“Hazelnut?”
He gave me a manly flick of his chin. “One of the best things,” he said as his eyes moved up and down my body, as if to say But not as good as all this.
No kidding. His hand edged up my leg, strong and sure right through the down and fluff. “Last night, Lisa…” He whistled quietly and rubbed his temples. “I mean… Jesus. Never in my life.”
I nodded at him again, this time unblinking. I silently ran through the words that might be adequate to describe it—earthshaking, mind-blowing, oh-God-oh-God-oh-God—but none of them was even close to enough. There I was, all warm and comfy, so happy and so surprised by all this that I felt like the heroine in some fantasy—all I could do was nod and smile at him. And plop a second cube into my cup. “I know.”
Dave winked again and stood up. “I washed your clothes because I wanted to make sure they were dry. They’ll be out of the dryer in…” He checked the massive, fancy watch on his huge wrist. “Just a few minutes.”
“And you do laundry?”
“Not usually. But you’re the exception.”
Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God. I set my coffee on the bedside table and flopped back into the pillows. “By the way, this mattress is fantastic.” I squeezed my buns and got a respectable bounce going. “I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well.”
And then for some reason, Dave laughed. “Glad to hear it. Come on down when you’re ready. I’ll leave your clothes in here, and then I’ll make you something to eat. How do you feel about bacon?”
“Like maybe you’re my knight in shining armor.”
“Attagirl,” he said, and I heard him head down the hallway.
Coffee in bed. Fresh laundry. Bacon. Best sex of my life. I rolled over into the comforter to wrap myself in a burrito and then went crazy with kicky-legs.
*
Much to my surprise, though, when I came downstairs freshly showered, warm, and comfy—led to the kitchen by the smell of bacon and feeling decidedly like a bloodhound on the trail—I realized that Dave and I weren’t alone in this great big house. Seated at the kitchen table was a very, very ancient lady, with a huge mug next to her emblazoned with the words IDRIS ELBA’S BATHWATER. Next to that was a red aerosol container of whipped cream. I was well behind her, on the far end of the kitchen, and she hadn’t seen me. She was reading something on her iPad and had a phone book next to her. She had the font on her iPad set so big that even from where I was, I could almost make out the words. And also, possibly, leaves? Whatever it was, she was intensely focused. Without looking up from what she was reading, she shook up the whipped cream, filled the mug to overflowing, and then proceeded to dig into the white fluff with a soup spoon.
In the oven was a jelly roll pan with rows of thick-cut bacon sputtering away. Next to the stove, in a bowl, were a few uncracked eggs waiting to be scrambled. Expecting to see Dave around the corner, I stepped softly into the kitchen and said, “Good morning?”
“Oh Jesus!” screeched the old woman, her arms flying up and sending the can of whipped cream tumbling to the wooden floor with a ping-ping-ping. “Who the hell are you?”
“Lisa,” I said, smiling and clutching my mug like a protective shield. Dave wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but the old lady was approaching with purposeful shuffles of her slippers. She was peering at me, holding the frames of her glittery purple bifocals, her gnarled fingers vaguely reminiscent of eagle talons. Vaguely, though. Not like exactly like that. But close. “I’m Lisa.”
“And I’m Grandma. Just that. Like Cher. Grandma,” she said, still eyeing at me and inching closer. She leaned toward me and sort of…sniffed. But I was pretty sure she wasn’t sniffing the bacon—she was sniffing me. I noticed her sweatshirt had someone who looked a lot like Vladimir Lenin silk-screened on the front, but it was pretty faded out, so I couldn’t be sure. She held up a skinny, big-knuckled finger. “Where’d you come from?”
Suddenly, it occurred to me that she probably heard me last night—I had a feeling I screamed the house down, and I grimaced at the memory and clapped my eyes shut.
I felt a cold finger press into my cheek. “Why are you doing that? Last time I saw someone with their face that way, they had end-stage tetanus. It was in El Salvador in 1979. Bad business.”
I dropped the grimace and summoned my best impression of the traffic girl on the local news—pure sweetness, pure smiles, even in the face of a twenty-car pileup and a three-hour delay. Nothing to worry about, folks. Nope. “I live in Rhode Island. I crashed my car last night in the storm. Your…grandson? Dave? He helped me.”
Grandma nodded and did the sniffing thing again. “No, I mean, where did you come from? Originally, honey! Where are your people from?”
My people? I felt like I was in some unused scene from The Godfather. “Um…outside Detroit.”
Grandma grumbled. She inched closer to me, and I got the very definite sense she was assessing something about my jawline. Or my hairline. Or both. “Name?”
“Lisa!” I said, this time louder, like I sometimes had to do when I brought cupcakes to the nursing home for Christmas. I figured she hadn’t heard me the first time, so I went at it with guns blazing. “I’m Lisa! Leeees-ahhhh!”
“Stop shouting, honey!” she hollered back, waving her iPad stylus in my face. Without dropping her voice, she added, “Before Detroit, where were your people?”
“Oh! Baltimore!”
“Christ! I mean, your heritage! You’ve got a kinda bohunk nose. Know what that means?”
I hadn’t the faintest. I automatically moved my hand to the bridge of my nose, though, because I wasn’t sure how a word like bohunk could be anything but bad.
“Never mind the schnoz!” she shouted again and hobbled back to the kitchen table and took a seat in front of an iPad. “Name! First and last!”
“Lisa…Smith?” I said tentatively.
“Unclear about Smith? Why does that sound like a question?”
“Smith!” I said, this time with much more certainty.
Grandma turned to me, making Lenin’s face contort like some psychedelic video montage in a David Bowie music video. “You’re shitting me.”
“Umm, no?” I said.
“Middle name!”
“Anne.”
Grandma slapped her sweat pants with her liver-spotted fists. “Lisa Anne Smith? That’s worse than Jane Doe! What am I gonna do with that?”
I looked at her iPad. And the God’s Eye over Lenin’s face. And the row of mood rings on her fingers. “What were you planning on doing with it?”