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Mrs. Duffy looked over at Astrid but said to Cal, “Did I?”
Keeping her body plastered against the wall as much as possible, Astrid shook her head.
“Changed my mind,” the old woman said before slamming her front door shut in Cal’s face and turning her gleeful attention onto Astrid. “Tell me everything.”
“You’re horrible,” Astrid said before she could stop herself.
The old woman’s smile just got bigger. “You gotta work harder to hurt my feelings, chickadee.”
They stared at each other like two opposing players in separate plexiglass-enclosed penalty boxes.
Mrs. Duffy reached for her doorknob.
Astrid had half a second of indecision, and then everything came out at once. “I can’t stop having sex with him, and I haven’t had sex with the same person more than once since my fiancé dumped me on our wedding day, and I don’t know why, but almost every time I see him I either end up naked or with his hand in my panties, and after that I do a whole walk of absolutely no shame back to my office—yes, we work together—or my apartment, because I feel too damn good and I think I could start to like him, like really like him, and there is nothing fucking worse than that, and this is why I don’t fuck anyone where I work, sleep, or recreate, and yet I can’t stop with him.”
Astrid slapped a hand over her mouth before she could say anything else. The woman hadn’t even had to shine her cell phone flashlight in Astrid’s eyes to break her. She’d confessed everything—EV-UH-RE-THING—to the building bully. She’d told her things Astrid hadn’t even admitted to herself. She could start to like him?
LIKE HIM?!?
No way.
She just panic rambled.
That couldn’t be true.
She didn’t do that.
She was half hyperventilating when she realized she’d said “fuck” and “fucking” to Mrs. Duffy, who looked a week past one hundred eighty.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” Astrid said. “Really this time. I am sorry I used the words I did and said what I said, and oh my God, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” Mrs. Duffy said, rubbing the knuckles swollen with arthritis on her left hand. “That’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard since they took my story off the TV. You retire from running the family business and your kids put you away in an apartment in the building they own and totally forget that you were the one that taught them how to figure when someone needs to have their thumbs rearranged. If I’d left that to my brother, Mikey, then they would be as shitty at it as he was. There was no way I’d do that.”
She shuffled into the kitchen, leaning on her cane a little less than usual, while Astrid tried to process the fact that the building bully Elizabeth Duffy was Nola’s Granny D. She wasn’t actually Nola’s grandma. She was a great aunt or cousin twice removed or something. At one time, Mrs. Duffy had been the real power behind the legally questionable activities of the Foley personal loan business. This Mrs. Duffy. The one who lived across the hall from her.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Duffy put the avocado-green kettle on the stovetop and took two mugs off the hooks hanging on the underside of the cabinets. “I’m too old and too far from giving a shit to serve this, so if you want some tea, you better come sit down at the table.”
Head still hazy from the shock, Astrid pushed herself up from the floor and walked over to the kitchen.
“Get out the cookies from the pantry,” the old woman ordered.
Astrid opened up the tall, skinny door next to the fridge. It was packed with cookies. There were chocolate chip, sugar cookies with puffy icing and sprinkles, Nilla Wafers, Milanos, Fudge Stripes, and so many more.
“Which ones should I get?” Astrid asked.
“The cookies that go with tea,” Mrs. Duffy said before mumbling to herself. “My God. Young people.”
Astrid had no idea which ones those were, but the idea of asking a follow-up question made her a little queasy. She grabbed the sugar cookies and put them on the small kitchen table.
“Not those. What is wrong with you? Get the Oreos.” The older woman took the whistling kettle off the heat and put it on the bubblegum-pink trivet on the table, muttering the whole time. “Breakfast cookies at tea time. I cannot even with these people, Alvin. I cannot.”
There wasn’t a cat, a dog, a bird, or even a fish within eyesight, and Astrid wasn’t about to ask who Alvin was. Instead, she put the cookies back and got the Oreos, putting them in the middle of the table, closer to the mug that said World’s Best Granny than the one that was plain pink with a small chip on the bottom.
“We put Oreos on a plate in this house, young lady.” She stopped and got a daisy-shaped plate out of the cabinet. “Were you raised in a barn?”
“Hockey rink,” Astrid said.
Mrs. Duffy harrumphed. “Same thing. Now sit down.”
