“Don’t spy,” Daphne scolded. “It’s rude.”
“I can’t help myself. Aren’t you curious about her? I mean, what did Dad see in her?” She studied the woman’s features. Goldilocks was pretty and she seemed nice in a ditzy kind of way, but she was no Veronica Grimm. Sabrina’s mother was a knockout.
“Love is weird,” Daphne said. “We can’t know why Dad was in love with her.”
Sabrina laughed. “What do you know? You’re only—” She stopped herself when her sister flashed her an angry look. She was already treading on thin ice with Daphne. She didn’t need to make their relationship any worse. “Yeah, that’s true. We can’t know.”
“Red, are you going to join us?” Daphne asked the little girl.
Red shook her head vigorously and sank back into her hiding space.
The girls left her there and returned to the living room with the drinks. Sabrina found the three bears sitting on the couch, shaking the last few gumdrops out of a jar Granny Relda kept on a coffee table for guests. The biggest bear gestured toward the jar as if to say “MORE!” It made Sabrina uncomfortable. She hated when she saw animals behaving like people. Animals shouldn’t eat gumdrops! They shouldn’t drink tea or chocolate milk, either.
“This is a bad idea,” Goldilocks fretted, sitting on an ottoman, then jumping back up to move a vase. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“No, you did the right thing. We’ve tried everything to wake them up. You’re our last hope,” Sabrina said, nearly panicked that the woman might turn and walk out of their lives. They had been searching for her for so long.
“Have some tea,” Daphne said.
Goldilocks ignored the offer and went to work rearranging the books in the family’s huge bookshelf. “Your dad told me he didn’t want to see me anymore and I tried to respect that. I moved to New York City and lived there for a long time. I had a nice little apartment in the East Village close to where CBGB’s used to be. Then I heard he and Veronica had moved to Manhattan. I never went to see him. It was the only way I could say I was sorry, and now, here I am. I know you need me to help him now, but when he opens his eyes and sees me standing over him I don’t think he’s going to be happy. And your mother! She’s going to think I’m … I’m a harlot.”
“What’s harlot mean?” Daphne asked.
Sabrina knew and thought Goldilocks might be right. “A harlot is—”
“I asked Goldilocks, not you,” Daphne snapped.
Sabrina frowned. Daphne always turned to her whenever she didn’t understand a word.
“A harlot is a woman with a bad reputation,” the woman explained. “A harlot is a woman who kisses another woman’s husband.”
“My mom will get over it,” Daphne said matter-of-factly.
Goldi turned to the three musky-smelling bears. “What do you think I should do?”
They stared into the woman’s eyes and shrugged at the same time.
“A lot of help the three of you are!” Goldi scolded then turned back to Daphne. “What is keeping your grandmother?”
“Same old Goldi,” a voice said from across the room. Everyone turned to find a tall, handsome man with a mop of blond hair and a nose that had seen the knuckles of one too many fists. He wore a trench coat with hundreds of extra pockets sewn into it. Uncle Jake smiled at everyone. “Just as impatient as ever.”
Goldilocks frowned. “Jake Grimm!”
“You ready to get this show on the road?” he asked her.
The blond beauty bit her lower lip. “Just a second,” she said, then snatched a paperweight from the coffee table and set it on the bureau. She stood back and admired it, then smiled with satisfaction. “OK, let’s do this.”
She followed Jake up the stairs with the bears lumbering behind her. Sabrina and Daphne followed them, unfortunately downwind of the bears’ special brand of funk. Elvis followed reluctantly.
“Are you coming?” Daphne said to Red, who had crept back to the couch now that everyone was leaving.
Red shook her head. “This is your family. I don’t belong.”
Daphne rushed back down the stairs and took the little girl’s hand in her own, then pulled her to her feet. “C’mon.”
At the top of the stairs, they met Granny Relda, a chubby, stout little woman with wrinkles lining most of her face. She had white hair streaked with faint traces of her old fire-engine red. These days she rolled it all into a bun on the top of her head, though wisps of it escaped through the course of a day. She had changed from her nightgown into a bright white dress and a matching hat with a sunflower appliqué in its center. She smiled and hugged Goldilocks as if she were one of her own children.
“It’s good to see you, Goldi,” she said in her light German accent. Granny had grown up in Berlin and moved to America when she married the girls’ late grandfather, Basil.