCamila had drunkenly admitted she was leaving, I’d been stressed about corralling the girls and then paranoid someone would fall off the party wagon. After Cami’s admission, my mood the whole next day had been fraught with anxiety and drunken inner monologue until Will Grant had—for lack of better phrasing—quieted me.
He’d taken my anxiety and soothed it. Listened to my best attempt at articulating that inner monologue and offered counterpoints. He stole my stress away, replaced it with a sense of ease. Even as heated as I’d been following our proximity, I’d gone back to Andalo and danced until my feet were numb, then sang karaoke at our Airbnb until I passed out.
It wasn’t that I’d forgotten even for a moment about Cami’s admission. It was that I stopped letting it infect every other thought I had.
“Toward the end of the weekend,” I amend for Mom. “That’s when I found my groove.”
“Who helped you find it?” she asks.
I feed her a bland line, but I swear to God, there’s a knowing, motherly glint in her eye. “Did the trip give you wedding fever?” she asks.
“Mom.”
She throws up her hands. “Just asking! You know Oma would roll over in her grave if she knew you were still single.”
“Oma was married three times,” I retort. “She would have understood me waiting for the right man.”
Dad gets home forty-five minutes later—just moments after Mom mutters something under her breath to the effect ofIf only men could make sex last as long as golf.He kisses my forehead and gives my shoulders a squeeze.
“Have you checked your retirement fund recently?” he asks.
“No.”
“Are you still making more money than me?”
“Yes.”
