“Oh, you’re such a smart-alec—always have been,” she says as she reaches across the table and half-heartedly smacks my hand. She holds up her menu and says, “I hear there’s a pretty new librarian in town.” She peeks her eyes over the top of the menu and looks at me with her eyebrows raised in question.
“There is. What about her?” I ask. I know what she wants to know, but I’m going to make her say it. She rolls her eyes.
“Are y’all a thing? Shandi told me that she saw y’all canoodling at Bob’s the other night.” She holds the menu in front of her face, embarrassed to think of her grown son ‘canoodling.’
I push the menu down and say, “Shandi is a gossip-mongering busybody. Millie and I are friends. She’s new to town. She lives next door in Nana and Pops’ rental, by the way, so I took her out to dinner where we sat a respectful distance away from each other the entire time.”
“Well, that’s boring. Her name is Millie? That’s so cute! Is that short for something?” she asks. I scratch my chin because I hadn’t really thought about it. I haven’t pondered the cuteness of her name yet because I can’t get past the cuteness of her face.
“I don’t know. I’ll ask her next time I see her,” I say.
“I want to invite her over for dinner,” she says, bouncing around in her seat and clapping her hands together. My mom should have been a cheerleader in high school with all of her uncontained pep.
“Mama, we’re just friends.”
“What? You can’t have friends over for dinner at your mama’s house?” And that is the end of that conversation. Mama is too much like Nana. Once she decides she’s going to do something, nothing is going to stop her. You don’t argue with Joan Lane. I’ll have to send Millie a text to warn her that some crazy woman is going to corner her and insist that she come over to her house and eat her food. Because that is how Mama would do it. She has no tact.
“So, what have you been doing, other than not canoodling with this tiny little librarian everyone’s talking about?” she asks.
I close my eyes and groan. “Just working,” I say.
“And hanging out with Seth and Colby like usual, I’m sure,” she says, and I hear the edge in her voice. Mama loves my friends. Heck, we practically lived in each other’s homes on a rotation growing up.
“What, Mama?” I don’t know what she could possibly have to say against them. They’ve always been like bonus sons to her.
“I just think that if you spent less time with them, then you could, I don’t know, find a nice woman and settle down. You’re thirty-one now. It’s time,” she says. My jaw drops to the floor. My mother, the woman who swore off men the day my father abandoned her at the age of eighteen, is telling me that I need to settle down and get married.
“You do realize that you yourself never technically ‘settled down,’ right?” I ask in disbelief. I thought she was fine with my bachelorhood—not that I have ever decided against marriage or being in a relationship. I’ve had girlfriends. I’ve dated. The pond is just really small here in Waverly, and my work schedule sucks.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re not talking about me, though. Trauma and all that,” she says, waving her hands around haphazardly.
“Don’t give me that,” I argue. It’s an excuse, and she knows it.
“Look, I didn’t settle down, and now I regret it. I’m forty-nine, and I live alone. I’m lonely, and I don’t want the same for you. I don’t want you to wake up and realize you’re almost fifty years old and you’ve never been in love.” Her eyes are watery, and my heart breaks for my mom. I never knew she felt this way. She always seems so happy. “Gosh, I don’t want to cry in public. It’ll be all over town by the evening.”
“Mama,” I say and go to her side of the table to hug her. “I’m not against marriage. I just have to find the right person.”
“It’s Millie,” she says.
“Don’t you think you should meet the woman before claiming her as your future daughter-in-law?”
“She’s coming over for dinner, remember.” I shake my head and pray. The women in my life are going to give me a heart attack.
After walking my mom back to her hair salon, I head back to my patrol car so I can get back to work. I get a strange feeling that someone is watching me. There are quite a few people out around town with the nice weather and it being the end of the lunch hour. I do a quick scan of the area but see no one suspicious, just the regular people I see milling around all the time.
A prickling feeling creeps up the back of my neck as I walk closer to my car and see a slip of paper on the windshield. I unfold it and read the same sloppy handwriting from a few days ago.
There’s no doubt in my mind now. This is not a joke. Seth and Colby would have mentioned it on Monday night if they were behind this. They know how stressful this job can get for me and wouldn’t let it go on for so long—if they were idiotic enough to do something like this to begin with. I have to figure out who this is—and fast.