“The women of my generation fought hard so that women like you could work outside the home, have a career. We fought for girls to get a college education, just like their brothers. And now you want to throw it all away.” She made a wild gesture with her napkin. “You’re retreating back into the kitchen, like these advances meannothing.”
Piper frowned, slightly alarmed. Her mother-in-law wasn’t usually sostrident. “I’m not tossing anything away. I’m just saying we need to slow down a little bit and smell the ...” Well, not roses. She’d somehow killed all the Knock Out roses she’d planted in her front yard. “And smell the daisies.”
“What if the girls grow up to be Soft Girls?”
Piper gave her a blank stare. “What’s a ‘Soft Girl’?”
Her mother-in-law huffed an impatient sigh. “Don’t youeverlisten to NPR?”
“Well I—” Piper began.
“It’s a new trend,” her mother-in-law explained, rolling her eyes. “Instead of working and building a career, young women are becoming stay-at-home girlfriends. They spend their days cooking and cleaning for their boyfriends and focusing on their complicated skin-care regimes and making TikTok videos. In Sweden they call them Soft Girls.”
“Well, that’s not very smart.”
“Of course it isn’t smart!” Sylvia raised her voice, and the other diners cast a concerned glance in their direction. “No economic security. No career. Utterly dependent on a man for support. And when he gets tired of her, she’s both homeless and jobless until the next man comes along.”
“Look.” Piper felt a surge of anger and worked hard to keep it from her voice. Of course she didn’t want her girls to become some kind of cautionary tale onAll Things Considered. “That’s not what this is about.My girls are strong and independent. But they’re also stressed out and exhausted. That’s why we’re doing this.”
And because Caitlin was being harassed at school. But she didn’t want to burden her mother-in-law with those worries on top of everything else.
“But who will teach them the things they need to learn?” Sylvia asked.
“Each mom has expertise in a certain area,” Piper said, drawing on the emergency supply of patience she normally reserved for trips to the DMV or the fifth consecutive showing of a children’s musical. “For example, one of the moms is a writer. She’ll teach English.”
Her mother-in-law narrowed her eyes. “Whatkindof a writer?”
“Well, she writes novels,” Piper said uneasily.
“Whatkindsof novels?”
“Well.” Piper wiped her clammy palms on her napkin. “She writes historical fiction.”
The color drained from her mother-in-law’s face. “Whatkindof historical fiction?”
“Well ...” Piper stammered. “She writes ... historical romance novels, but they’revery goodhistorical romance novels. So good they made them into a series on Netflix.”
Her mother-in-law’s mouth dropped open. “You’re allowing a woman who writesgenre fictionto teach my granddaughtersEnglish literature?”
“Look, it will be like ...Little Women,” Piper said before taking a big swig from her wineglass.
“How could thispossiblybe likeLittle Women?” her mother-in-law asked icily.
“Well.” Piper swallowed and wiped her mouth with her napkin as she tried to construct an answer. “Remember when Amy brought the limes to school and her teacher confiscated them and then the teacher beat Amy’s hands with a stick as punishment and Marmee found out and she said ...”
Piper paused, trying to remember what Marmee could possibly have said. “And Marmee said, ‘Enough is enough.I will educate my girls at home.’” She thrust her fork in the air to emphasize these words. “If it was good enough for the March family, it’s good enough for us.”
Sylvia raised a skeptical brow. “This is not 1863, and you arenotMarmee.”
“Perhaps not,” Piper said stiffly. “But I’m a mom in 2025 who feels like the way we’re doing things isn’t working. I’ve talked to my husband and my daughters, and we all want to try something different. And maybe it will be great and maybe it will be a disaster, but we need to try because it is my responsibility as a parent to keep my daughters safe and happy. And right now, they are neither.”
Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Don’t cry to me when the girls end up at some college no one’s ever heard of because of what you’ve done.”
Piper sighed. Her mother-in-law had forgotten, or perhaps she hadn’t, that Piper had actually attended a college no one had ever heard of. She’d had the time of her life, met the people who were still some of her closest friends to this day, and also managed to get an excellent education at the same time.
“We appreciate your support,” Piper said with the biggest, falsest smile she could muster. “Do you want to order dessert?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
