Page 7 of Mother-Daughter Murder Night

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In the time it took Jack to bike the three miles back to the house, Lana and Beth went to war. Beth was outside on the front porch shouting at her mother; Lana was inside, shouting back; and there were two increasingly uncomfortable-looking men holding Beth’s old quilted sofa in the doorway between them.

Lana realized she had made a tactical error in not timing the new furniture to arrive when her daughter was at work. But Beth’s schedule was always changing, and Lana couldn’t keep living in a cottage decorated with mismatched cane chairs and palm frond lampshades. The house looked like Martha Stewart had been trapped on a desert island for a very long time. Recently, Beth had been lugging buckets of rocks up from the slough, and Lana worried they’d soon have a coffee table made of river stones.

“Beth, be reasonable.” Lana tried to keep her tone even, while using one hand to urge the workmen to shimmy around her daughter with the threadbare sofa.

“We didn’t talk about this,” Beth said. “You should have asked.”

“I’m not allowed to buy my granddaughter a decent fold-out? Don’t you want her to get good sleep?”

“Ma, that’s not the point.”

“Your daughter gave me her room. She’s been sleeping on that lumpy couch for months. This is literally the least I can do to thank her.”

Beth looked over at Jack, who was taking a suspiciously long time removing her helmet. Then Beth exhaled and took a half step to the side. The two men hustled the patchwork couch down the front steps and into their waiting truck. Lana watched, triumphant, as they came back into the house with a brand-new, cream-colored sofa with spindly gold legs.

They came back outside and pulled a large cardboard box out of the truck.

Lana hurriedly answered the question in Beth’s eyes. “A new mattress for me. European pillow-top. Lumbar support is crucial to my recovery.”

“But—”

“Did you want a new mattress too? I can have it here in five days, no problem.”

Beth’s jaw was locked, her eyes fixed on the men hoisting the box up the steps. “I don’t like having strangers in my house.”

“Strangers? Please. This is Max. And Esteban.” Lana beamed at them. “Next week, they’re painting the interior.”

While the men wrestled the mattress inside, Lana produced a stack of paint chips from the pocket of her robe and started laying them out on the porch swing. Jack came up behind her, smelling of salt and rubber, and put a finger on one of the samples.

“It’s like French vanilla,” the teenager said, crouching down to get a better look.

Lana nodded. “I was thinking that for the kitchen. Or it could be nice for my bedroom. I mean, yours.”

“I don’t think so,” Beth said.

“You prefer the Arctic Gray?”

“I prefer the house we have now.”

Lana gave Beth a wide-eyed look. “I’ll make sure they do it all while you’re at work. You don’t even have to see them. That textured fern pattern in the kitchen, it’s practically sliding off the walls—”

“Ma, that’s not what I mean. You don’t get to replace my furniture. You don’t get to redecorate my house.”

“I just want to make it comfortable—”

“It is comfortable. Jack and I have been making it comfortable for fifteen years. Right?”

Lana looked at Jack. She expected her granddaughter to speak up for herself, for what she wanted. But the girl just nodded, looking uncertainly at her flustered mother.

“We’re happy to have you here, Ma,” Beth said in a more conciliatory tone. “We can keep the new couch. And your mattress. But please. Give it a rest.”

“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

“We’re doing everything we can to make sure that’s a long, long time from now.”

“Not if that textured paint kills me first.” Lana swept up the paint chips, shoved them into her pocket, and shuffled back into the house.