“Okay, ouch,” I say. Maybe Iamunprepared. My neck starts to sweat.
“Exactly!Ouch. I told you, meeting my family isnotlike meeting your family. I warned you.” Her voice starts to tremble.
“It’s alright, baby. We are in this together, just like everything else. But I do have a question,” I say cautiously.
“What?” She looks over at me, picking at the pink polish on her manicure.
“If you have such a hard relationship with your mom, why did you move to Fox Grove?” I glance at her and then back at the road, slowing at a four-way stop.
“I thought that after she divorced my dad, left his toxic orbit, that things with her would be easier. That maybe the reason she was critical of me was because of him.” The sadness in her voice makes me wish we weren’t in my truck having this conversation. I need to have her in my arms.
“It’s not?” I ask.
“Not fully,” she says. “He was a big factor, and some things have gotten better, but not to the point that I thought they would. I heard my mom talk very rarely about growing up here, but I always liked the idea of it. Living in DC was suffocating for me. I know a lot of people can’t wait to leave the small-town bubble and go off to bigger places, but I was the opposite. I want a smaller, simple life. And people there can’t understand that,especiallymy dad.”
I grunt, holding my thoughts back about a man I have yet to meet but already can’t stand.
“When my mom told me she was coming back to Fox Grove, I wasexcited. I felt like it was my chance to live a small-town life, and maybe it was a sign that I could build a different kind of relationship with her. I’m at least getting one of thosetwo things.” She smiles over at me and rubs her gentle fingers through the hair at my temple.
I grasp her hand and kiss her fingers. “You can build any kind of life you want,” I tell her sincerely. I want Lainey to have anything she wants, support whatever dreams she has in her mind, but she has yet to lower that wall for me and tell me what those dreams truly are.
She sits back deeper into her seat, lets out a sad hum, and looks out the window.
We pull up to her mother’s house, a big, newer-construction home. It’s stark white with black-framed windows and two stories. There is a large concrete porch with little personality, no landscaping other than grass and a few sparse bushes. As a landscaper’s son, I cringe. It has so much potential but has obviously not been a priority.
I get out of the truck and go around to Lainey’s side, helping her out. She is holding a bottle of wine, the same kind she brought to my parents’ house the night she first met them and my mom raved over it. “Hang on,” I say. I open the back passenger door and pull out a small bouquet of yellow and white daisies. They are cheerful, soft, and friendly.
Lainey looks at me and back at the flowers, questions in her eyes that she is unable or unwilling to speak.
I clear my throat and tell her, “I did not want to show up empty-handed, and I figured your mom probably never got many flowers, either. So daisies for meeting your mom because they mean new beginnings.” Lainey sucks in a breath, and a wave of emotion rolls thick through the air between us. I didn’t know what she would think of me bringing her mom flowers, but I wanted her to know that they were not just for Ann, but for Lainey as well.
“You are not real,” Lainey says, stepping up to me on her tiptoes and kissing me.
“Yes, I am, and I am not going anywhere.” I wrap my armaround her waist, tugging her closer, and she relaxes into the familiar sweep of my tongue against hers as I kiss her again.
A front door opens, and Lainey stiffens in my hold, pulling back and locking her eyes with mine, an apology already written all over her beautiful face.
“Lainey!” A sharp voice clips across the sad lawn. Sighing, Lainey grips my hand and turns toward the sound—her mother. Standing with arms crossed is a tall woman with a sharp nose and hard blue eyes. Her brown hair is twisted into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and she is wearing an expensive linen pant suit in a lemony color that washes her out.
“Hello, Mom.” Lainey greets her mother in a kind but artificially happy voice. She has on a tense mask, ready to perform for this woman, and I do not like it at all.
“Please come inside. I hardly think it is appropriate to be standing out here kissing your ... friend,” she says looking at me, her eyes locked in on my tattoos.
Great, she is one of those people.
Walking up to the porch, I put on a smile and try not to judge her mom before I give her a chance. But the stress rolling off of the woman Icareabout—fuck, fine way more than care, but I am not going there right now—has me on edge, too.
“Mom, this is Remington LeBlanc, my boyfriend. Remington, this is my mom, Ann Quinn.” Lainey looks at me with a sweet, genuine smile—no mask for me in sight.
I reach out my hand. “Hello, ma’am, it’s very nice to finally meet you.”
Ann takes my hand gingerly, like I might snap hers or give her some kind of disease.Jesus, take the wheel. This is going to be a long-ass dinner.
“Reming-ton,”Ann repeats. “That’s an interesting name.”
“My parents thought so. Everyone calls me Rem,” I say, trying to keepmy tone cordial.
Turning to the door, Ann welcomes us in and we make our way to the kitchen. For having lived here a few years, you really couldn’t tell. The house feels like a cold showroom. No family pictures, no warmth, no personal touches that make it feel like a well-loved and lived-in home. When Lainey first saw my place, she told me that she lived in a big house with her family in DC and it was like a prison. If her mom was in charge of the decor and her dad was even more controlling of her mom’s choices back then, I can only imagine how sterile and suffocating Lainey’s life had felt growing up.
