I give her a look that shuts her up. “Maybe he was just being nice. Not breaking up with me when I was in a medical crisis.”
“That doesn’t explain Easter,” she declares.
We sit in brooding silence. Amanda takes action and starts googling furiously. I take action by searching through all the open mystery shops available at work to see if there’s one at a bakery. I have a hankering for muffins suddenly.
“What are you doing?” Amy asks, peering over my shoulder.
“Discovering my ex-boyfriend’s mother died from the same allergy I have always makes me crave baked goods, you know?”
Amanda ignores us both. “You two leave me alone for an hour and I’ll have an answer.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do for an hour while I wait to find out the one little piece of information that could put all the puzzle pieces together?” I demand.
“Eat ice cream,” she says.
“Okay.” Good answer.
“How about we go for a nice power walk?” says my sister, Richard Simmons. In about fifty years she’ll look just enough like him with that curly reddish hair…
“Power walk or ice cream. Power walk or ice cream. That’s like asking if you want to have sex with Sam Heughan or just use your vibrator, Amy.”
She blushes. “Some vibrators are pretty damn nice.”
“Like the one I got at the sex toy shop with Shannon last week!” Mom chirps from the main door.
“You summoned her. Say the word ‘vibrator’ and if she’s within three miles, she just appears,” I hiss. To be fair, Mom came to my rescue at the sex toy shop. The trauma of seeing Jessica with Declan, then creating a minor traffic catastrophe that thankfully missed being covered on local news, meant I was completely useless by the time we’d reached the store’s parking lot.
Instructions memorized, she went in and spent ninety minutes doing a fabulous customer service evaluation of the store, and came out with a lifetime of orgasms in a surprisingly compact shopping bag.
“Look at this puppy! While Shannon was having her breakdown in the garbage-covered car, I was a professional and handled everything for her,” Mom announces with glee. She fishes a pink and white vibrator out of her purse.
It is bigger than a compact umbrella.
“Jesus Christ!” Amy screams.
“No, he’s the butt plug.” Mom pouts. “I didn’t have enough in my budget for him.”
The three of us stare at him, mouths agape.
Make it four. Even Chuckles’ jaw drops just a little.
“They make a Jesus butt plug?” Amanda asks in a shaky voice.
“See why I wanted you to go with her?” I say with more viciousness in my tone than I’d planned. But it’s sincere.
“See why I blackmailed you?”
Fair enough.
“Let’s go for that walk while Amanda stalks your ex boyfriend to learn how his mom died,” Amy says in a shell-shocked voice.
Mom marches into the living room and searches through the coat closet.
“What are you doing?” Amy asks.
“I need to hide this,” Mom announces.
“Oh, God, we don’t need to watch that!” I shout.
“Not in my body,” Mom says with disgust. “In your closet. It’s a surprise for your dad.”
“Oh, that would be a surprise in bed, all right. It’s basically a third partner.”
Mom brightens. “That was my thinking, too!” She frowns. “Why are you researching how someone’s mom died?”
“We’re making plans,” Amy whispers. “His mom came home with a giant vibrator one day and BAM!”
“I heard that.” She shoves the vibrator inside a bag with great effort, shoving once, twice, three times.
“Give the poor thing a cigarette after all that,” I mutter. “You didn’t even buy it dinner.”
Mom makes a sour face at me, then brightens as she sees Amanda at the laptop. “Are you really researching how Declan’s mother died? Did James do it?” A bit too eager with that question, isn’t she?
“Hey, wait a minute. You never finished telling me how Declan nearly became my stepbrother.”
Amy does a double take. “What? Wouldn’t that make Shannon and Declan’s relationship incestuous?”
“No, more like Marcia and Greg on The Brady Bunch.”
“Ewwww,” Amy and Amanda say in unison.
Mom pretends not to hear us.
“Mom? James? You said you dated him.”
“When did I say that?”
“The day Steve appeared at the ice cream shop.”
She frowns, then grins like an idiot. “You were so commanding with Steve! So fem dom! I’ll bet if you got one of those strap-ons at the sex toy shop—it turns out they’re not just for lesbians!—you could have…”
Her voice trails off when she sees the looks on our faces.
“Walk!” Amy announces. “You’ll spill your guts while Amanda does her cybersearching.”
“Where are we walking?”
“Not where. What. The plank.” She shoves me out the front door.
The big orange fireball in the sky is so interesting. I haven’t seen it for days, holed up in my apartment, and I’m tempted to wave hello, like it’s some neighbor I’ve known for years but haven’t chatted with for a long time.
“Some vibrators are pretty nice,” I taunt Amy. “You had to say that, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes it’s true.” She won’t back down. Sheesh. Little sister syndrome. When in doubt, dig in your heels.
“Something is very wrong with you,” I mutter, but we go for a walk. Because she’s right.
Not about the vibrators, but about needing to get out of the house.
“Tell the story about James, Mom. I can’t believe you let a real billionaire get away.” She misses the obvious sarcasm in my voice.
She chuckles. It’s not a happy sound. “He wasn’t a billionaire back then. Far from it. I was an artist’s assistant in some crappy squatter’s building where we were all avant-garde painters and he was with the real estate company that was trying to turn our run-down warehouse into fancy loft apartments. If he could get the building, he could make his first fortune. Only one thing stopped him.”
“You?”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
“Rats.” She says that single word like it explains everything.