"I was. That is exactly why I hate them." I take a sip ofwine, not caring how early it is. "Years of exposure did not desensitize me. It radicalized me."
Beth settles onto her stool, wine already in hand. "Rome always does a good job. That boy could build a house in his sleep." She turns to me. "It's the being human part he struggles with."
"Mom." Poppy looks mortified that her mother would criticize my brother right in front of me.
"I say it with love."
Fair enough. I say worse about Rome daily, but I'm also his biggest defender. The first to list every impossible thing he's done for me if anyone pushes too hard. He's earned every eye roll I've ever given him. He's also earned every bit of loyalty I have.
"Where's the chair?" Vera asks.
"Will's bringing it," Poppy answers, setting plates next to the tray. She tears off a piece of cinnamon roll with her fingers. "He called this morning. Said it's finished and he's driving it over this afternoon."
"Will Holt?" I know the name. He’s Callahan's dad, but I haven't met him yet.
"Cal's dad." Poppy pushes a plate toward me. "He makes furniture. Handmade, beautiful stuff. He built Ramsey and me a rocking chair for the porch as a housewarming gift."
"Will Holt is one of the good ones," Gran says, swirling her wine like it contains prophecy. "Lost his wife young. Never remarried. Never even looked at another woman, as far as anyone knows. Just works in that shop of his and raises that boy."
"That boy is twenty-nine, Mother." Beth shakes her head. "He hardly needs raising anymore."
"He's a boy until I say otherwise."
"His wife was lovely," Vera adds, quieter than the others. Gentler. "She made you feel like she had all the time in the world for you even when she didn't. That was Anna."
"Cal was eighteen when she died," Poppy says, and something in her tone tells me she wants me to have this piece before I meet him. Before I see his father's face and put things together on my own. "Aneurysm. No warning. Just gone."
I stare at my hands. Eighteen was too young to lose a mother. I grew up without a mother in any way that counted. No school pickups. No one braiding my hair. No one to call when I got my first period. Rome handled that. A teenager with a YouTube tutorial and a box of pads from the pharmacy and panic in his eyes that he tried so hard to hide.
I've missed my mother in waves my whole life. Sometimes small, when seeing a friend's mom pack their lunch. Watching someone get picked up after school by a woman who looked happy to see them.
Sometimes the waves were so big I couldn't take it. Like the night before my high school graduation, when I sat in my room alone and wished, just once, my parents would call and say they were proud of me without me having to ask first.
The only times they showed interest was when I mentioned Johns Hopkins or Stanford, the only two places good enough in their eyes.
But still, my mother is alive. I could call if I wanted. She might not always answer, but the possibility exists. The door is still there, even if no one ever walks through it.
Callahan was eighteen. His mother was there, and thenshe wasn't, and the door closed forever. He had to keep living in a house full of her things and nothing of her. Keep waking up in a world where the flowers stopped appearing in the kitchen. I press my fingers into my wine glass and look away.
"You." Gran's voice cuts through, and I've never been more grateful for an interruption in my life. She points her wine glass at me like a weapon. "How old are you now?"
"Twenty-two."
"Good. You're young. Do things. Make mistakes. Fall in love with someone inappropriate." She levels me with a serious look. "Don't waste your twenties being sensible."
Beth sighs like she's heard this speech a thousand times. "Don't listen to her, honey. Be sensible."
"Sensible is for your thirties. Your twenties are for living."
"Your twenties are for building a foundation," Beth counters, straightening her cardigan like the gesture will lend her argument weight.
"You spent your twenties getting knocked up by a literal stranger and being a single mother alongside your best friend, Beth. Stop preaching."
I laugh hard, right along with everyone else because Gran told not a single lie.
"Your twenties are for both," Vera says, quiet and final. We all look at her like she'd just ended a war.
I love them. All three of them. They bicker like they've been doing it for decades, which they have. Loud and opinionated and so deeply woven into each other's lives they couldn't tell where one ended and another began.
