It’d serve her right if I went on Tinder and brought a guy home, I thought, imagining the look on my mother’s face when some random dude came walking into the kitchen in the morning, shirtless, to drink milk straight out of the carton. You told me to try Tinder, I’d tell her, shrugging. Not that my parents kept milk in the house. My mother used powdered creamer, and my father was lactose intolerant. But random one-night stands had to drink milk out of the carton while half-naked. Everyone knew that.
My work best friend did have a guy she wanted to set me up with. The thought filled me with dread, but maybe going on a date would get my mother off my back for a month or so. And that was all I needed. Another month. Maybe two. I’d feel more like myself then.
Hopefully.
CHAPTER THREE
I avoided my mother as much as I could for the next few days, which took a lot of careful listening at doors and sneaking into the kitchen at odd times to eat. If I was invisible, maybe she would forget I was there. Like that woman who lived in the walls of someone’s house for years before they realized she existed.
But Thursday night, I heard the unmistakable arrival of my grandmother, followed by my father tapping quietly on my bedroom door. “Your grandma has that crazy look in her eye,” he said when I let him in. “You know she and your mom are going to fight when she shows up like this. You can’t leave me alone with them.”
I sighed but agreed to come down. There was a good chance that my grandmother would take my side. Evelyn Gold’s primary form of entertainment was antagonizing her two daughters, which frequently worked to her grandchildren’s benefit. She could turn on us just as quickly but usually didn’t if our mothers were present. If torturing her daughters was an art form, my grandmother’s work belonged in the Louvre.
My grandma turned her gaze, as sharp as ever though she was almost eighty-nine, on me, her eldest granddaughter, as I slid into my seat at the dining room table. “The recluse is alive,” she said, the corners of her lips twitching into a half smile. “I was sure I’d have to burn the house down to get you to come see me from the way Anna talks.”
My mother’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “She comes downstairs. She just doesn’t leave the house.”
“Who wants to leave the house these days? You’ve got everything you need inside with the Google and the Facebook. Besides, it’s too humid.” She winked at me. “You just stay in your cocoon until you’re ready to come out.”
“You’re not helping, Mom.”
“Not helping you maybe. Jenna, darling, am I helping?” My dad started to laugh, which he tried to hide behind a fake coughing fit when my mom glared at him. Grandma pursed her lips. “On second thought, don’t answer that. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”
My mom shook her head and changed the subject. “Have they set a date for the wedding yet?”
“Whose wedding?” I asked.
“Your cousin Lily. She’s marrying that boy from the bog thing,” Grandma said.
She meant my cousin’s blog. I raised an eyebrow. “And she’s actually having a wedding?”
“Sounds like it.”
“Huh. Good luck finding anyone willing to be her bridesmaid.”
Grandma waved a hand in the air. “Water under the bridge. That was all ages ago.”
I opened my mouth to say, It was just a couple of months ago, but stopped myself. It wasn’t. It was a year ago that my cousin had been a bridesmaid in five weddings over one summer and had blown up her life by writing a blog trashing the brides, which of course went viral. Lily always had a flair for the dramatic, which, to be fair, did run in the family. It couldn’t not when you were descended from our grandmother. But it had been a year, hadn’t it? Which meant I had been living in my childhood bedroom for . . . Oh no.
“Good for her,” I murmured half-heartedly.
My grandmother looked at me sharply again, then reached over and patted my hand. “Brad wasn’t the one,” she said. “You’ll see. I never liked him.”
Couldn’t you have told me that six years ago? I thought. But then Grandma turned her attention back to my mother.
“Sometime in the spring, I think. Staying local. Nothing big or fancy.”
“I’m glad it worked out for her,” Mom said. “Joan must be over the moon.”
Grandma rolled her eyes, but there was a gleam of amusement in them. “Joan is already trying to plan some huge wedding. It’s her last one, after all. She wants to go out with a bang.”