“You’re the best!” I said, gratefully accepting the mug.
“Remember that,” she said while tucking a computer cord into her yellow tote bag, “because I need the car today.”
“Mom! I’m supposed to meet someone at ten.…”
“I’m sorry, hon, but your dad had to take the truck for an emergency, and”—she shut down the PowerPoint deck she’d spent the last week designing for a CEO at a tech company—“my own client’s having a conniption fit and needs me at the dress rehearsal after all.” She checked her watch. “If you don’t mind being about an hour early, I can drop you off, at least.”
To be honest, I was relieved, since this provided me with the perfect excuse for nixing the long drive to Portland with Quattro. I was still hashing out the logistics of getting downtown with Mom when the doorbell rang. She frowned; I shrugged. Neither of us expected anyone, but there was Reb, standing outside the front door. It’d have been weird to see anyone but Reb at nine on Sunday morning, but who knew what time zone she had just been in?
“What’re you doing here?” I asked, throwing my arms around her. Reb’s so tiny, I’m always half-afraid I’ll crush her, but from the way she squeezed me tight, I could tell she had packed on some serious muscles from lugging paint cans for her house-painting job.
“I got home a day early!”
The last time I saw Reb was two weeks ago. Juggling a part-time job and two internships during her gap year before college seriously ate into our time together. I said, “You’re free? Today?”
“But you’re not,” she guessed before greeting Mom: “Hey, Mrs. Wilde!” Then, lowering her voice so Mom wouldn’t overhear, Reb asked, “So who’s the new guy?”
“There’s no new guy.”
“Mmm hmm. So who’re you meeting, then?”
“A guy,” I mumbled.
“What was that? Did you say ‘a guy’? As in ‘a new guy’?”
“Sorry, I can’t believe it, but I have to run,” I said when Mom tapped her watch. “Mom’s driving me to my non-date.”
Without missing a beat, Reb told my mom, “I can drive Shana.” A few minutes later, Mom sailed out the door, shoving a bag of cookies at us, and as soon as she was gone, Reb wriggled her fingers at me. “Where’s your camera? Come on, show me the goods.”
“I hope you’re hungry, because I am,” I deflected as my stomach rumbled again. In the kitchen, I plated the rest of the cookies Mom had baked yesterday, an excellent first effort at replicating one of Ginny’s tried-and-true recipes. The cookie defense held Reb off for a good ten minutes, but then she brushed her hands together and settled down for some juicy girl talk.
“The Boy,” she reminded me, as she leaned forward at the table.
“Fine,” I sighed and powered the camera on, advancing to my favorite photo of Quattro. I wasn’t expecting the excited little flutter in my stomach at his expression: searing. He stared straight into the camera as though daring me to look away. When I angled the camera toward Reb, her lips curved into a smirk. “Well, hello, New Guy. What time’s the date?”
“This isn’t a date,” I told her, and glanced at the clock. Time had sped up the way it always did when we were together. It was now nine thirty. I sprang to my feet. “Oh, shoot, we gotta go.”
I quickly ushered Reb outside as I grabbed my messenger bag and tucked the camera back in safely. After locking the front door, we dashed through my pocket neighborhood of fifteen storybook-size cottages, built on a plot of communal property adjacent to wetlands. My family had transplanted here after the twins left for college, seven years ago, downsizing so my parents could afford two tuitions and a mortgage. As we exited the gate to the street where Reb had parked her minivan, she asked, “And you met this mystery man how?”
“When he ruined my picture at the Gum Wall.” I supplied the details about yesterday’s fiasco as we settled into the minivan. Few people aside from Reb and Ginny could understand my frustration about losing the perfect shot for my portfolio. But after discussing a novel together every month for the past four years in our mom-and-me book club, we Bookster Babes knew virtually everything there was to know about one another, from smoking pot (why kill my few brain cells?) to self-starvation (Ginny’s coconut chocolate-chip cookies; need we say more?) to sex. (Reb just lost her virginity to her longtime boyfriend, Ginny had come close, and I was the Virgin Queen.) Maybe I’d surreptitiously read one too many of Mom’s relationship books—and I’d definitely heard one too many of Mom’s sine qua non lectures—but I was holding out for true love. Anything less than that just seemed to make sex meaningless. And I, for one, refused to be meaningless.
Still, not even my besties knew about Dom. At least, I didn’t think they did.
Hands on the steering wheel, Reb asked, “Where to?”
“The Four Seasons.”
“Fancy.”