Page 45 of I Saw You First

“Glamma? Is she… your grandmother?” I’ve heard Grammy and Nana and my grandmother on my mother’s side calls herself Mimi, but Glamma is a new one. “Does she live close?”

“Right next door to my parents, yes.”

“Do you see her a lot?”

“Not as much as I should,” she says, “especially now that I work such a weird schedule.”

“What’s she like?” I love that she’s telling me about her family. I want her to keep talking. I want to hear her soft, honey voice, her laugh.

“Glamma’s the best person I know. She doesn’t care what people think of her. She’s loud and brash and she has no trouble sharing her opinion, although she’s always tactful and would never intentionally hurt anyone’s feelings. She’s confident. She’s comfortable in her skin. I want to be like her when I grow up.”

“You don’t think you’re already like her in those ways?”

“Not at all.”

This surprises me. “Really? You always seem confident. You put Kels in her place today. And speaking from experience, that’s not an easy thing to do. You don’t give yourself enough credit.”

Her cheeks pink up, and she bites back a smile. I like making her smile, even when she tries to hide it.

“So, your name,” I say. “That had to be intentional, right?”

She slides the queso bowl and chip basket closer to me. “Not at all. I mean, Dad—not my biological father—is a big Beatles fan, yes, and Rhodes is his real last name. But I wasn’t Abbey Rhodes until he adopted my brother and me after he married my mom.”

“Sounds meant to be,” I say. “How old were you when he adopted you?”

“Mom met him when I was four, they got married when I was five, and Dad adopted me a year later.”

“And your—your biological father?” I want to be careful with how I phrase this, so I use the same term that she did.

“He left when I was a baby. I saw him a handful of times over the next couple of years, not that I can remember, and apparently, it wasn’t hard to convince him to give up his parental rights.”

Wow. Jefferson A. Wilshire III might be an overbearing, controlling tool but he’s always been a part of my life.

“That sucks,” I say.

“Thank you for saying that, but I’m better off without him, and honestly? I got the best dad out of the deal, and he treats my mom like a queen. He’s bought her a bouquet of flowers every week since they met—he’s never forgotten, not once.” She huffs out a laugh. “Whenever I have a little extra money, I buy myself flowers, too. Not every week, especially now, but most weeks.”

Especially now—she must mean because she doesn’t make as much money as she did at the paper.

“He sounds like a great guy,” I say.

“He is.” She pauses, then asks in a tentative tone, “If you don’t get along with your dad, why did you decide to work for Hometown?”

Like there was ever any question.

“It wasn’t so much a decision as it just… had to happen. I joked once that I wanted to work at Target, but you may have noticed that Jeff—pardon me, Mr. Wilshire—doesn’t have a sense of humor. So, I worked at Woodlake during high school and on breaks during college, and for a while, at the Dinkytown store.”

“What was your major?”

“The only acceptable major in the Wilshire family is business administration. Dad wanted me to go to Schilling, his alma mater, but I didn’t have the grades. He told me, and I quote, ‘Even I couldn’t pull enough strings to get you in.’”

“Wow,” she says. “Harsh.”

I shrug.

“Why did you major in business if you didn’t want to?” she asks. “Life is too short to study something that doesn’t interest you.”

I pick at the label on the beer bottle. “It’s not that it doesn’t interest me. I like my job. I grew up with Hometown. I wanted to play for the Twins, but I got kicked off the varsity team because of my grades, and my baseball career ended before it began.”