“Oh, please, Mia. We never used that term when our parents were actually married, let’s not start using it now.”
“Della, such a buzzkill.” She reached forward, grabbing the bowl of popcorn and sat it between the two of us and we both started munching away. I never once thought I would be here with Mia like this. Callie and Zoey were getting along with her pretty well, too. I thought maybe after I told everyone that I was moving out that they might want Mia to move out, too, but she had somehow become an official roommate and friend, just like I had been. And it seemed to be doing her some good. When she wasn’t with Nate, she was here, not out at parties or bars. She even got a job at a tattoo shop in town. I never thought I would see the day that happened. I knew it wasn’t the best job in the world, but she seemed to like it, plus as she told me, there were added benefits to working with tattoo artists. She already added two tattoos to her body since she started working there, one on her wrist and one at the nape of her neck, in addition to the one on her stomach. She kept trying to convince me to come in and get one, but surprisingly that was something I hadn’t done when I was in my rebellious stage. As Justin liked to say, I had virgin skin.
We watched movies for the rest of the night, eating junk food, and painting each other’s nails. It was the perfect girls’ night to close-out my time as their roommate, but there would still be plenty of these to come. It wasn’t as if I was moving across the state or anything.
“Well.” I stood up, stretching after the last movie finished, swaying as the combination of margaritas and sleepiness hit me full on. “I’m going to head to bed.”
Zoey and Callie were both passed out on the couch already and Mia pouted her lips. “Fine, leave me all alone. I think I’m gonna watch one more before I head to bed.”
“Night.” I headed up the stairs and into my mostly empty bedroom. It was weird to see it like this, and a little sad, but I was excited about moving in with Justin. And also scared shitless. What if we got on each other’s nerves within the first week of living together? He said he loved having my mess around even though he was anal about his house being clean, but what if he got sick of it? I didn’t know if I could control my mess. I had started worrying a lot about his job recently, too. That definitely wasn’t a deal-breaker in our relationship, but I had a feeling I would be waiting nervously for him to come home from every shift.
Somehow, I managed to push that all out of my head, falling asleep nearly as soon as my head hit the pillow. Normally, I was a restless sleeper but I must have slept straight through the night, because the next thing I knew, someone was pounding on my door as Mia yelled my name.
“Calm down,” I muttered, rubbing a hand over my eyes that were caked with sleep.
My door popped open and Mia came to the edge of my bed, her phone in one hand, her mouth set in a deep frown. “My dad’s on the phone for you,” she said quietly.
“What?” My brows twisted in confusion. Gerald and I weren’t exactly BFFs. In fact, I didn’t think I had ever talked to him on the phone, and when we lived together, we rarely said more than ten words to each other at a time.
“Here.” She pushed the phone into my hand and sat down at the end of my bed.
“Hello?” It came out as more of a question as I sat up straighter and pressed a hand to my forehead. I felt a headache coming on, probably from being woken up so suddenly.
“Adelaide, dear.” He cleared his throat loudly. “I’m sorry to have woken you up, but I have some bad news.” He paused heavily and I sucked in a breath, holding it until he spoke again. “Your mother…Lillian…she’s gone.”
“Okay,” I dragged out. “I thought you two split up a while ago, Gerald. So what exactly is the big deal? Did she leave with that new guy she was talking about?”
“No, Adelaide. There was no other man that I’m aware of. I told her we were getting divorced and she moved into an apartment the next day. I couldn’t handle her any longer.” He sighed loudly, and I pressed my ear closer to the phone, wondering what exactly he was getting at. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be speaking that way of her, especially now. Apparently, your mother mixed a heavy dose of pills along with quite a bit of alcohol. The cleaning service that I hired found her early this morning.”
Leave it to my mom to do something like that. She almost always had a drink in her hand and a mini pharmacy in her medicine cabinet, but she never mixed the two together as far as I knew. “Okay, well did they have to pump her stomach or something? Is she still at the hospital?” Even after everything that happened between us, I hated to think that she was there alone. Apparently, Gerald could no longer stand her and there was no new man. I had no idea why she would have lied about that.