“That’s because you bought seven cards.”
“That caller was in cahoots with the brunette in the Rascal. They were trading looks. I know those looks. It’s how a caller looks at me when I bribe them with an iTunes gift card.”
“iTunes? Is the caller thirteen and in 2009?”
“I got my hands on a big box of those gift cards back in the day, and now I’m stuck with them. Maybe your new beau can trade them for something else. Make himself useful to me,” Gran suggested.
“He’s not my ‘beau.’ He’s the guy I’m marrying for health insurance.” Lainey left out the whole “him buying her house” part. She hadn’t told Gran about her hopes to leave Timber Creek. She wasn’t hiding it from Gran; she just wasn’t mentioning itnow. She was still afraid to speak that part of the plan into existence, lest it fall through.
Even so, she’d downloaded a language learning app to brush up on her French. She understood quite a bit but didn’t speak as fluently as she’d like. Whether she’d meant to or not, she’d started to dream a little, and Elliot Hodges was inconveniently tethered to that dream.
“Marrying a man for money never goes the way you hope it will,” Gran warned.
“Good, because Elliot doesn’t have money. Just insurance.” Lainey braced herself on the handlebar above her window like a vertigo patient on a city bus. “You’ve really never considered marrying any of your…significant others?” She couldn’t bringherself to use her grandmother’s preferred vernacular without bringing up digestive fluid.
“I considered marrying every one of my lovers who proposed. It’s the decent thing to do to at least hear them out, but no. Marriage has never appealed to me. Every married man I know is thriving, and every married woman is miserable. Plus, why would I pay a county clerk to collect information about me? I don’t have to pay to participate in the census.”
Lainey didn’t follow her grandmother’s logic as they pulled into the circular drive of the cluster of cottages her grandmother now called home. Gran was meant to shine a bit brighter than northern Wisconsin could allow, but at least the Lake Superior shoreline had good lighting.
“Besides, marriage ties you to another person, and that’s not an easy knot to slip out of, darling. Are you sure you can trust this one?”
Trust. That was a difficult word for Lainey. There were few people in this world who’d earned her trust.
Who shedidtrust was herself and her ability to read someone, and—cleft chin aside—Elliot had the eager, honest eyes of a man who could be easily tricked. He wasn’t capable of pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes—especially hers.
“I know what I’m doing, Gran.”
“Okay, then,” she replied, satisfied. “Thank you for entertaining an old woman before your lunchtime sexual engagement.” Gran flipped down the mirror to reapply her crimson lipstick.
“It’s just a normal lunch. At Benihana. A restaurant outfitted with the least-conducive surfaces for midday sex.”
“Speaking of”—Gran pulled a tissue from her handbag toblot her lips before continuing—“your mom is visiting for Easter this year.”
Lainey grimaced. “Do I even want to ask why that’s a ‘speaking of’?”
“She used to work at a hibachi restaurant. Don’t be crass.”
Lainey’s head fell back against the seat on its own accord. “Why Easter? Is she Catholic now or something?”
“You know she’s a Buddhist.”
“She’snotBuddhist, Gran. She’s a forty-seven-year-old white woman who’s still trying to ‘find herself.’ ” She punctuated the last two words with finger quotes.
Camille was what Bree called a “searcher” and what Bree’s mother called—after four G&Ts at the 2014 Timber Creek holiday tree lighting—“ambiguously European trash.” Camille had spent the first fourteen years of her life following Gran across Europe in a mid-tier dance company like a transient Eloise. She’d spent the next four years trapped in the woods of Wisconsin with Miss Elk River County, who’d returned to town in a blaze of glory with no money, two bad ankles, and a peculiar French teenager.
Given her upbringing, Camille’s accent had a confusing and magnetic Anna Delvey quality. Also, she had stolen quite a bit of money from people during those years, which would only deepen the comparison. Camille never adapted to small-town life, and when she got pregnant herself senior year, it looked as though she’d be trapped there forever.
Or at least, this was how she’d explained it all to Lainey at a diner over milkshakes when she was twelve and had become old enough to comprehend what her mother referred to as “the complexities of womanhood and the urgency of inner child work.” Lainey had, in fact, not been old enough to understand either ofthose things and had spent most of the conversation using the free crayons to color the bear eating a stack of pancakes on the kid’s menu into a zombie bear eating a stack of brains.
“If she can forgive me, then surely you can forgive her,” Gran said. She was always hypercritical of her own parenting in an effort to level the bad-parent playing field, but Lainey had never quite bought into the premise of her grandmother’s argument. Gran had stuck around. That had to count for something.
“I don’t…there’s nothing to forgive. I don’t care what she does. I’m Camille-neutral.” Lainey didn’t hate Camille. Not at all. But she wasn’t wasting her energy waiting around for her mother to become an actual mom. She’d had Gran. To Lainey, Camille was like an eccentric aunt who occasionally blew through town after deserting a fiancé at a ski chalet in Quebec or having been robbed during her silent month in a monastery in Thailand where she was unable to identify the perpetrator to the police without violating her oath. Lainey had grown tolerant of their unique—though certainly not parental—dynamic.
“You can’t be neutral about your mother. It doesn’t work that way, kid,” Gran said, stepping out of the car.
“Fine. I’m eagerly awaiting Camille’s miraculous reappearance on Easter. It’ll be wonderful. And biblical. Happy?”
“Thrilled.” Gran flipped her scarf over her shoulder. “She can meet your husband. Or your accomplice. I’ll leave the labels to you.”
