Eva flushed. “Sorry.”
“No—no, I’m sorry, honey. That’s totally fair. I know I haven’t seemed very interested in settling down before now.”
Eva smiled a little. “I guess you could put it like that. But being mates is...different?”
“It really, really is.” Stella was surprised to realize that she meant every word of that. The idea of leaving Nate, ever, for any reason, sent up a screaming sense of wrongness in her chest. Before now, she’d always been in the moment during her relationships, living with a sense of I’m here for the now.
But now, she was here for the long haul.
Eva was ahead of her, though, as usual. “Are we going to move again?” she asked tentatively.
“Do you want to move? Nate lives in Chicago,” Stella said leadingly.
Eva smiled a little. “I—Chicago would be awesome.”
She didn’t sound as excited as Stella had thought she would. “I would’ve guessed you’d be jumping for joy at the thought of living in a big city for once. I thought all the nerds lived in big cities.”
Eva laughed. “Not all of them. I just—I have this cool job here, and Aunt Lynn and Ken are here, and this house is really awesome, and the Park is right there, and we can shift whenever we
want. And...I made a couple of friends.”
Stella raised her eyebrows. “Friends, or friends?”
Eva blushed. “Mom! Stop it.”
Stella held up her hands. “Okay, okay. Stopping. But you haven’t said anything about this before.”
Eva made a face. “Didn’t want to jinx it. I thought they’d think I was weird or something. But they’re pretty weird, too, so.”
“Good,” Stella said firmly. “The world needs more weirdness.”
Although...this made everything more complicated.
“So I don’t really want to move...right now,” Eva finished. She made a worried face. “Do we have to?”
“No,” Stella said immediately. “Of course not, honey. We can absolutely stay here.”
“Or, if you wanted to go live in Chicago, maybe I could live here with Aunt Lynn and Uncle Ken?” Eva asked tentatively.
That idea tore at Stella’s heart. “No way,” she said. “You’re going off to college somewhere fabulous next year. I’m not leaving you behind for a whole year before I absolutely have to.”
Eva smiled softly. “Okay. Thanks, Mom.”
Stella leaned in and hugged her. “No charge.”
Eva hugged her back, and Stella thanked her lucky stars for such a fantastic daughter.
Eva pulled back, and said, with a kind of a light in her eyes, “Hey, do you still have to keep working at Oliver’s now?”
“Eva!” Stella said, putting as much shock and admonishment in her voice as she could, to disguise the fact that the idea had, actually, crossed her own mind as well. “That’s not the sort of thing you can assume. We’re not going to be freeloaders on Nate’s generosity for the rest of our lives.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Eva sat forward, hugging a pillow. “You always say that you don’t have time to focus on your drawing because you’ve gotta put food on the table. You’re always working these crappy jobs for long hours because we need money. But now maybe you could just...be an artist? That’s a job.”
“That’s a job that takes a lot more effort that just making drawings sometimes,” Stella said tartly, “and isn’t likely to make me any money anytime soon.”
She knew because she’d tried it, here and there—selling drawings at local craft fairs, talking to tiny art galleries in Missoula, seeing if there was any way to build herself a website that didn’t involve a lot of tears or a lot of money. She’d come up essentially dry every time—even if she sold a drawing or two at a fair, that didn’t make her enough money to be anywhere near worth it.
“That’s my point, Mom,” Eva said patiently. “Now you could take some time to do it. To build up a customer base.”