“Checking Facebook.”
“What? No. Stop!”
Erin ignores her, scurrying out of Maggie’s reach, her fingers moving with lightning speed across the phone’s surface. “And here he is! Richard Atwood, certified public accountant. Wow! He’s hot. Oh my God!”
“What?”
“It says he was born in…Oh my God! Are you kidding me? He’s twenty-eight?”
“Is he?” Maggie asks, blushing beet red against the white of the towel.
“That’s what it says.”
“Must be a mistake.”
“Really? You’re going with that?”
“He looks older.”
“Does he know how oldyouare?”
“Does it matter?”
Erin throws both hands into the air as she paces between the bed and the window. “So, let me get this straight. My middle-aged mother, who has spent the past year and a half jumping at her own shadow, virtually terrified of every strange man she sees, meets this hot, twenty-eight-year-old guy in a Starbucks, and decides to throw caution to the wind and go out with him.”
“Well, I’m not exactly throwing caution to the wind,” Maggie demurs. “He’s an accountant, for God’s sake. How dangerous can he be?”
Erin comes to an abrupt stop. “He’s twenty-eight!”
“Yes, I think we’ve established that.”
“Okay,” Erin says, resuming her pacing, “I can kind of get whyyou’reinterested. But what about him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s get real, Mom. I appreciate that you’ve been looking really good since you changed your hair and started wearing a bit of makeup and everything, but come on. The guy’s gorgeous. He could have anybody he wants. No disrespect, but what’s he doing with you?”
“Wow.”
“Are you going to have sex with him?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Are you going to have sex with Richard Atwood, certified public accountant?”
“No! For God’s sake, I hardly know the man. We’re having dinner, period.”
“Does he know that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Because that would make sense. I mean, he probably thinks you’ll be so grateful that someone as young and good-looking as he is has asked you out that you’ll just fall into bed with him….”
“Erin…”
“Just make sure you use protection ’cause you don’t want to pick up any STDs.”
“Okay, that’s quite enough.” Maggie fights the urge to push her daughter out the bedroom window. Instead she pushes her clothes aside and sinks down on the bed. “What’s really going on here, sweetie?” she asks when she can find her voice. “Why are you being so mean?”