My mom would try to insist I stay over. I’d have to not-so-politely decline. She would pout. I would snap. Susan would roll her eyes.
“What time was she supposed—”
“I’m here. Sorry, sorry.” Susan, eyes bright, cheeks a little flushed, bustled into my mother’s kitchen with a brimming accordion folder.
They squared off like cowboys in an old Western, but neither of them drew. After a moment, my mother grudgingly offered coffee, which Susan politely declined. The pair of them looked at me like I had anything to say about it, but I only shrugged, and they both went into the dining room to lay out menus and brochures from different locations.
The first disagreement happened over kosher catering. Never mind I’d gone out to dinner with my mother plenty of times and watched her devour a Cobb salad like it wasn’t riddled with pig, but Susan would send her order back if it arrived with unexpected bacon. Or that neither of them actually kept a kosher kitchen with separate pots and pans and the like. My mother wanted to be able to invite and impress her friends. My sister-in-law wanted a nice place to have a party and have some good food. We didn’t live in an area where kosher catering was a common thing.
Under other circumstances I’d have popped some corn and settled back to watch the show, but tonight I was already tired because I’d been up at three in the morning being a dumbass and messaging a man who always read my messages but never answered me. I didn’t have the patience to listen to them quibble over hors d’oeuvres. It wasn’t my event, nor my money. My phone hummed from my pocket, and I drew it out, surprised to find a message from Esteban. I was also pleased, though. More than I wanted to admit.
“I won’t be serving shrimp cocktail,” Susan said stiffly. “There will be a pasta station and a mashed potato bar, which William requested. We’ll have grilled chicken skewers, too. I don’t see why this has to be an issue.”
“I simply think that you should serve food your guests will be able to eat,” my mother said with a sniff.
Susan’s eyes narrowed. “Anyone I invite will be fine with the food.”
“You’re having it at William Penn Inn, right?” I asked absently, reading Esteban’s short but descriptive list of things he wanted to do for and to me. He’d started off with “I humbly request the honor” and ended it with “If it pleases you,” and though the wording was campy and silly, I had no doubts he was sincere in his offerings.
Both of them shut up and turned to me.
“There were so many other choices,” my mother muttered.
Susan made a contemplative noise. “That’s where Evan and I had our wedding reception. We discussed this already.”
“I know,” I said, looking up with a grin at what my lover had sent me, not for either of them. “I was there, remember? Bright yellow dress, puffy sleeves? Groomsman stepped on the hem and ripped it straight off the waist seam just before we walked down the aisle?”
I’d been trying to make light. Susan didn’t laugh. My mother’s mouth twisted again.
“It’s a great location,” I told them. “I just went to a thing there a few months ago. They had a huge vegetarian buffet with hummus and grilled portobellos and stuff. You can do vegetarian meals for people who really care about it being kosher, which honestly, won’t be that many. Nobody has to eat the grilled chicken if they don’t want to. Just make it at a different station.”
“Well, maybe you don’t care what people think of this family,” my mother said, “but I do!”
Susan scribbled something on her notepad, then excused herself to use the bathroom. My mother glared at me. I dragged myself away from my increasingly dirty messages to shrug at her.
“What? It’s not your event, Ma.”
“I want to be able to invite my friends and not be embarrassed!”
“You can want what you want,” I told her, repeating one of her most-often-used phrases from my childhood, “but you get what you get.”
My phone tickled me through the pocket of my jeans again, and I bent back to it while my mother got up to putter around the kitchen.
“Is she going to invite your father?”
I pulled my attention away from Esteban’s message, which had included a photograph that made the ones my mother complained about look like they belonged in a hymnal. “I don’t know. I’d assume so.”
My parents had been divorced, at this point, almost as long as they’d been married. My dad had moved to Florida, which had meant the every other weekend custody thing hadn’t happened for us, something my mother loved to point out over and over. How she’d been a single mother, did it all on her own. By now it was old news, especially since whatever generous alimony arrangement they’d made had allowed her to work only at part-time retail jobs she cycled through whenever she decided she wanted the employee discount at some new place. My mom hadn’t had it all peaches and cream, I’d never say that, but she hadn’t exactly had to work in a labor camp to raise us, either.
“He’s not even close to William!”
“William spends a week with Dad in Florida every year, Mom. Just like we did when we were kids.”
“A week out of the year?” She sniffed. “That’s hardly anything.”
I shook my head in warning. “Not your party. Not your choice. If Evan and Susan want Dad there, he’ll be invited.”
My mother scowled. “The way you talk to me!”
“Someone has to,” I said, kind of hating that it had to be me, but for fuck’s sake, Jill was my mother times two, and Evan was Mr. Avoidance. I was already the perverted black sheep anyway. I might as well also bear the burden of being the ungrateful child.
Susan came back from the bathroom with suspiciously red eyes that made me feel bad that all of this had to be such a big freaking hassle. “It’s settled. I’ll replace the pasta bar with a vegetarian buffet. Will that be acceptable?”
Before my mother could answer, Susan picked up her purse. “I have to get going.”
She’d fled within ten minutes, leaving nothing but a few crumpled catering menus in her place. My mother, scrubbing the counter so hard I feared she meant to slaughter her sponge, barely said goodbye to her. She turned her face from mine when I tried to hug her goodbye.
“You want to stay over? Your room is ready. I saved some Shirley Temple movies on the DVR.” She turned off the water.
I snuck a peek at my phone, but to my disappointment, Esteban had signed off with a hurried GTG. I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “No. I have to work in the morning. I didn’t bring a bag.”
“You should’ve. I never get to see you since you moved so far away.”
We talked on the phone several times a week and texted more than that. I sighed and hugged her. My mother had gotten so much smaller over the past few years. We used to be about the same height—not that we’d seen eye to eye very often. Now it seemed almost like I could rest my chin on top of her head.
“I’ll
