“Okay, okay, I get it. Well, one of these days you’ll have to. And if you’re hungry, Chloe, I can give you some great recommendations for restaurants. That place you went to isn’t any good.”
“Do you know this? Have you been there?”
“No, but I can tell just by how it looks from the outside. Now, if you want to try a really great menu, there’s this new place that just opened ...”
I completely tuned her out. I let her finish whatever it was she was saying, smiled, said goodbye, and then left.
Chapter Twenty-One
Graham
Someone was knocking at the door.
I was lying in bed, half-awake, enjoying how comfortable I was and having a rather convincing argument with myself that I should stay in bed a while longer. Then the knocking started. At first, I thought it might’ve been Chloe, but the knocking quickly morphed into banging, and I knew there was no way in hell it would be her.
“Hold on!” I shouted, throwing the sheets back, feeling fully awake—and irritated—now. If it was the fucking mailman with a package that was too big to fit in the mailbox, I was going to lose my shit.
But no, it was not the mailman; it was my mother.
“Hi! Good morning,” she said as I opened the door. I had to refrain myself from asking what the hell she was doing here. Why all the visits all of the sudden?
“Is there something wrong? Is there some sort of emergency I’m unaware of?”
My mother bustled in, looking around. Looking for clues of the presence of someone else, I knew immediately. “There’s no one else here,” I said. “Except now, you. What exactly is it that you want?”
“I’m here for a tattoo.”
I smiled thinly. “Ha ha, very funny. I don’t work out of my home, so you’re SOL, sorry. What are you actually here for?”
“I’m not just allowed to stop by? I haven’t been over here in ages. This is such an adorable little cottage.”
I stifled a yawn, wishing that I’d just ignored the banging on the door and stayed in bed. “I was thinking about running into you the other day at Lorraine’s,” my mother said. “Been thinking about it a lot, actually. She’s not the right girl for you. A mother knows these things.”
“Please. You know, despite all your talk about wanting grandchildren and all that shit, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t matter who the girl was—you wouldn’t approve.”
“That’s simply not true. I don’t think you realize how badly I want grandchildren. Even if it would make me feel old. But you need to be with someone who’s not ... how should I put this? So much of a goody-goody. She just seems so ... vanilla.”
“You don’t even know her. You met her for what? Five minutes? Less than that? And you think you know her?”
“I’m a good judge of character.”
I snorted. “Right. If by ‘good’ you mean ‘totally horrible.’”
“I’m just saying, Graham, that I don’t think she’s the right one for you.”
“Weren’t you just saying how you were going to be supportive of me? This doesn’t sound very supportive. You shouldn’t just get to drop that support because you suddenly don’t agree with me.”
“It’s like me and your father,” she said.
I held my hand up. “Just stop. I don’t need to hear anything about you and my father.”
She continued as though I hadn’t said anything. “If I had been a rich summer resident, or some tourist with a mansion out in California, do you think he would’ve just walked away like that? You bet your ass he wouldn’t have. But because I was a local girl he met at a strip club, he saw me as beneath him. Just a bit of fun for him, something that he thought he could just completely forget about once he got tired of it.”
I was tempted to put my fingers in my ears and start humming. “Really, Mom, just stop. I don’t need to hear your theories about this.”
“That’s exactly what he did, though he hadn’t been planning on you. Well, neither of us had. For a few days, I thought that this might be a turning point. You see, I actually really liked your father—he could make me laugh. I thought maybe that he was the man I’d been waiting to meet, and I’d be able to start on a different path, have the sort of life that I always imagined I’d have.”
“You could’ve had that,” I said. “It didn’t need to be dependent on some guy.”