Page 12 of The Do-Over

I will not date.

I will not try to be a better daughter and sister.

“I promise,” I said, with the knowledge that oaths made under duress or the influence of way too much wine didn’t count.

I stood and took a moment to steady myself before grabbing the sheet from his hand and marching to the refrigerator. There, I hung it with a magnet Mom had slyly stuck on the last time she’d visited. It read: Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.

My mother was not subtle.

The list stared back at me, taunting me with its five little sentences that summed up my entire life. It would be nice to live my life the way Mathias imagined it, to not worry about anyone else’s expectations. But all the little things that made me me had never, ever been enough. Maybe some of us weren’t meant for greatness.

An impossible dream, that’s what it was. By the time I made it back to the couch, Mathias had sprawled across it. “Don’t think you’re getting off so easy. What’s your resolution?”

He shifted, revealing a thoughtful expression. “I’m going to do it.”

“Do what?”

“I’m going to tell Phee I’m in love with her.”

Seemed like both of us were dreamers.

FIVE

“Dull women have immaculate homes.

And, honey, I’m a terrible housekeeper.”

—MIMI

“You ready for this?” Mimi asked as I pulled up to the curb in front of my parents’ house.

“No, I’m not.” I turned off the car and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. Our family Christmas dinner this year had been pushed to a New Year’s Day lunch because of Phee and Joel’s schedule.

I stared at my parents’ house, a stately three-story with a brick façade and a partial wraparound porch in the West U area of Houston. At over a hundred years old, the house contained five thousand square feet of spacious bedrooms, more bathrooms than I could count on one hand, and a butler’s pantry. I still wasn’t entirely sure what a butler’s pantry was, but it was a crowning jewel for my mother.

It wasn’t home, though. My parents had purchased this right before I started high school. Before that, we’d lived in a modest three-bedroom house in a cookie-cutter, middle-class neighborhood. Phee and I had shared a room. On the doorframe between the dining and living rooms, tiny lines marked our height measurements throughout the years. The backyard had a trampoline and playset, and the sprinkler in the front attracted all the neighborhood kids regularly.

Back then, Mom had been a regular mom. She’d yell at us for dragging dirt in the house, and didn’t seem to mind that none of the kitchen appliances matched. At bedtime, she still read us stories and it was she who scrubbed the toilets and made dinner each night.

It had been perfect, mostly because it was imperfect.

Then Dad’s business exploded, and my parents moved to this big house in the nice neighborhood and imperfections were no longer an option. They had a reputation to uphold.

Mimi flipped down the visor. “Well, honey, there’s no way of getting out of it. Hitch up your big girl panties.” She fluffed her hair, then dug through her purse for her lipstick, a shade of blinding orange red. “Do you know what this color is called?”

It was such a Mimi sort of color that I felt my shoulders lose some of their tension, happy she was here with me.

Six months ago, after experiencing shortness of breath, Mimi landed in the emergency room. Mom had rushed to Eagle Pass in the middle of the night. After years of huffing her way through a pack a day, the smoking had caught up with her.

The doctors told her she needed to quit immediately, and after another scare a few weeks later, involving a suspicious spot on one of her lungs, the decision was made for Mimi to sell her little trailer and move to Houston to be closer. There’d been talk of her moving in with my parents and she’d flatly refused. So, we’d found her a small one-bedroom apartment in one of those complexes for the fifty-five-and-older crowd.

“Red?”

“‘Fireman’s Bait.’” She waggled her eyebrows.

I laughed despite my dark mood. “Let’s get this over with.”

Mimi patted my leg. “This is all just one of them life moments. It will pass, it will.”