“Why not just take a nice headshot then?” I want to know. “Taking your clothes off and you know …” I wave my hands through the air for effect. Unable to find the words to finish my sentence, I declare, “It’s indecent!”
“We’re married,” my dad says.
“What if I had done something like that when I was married?” I want to know. “Would you have supported that?”
“With Brett?” My mom looks like she just smelled milk that had gone bad a month prior.
“Brett was the man I married, so yes, with Brett.”
“I can’t see Brett ever wanting to have a picture like that taken,” my dad announces. “He was always, too, too …”
“Stuffy,” my mom interjects.
“I always thought you two were stuffy!” I declare heatedly. “You never gave any indication you were exhibitionists.”
My mom walks over and sits on the couch next to me. She reaches out and takes one of my hands in her own before saying, “We never even considered doing anything like this before Finley came to town.”
I’m not seeing the connection, so I ask, “And then what? You changed personalities and suddenly had a mad urge to strip down for the camera?”
My dad sits on his wing-backed chair and kicks his feet up onto the coffee table. “We won a photoshoot at the country club.” He explains, “It was a door prize at the Secret Santa fundraiser.”
“We weren’t even going to do it at first,” my mom says. “But then we thought we could get a nice picture out of it for our Christmas card.”
Icy cold fingers of dread crawl up my neck toward my brain. “Please tell me you’ve never sent one of those pictures in your Christmas card.”
“No,” my mom says.
“Not yet …” my dad teases while shrugging his eyebrows. At least I hope he’s teasing.
My mom continues, “Finley was just so charming andsweet that we put ourselves in her hands. And then, well, we sort of became addicted to seeing the beautiful images she took of us.”
“How many times have you done this?” I ask like I’m grilling them about a cocaine habit.
My mom purses her lips before tipping her head back. She looks like she’s searching for a spot of dirt on the ceiling. “Fourteen? Fifteen?”
“I think it’s more like seventeen,” my dad interjects.
I cannot disguise my shock. “You’re going to go broke if you keep this up!”
“We are doing just fine financially,” my mom says. “We invested in bitcoin when it was only a thousand dollars. Your friend Lorelai’s parents talked us into it,” she adds as an afterthought.
“I’m glad for you,” I tell her, while making a mental note to circle back around to find out how loaded they are. But for now, I tell them, “I’m embarrassed that people have seen pictures of you like that.”
Trying to defend her actions, my mom says, “We’ve only showed a couple people.”
“Before now, maybe.” I remind her, “The whole town is currently looking.”
My dad smiles cockily. “We’re somewhat of celebrities. I took your mother to lunch and at least twenty people stopped us to compliment us on our photo.”
“Twenty people?!” I gasp.
“They say that for every person who says something there are a hundred more who want to.” My mom seems positively delighted by this.
“Who says this?” I want to know.
She flashes a pair of jazz hands. “I don’t know, marketers, people in the know. Who cares who says it, your dad and I are famous!”
If you told me aliens abducted my parents and sucked outtheir souls before replacing them with these insane people, I wouldn’t fight you on it.
