“Nice guard cat,” my mom says. She holds her purse over her shoulder and keys in her hand. “Before you ask,” she adds as I press my palm over my heart, willing it to stay in place as Chuckles’ death ray of magnetic harm tries to pry it out of me, “Amanda called and told me she couldn’t reach you.”
“I’ve been unavailable by phone for no more than thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! And she sends out the National Guard.”
Mom looks triumphant. Marie Jacoby is what all my friends called a MILFF—Mother I’d Like to Flee From. A little too tan, a little too blond, a lot too judgmental. My mother doesn’t greet you with “Hello.”
“You should” is her salutation of choice.
“You should consider yourself fortunate. Some young girls would be falling all over themselves to have a mother who cares so much,” she grouses.
“First off, I’m not a girl. And second, you’re right. How about I sell you on eBay as mother of the year? You’d fetch a great price.”
One eyebrow shoots up. One perfectly threaded eyebrow, that is. No stray hair can live on Mom’s face. She visits the mall weekly and the women at the threading spa not only know her by name, they know her preferred coffee order from the little espresso place next to the escalator.
She peers intently at me, her eyes that luminous sapphire I still envy. I got dad’s dirt-brown eyes. “You’ve met someone,” she crows, plopping her oversized fake Prada bag on my scarred thrift shop table.
Which means she is here to talk.
“How do you do that?” I screech, channeling the same inner fifteen-year-old she can conjure at will with just two sentences and one knowing look.
Her eyebrow climbs higher. “So I’m right.” She stands and gives my coffee machine an appraising look. It is an espresso machine I’d gotten on a mystery shop for a high-end cookware store. “Make me a coffee and I’ll only ask the basics.”
“Blackmailer,” I mutter, but I know the score. Do this and she’ll leave me alone. Argue and I am in for the full hover-mother treatment that makes the NSA look like Spy Kids.
I grab the can of ground espresso out of the cabinet above the sink and she makes a guttural sound of reproach. Ignoring her, I fill the machine and make sure there is enough water. Sometimes, pretending she didn’t make a noise works.
But not this time.
“Look at the food in your cabinets! Coffee. Sugar and sweetener packets. Ketchup and soy sauce packets. Sample-size cookies. Teeny packages of microwave popcorn.”
“I eat a perfectly fine diet, Mom,” I mutter as the machine begins to hiss. Or maybe that’s me. It’s hard to tell.
She waves a perfectly manicured hand dismissively. The nail polish matches a thin line of mauve that runs as a single stripe through her shirt.
“Not for you. For the man you’ll entertain! He can’t see that. That’s not wife and mother material. No woman who makes a good wife keeps a pantry like that!”
“Last week you were Feminist Crusader Mom, telling me how proud you were that I finished my degree and support myself!” This is a well-worn argument. Since she turned fifty a little more than two years ago, and as her friends are all getting to Momzilla their way through their daughters’ weddings, Mom has become zealously devoted to finding me A Man.
Not just any man, though.
A man worthy of a Farmington Country Club wedding.
Mom’s phone rings. “You Sexy Thing” fills the room and Chuckles makes a disapproving sound eerily similar to my mother’s. I seize my chance.
“Gotta wash the toilet water off my arm!” I call back as I pad to the bathroom and turn on the shower, drowning out whatever comments she peppers me with. Stripping out of the pajamas I’ve been wearing for far longer than their shelf life feels like shedding a skin.
The tiny, hot pinpricks of escapism give me ten minutes to cleanse myself and to think. Or not think. Mom chats on the other side of the bathroom door, blissfully unaware that I am not listening. Or commenting. Or responding in any way, shape, or form.
That doesn’t stop her.
I turn off the shower spray and hear her shout, “And so that’s how Janice’s daughter found out her and her husband’s toothbrushes had been shoved up the robbers’ butts.”
Whoa. As I towel off, my reflection opens its mouth and closes it a few times, wondering how I am expected to respond to that.
Some things are best left to the unknown.
As I open the door, a plume of steam hits Mom. “My hair! My hair!” she shouts. I inherited her limp hair and Dad’s eyes, which is so totally backwards. Dad has lush hair that my sister, Amy, got—perfect spiral curls that rest elegantly in auburn tendrils against her back. And Mom has those blue eyes.
I look in the mirror and Declan’s name runs through my mind, planted there by my subconscious. If I say a word about him to Mom then she’ll be planning the wedding and have him in a headlock, demanding a two-carat ring before he can say “Hello.”
I walk into my bedroom wearing a towel, and stop short. Clothes are laid out on my bed for me.
“What am I? Four?” I mumble. Then I grudgingly put them on, because Mom does have good taste. The adobe shirt she pairs with navy pants and a scarf I never use looks more stylish than I want to admit.
“I can color code your wardrobe for you, Shannon,” she shouts from the hallway as I dress.
“You should start a clothing line. Garanimals for Adults. It would be very popular!”
She takes my comment at face value. “What a great idea! I’ll ask Amy what she thinks. Maybe we can do one of those crowd-funding things to raise money for it like Amy does.”
Amy is an intern at a venture capital company. So not the same thing as Kickstarter or Indiegogo. I don’t correct Mom, because it’s about as useful as correcting Vladimir Putin about the Ukrainian/Russian border.
“Who was on the phone?” I ask.
“Amanda. She wants you to call her. What’s wrong with your phone?”
“I dropped it in a toilet on a shop this morning.”
Mom’s face freezes in an outrageous O. “You didn’t…retrieve it?” The only thing Mom fears more than never marrying off a kid at the Farmington Country Club is germs.
“I stuck my hand in the toilet in the men’s room and saved it, even as I flushed!” I say with glee.
She glares at me. Chuckles leaves the room, clearly outclassed. “Men’s room?”