“Who?” Michelle asked.
“Ssh. Hello, Mr. Dormer. Yes, it’s most unfortunate about the media. I’m sorry, too. Peggy just phoned me. She says you need my permission in order for her to pick up the test results, so I’m giving it to you. Yes, thank you. She should be there in about an hour.” She hung up the phone.
“God, this feels like something out of James Bond.”
“What feels like something out of James Bond?” Lili asked from the doorway.
“The results are back,” Caroline said as Lili turned a deathly white, her pallor a stark contrast to the dark blue of her denim shirt.
“The moment we’ve all been waiting for,” Michelle said. “I’ll call Dad.” She reached for the phone, leaving messages for him at his office, at his home, and on his cell, telling him to get over there as quickly as he could. “Should I call Grandma Mary?”
“Let’s wait,” Caroline said. “There’s no point in getting everybody all riled up until we know one way or the other.”
“So what happens now?” Lili asked.
Caroline wondered how many times she’d heard that question these last few weeks, how many times she’d asked it herself. “Peggy is going to pick up the results in about an hour and bring them over. In the meantime, there’s not much we can do. Except wait.”
Michelle shrugged, broad shoulders reaching for her ears. “Looks like the gym is on hold. Scrabble, anyone?”
—
“What kind of word is ramet?” Lili asked, studying the small wooden tiles Michelle had just laid across the Scrabble board.
“It’s a word,” Michelle answered.
“What’s it mean?”
“I have no idea. But I don’t have to know what it means. I just have to know it’s a word.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Are you challenging me?”
Lili looked across the kitchen table at Caroline, as if appealing to her to intervene on her behalf.
Caroline braced herself. It was never a good idea to challenge Michelle. About anything.
“What happens if I challenge you?” Lili asked.
“We look it up in the dictionary. If you’re right, I lose a turn. If I’m right, you lose a turn.”
“Okay, I challenge you.”
Caroline reached for The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary on the table beside her, noting it was almost two decades out of date. How many new words had come into being since the last time she’d played Scrabble? How many had been declared obsolete? “Here it is,” she said, locating the word “ramet” between “ramentum” and “rami.” “It means ‘an individual plant of a clone.’?”
“What does that mean?” Lili asked.
“Beats me.”
“I’m right. It’s a word,” Michelle said. “You lose a turn.” She beamed triumphantly.
Lili shrugged and Caroline smiled. Playing Scrabble had been a good idea, even though Michelle probably hadn’t been serious when she’d suggested it.
“Your turn, Mom.”
Caroline glanced down at her letters—two A’s, each worth one point, a P, worth three, a Y, worth four, an E and an I, each worth one—then back at the board, stealing a look at her watch as she lifted the P from her rack. It was almost three o’clock. She wondered what was keeping Peggy. She should have been here by now.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“You’ve been staring at that letter for five minutes. Are you going to do something with it or not?”
Caroline put the P down on a space that awarded her a triple-letter score, then followed it with an I, then an E and a Y on either side of the T Michelle had used to form “ramet,” the Y landing on another triple-letter score. “Piety,” she announced. “That’s nine points for the P, twelve points for the Y, and one each for the I, the E, and the T.”
“Twenty-four,” said Lili absently as Caroline’s smile widened and Michelle’s vanished altogether. “What?” Lili asked warily.
“You’re good in math,” Michelle said. “Of course you are.”
“Not really.”
“You don’t have to try so hard.” Michelle’s frown shifted from Lili to Caroline. “She’s already on your side.”
“I’m not trying…”
“And you’re not fooling anyone,” Michelle said to her mother.
“What are you talking about?”
“I know what you’re thinking.”