Chapter Twenty-eight
“Why won’t you tell me whereyou’re going?” Erin is asking.
“I told you,” Maggie tells her daughter. “I’m going out for dinner.”
They’re in Maggie’s bedroom. Freshly showered, Maggie is wrapped in a large white towel, trying to decide between the blue cotton sundress stretched out on the bed or the pair of white pants and pink silk shirt lying beside it.
“With who?”
“Withwhom,” Maggie corrects.
“Really?” Erin says. “We’re doing the grammar thing? You’re not an English teacher anymore, remember?”
Maggie sighs.
“Fine,” Erin says. “Withwhomare you going out for dinner?”
Maggie takes another measured breath and tries to stay calm. Her daughter hasn’t shown the slightest interest in her in months. She never asks about her day or if she’s enjoying her job, and responds with one-word answers when questioned about her own. So why the sudden interest now? Does the teenager possess some kind of special radar? “Just a friend.”
“You don’t have any friends.”
“Of course I have friends.”
“Name them,” Erin challenges.
Maggie searches her mind for the names of anyone she could plausibly count as a friend since moving to Florida. “There’s Dani Wilson and Olivia Grant,” she offers.
“Our neighbors? Are you kidding me? You hardly know them.”
“And there’s Nadine…Jerome…Rita…”
“Aren’t those the people you work with?”
“Yes, but—”
“Are you having dinner with them?”
Maggie hesitates, unable to tell her daughter an outright lie. “No.”
“So, I repeat, withwhomare you having dinner?”
Shit!This is exactly the conversation Maggie was hoping to avoid. “Just somebody I met.”
“At the hairdresser’s?”
“Close by.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I met him at a Starbucks in the plaza. Okay?” Maggie says quickly.Tooquickly.
“You methim? It’s aman?”
Shit!Shit! Shit!
“You have adate?” Erin looks horrified by the thought.
“Is that so shocking?”