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“Yeah, only it wasn’t Facebook,” Grandma said. “It was a romance site.”
Lula shook her finger at Grandma. “Granny, you’ve been catfishing!”
I looked over at Lula. “What’s catfishing?”
“It’s when you go on a dating website and make up your profile,” Lula said. “Like Granny could be telling men she’s twenty-three years old and a NFL cheerleader. Problem is when it gets serious and they want to meet you in person you gotta keep making excuses.”
“Exactly,” Grandma said. “I’m real hot stuff online.”
“That’s awful,” my mother said.
“Everybody does it,” Grandma said. “It’s not like there’s a lot of good stuff to watch on television these days. You got to do something to make the time go. You heard about fantasy football? This here’s fantasy dating.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s see if I can guess. You told these men you were me?”
“Of course not,” Grandma said. “You don’t steal someone’s identity. I went by the name of Gina Bigelow. And I said I was an interior designer. The only thing I borrowed from you was a picture. It didn’t have your name on it or nothing.”
“They could do an image search,” Lula said. “Connie uses stuff like that at the office all the time. You just plug Stephanie’s picture in, and it’ll get you her name. After you have her name it’s easy to find out all kinds of other things, like where she works and her home address.”
“I didn’t know that,” Grandma said. “Does it work for everyone?”
“Some people are harder to find than others,” I said. “I’m easy because my picture’s been in the paper a couple times.”
“And it’s easy to find people who got social media accounts with their pictures on them,” Lula said.
“It’s like we’re living in a time of magic,” Grandma said.
“How many people are you catfishing?” Lula asked Grandma.
“I got two on the hook right now. And there were four that I cut loose. Those were the ones I sent the picture to. It was like a goodbye gesture.”
“Boy, you must be something to get these men so worked up over you,” Lula said. “I bet you would have made a good ’ho.”
“Coming from you that’s a real compliment,” Grandma said to Lula.
“I smell cake baking,” Lula said.
“It’s Stephanie’s cake,” Grandma said. “She made it all by herself. We’re going to put the frosting on it when it’s cool.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a piece of that cake,” Lula said.
“You could stay for dinner,” Grandma said. “We’re having the cake for dessert.”
Lula looked over at my mother. “Is that okay with you, Mrs. P.? I don’t want to impose.”
My mother is a good Christian woman who would never refuse someone a seat at her table, but I knew this was a nightmare for her. With Lula and Grandma at the table together, it’s much more likely that my father will try to stab someone with his fork.
•••
My father has developed coping methods over the years. He puts his head down at the dinner table and plows through the meal, listening to no one. Once in a while he’ll pick his head up and look like he wants to join the Foreign Legion. At the moment he was concentrating on shoveling in chocolate cake.
“That was a wonderful meal,” Lula said to my mother. “And this chocolate cake is excellent. Who’d ever think Stephanie could make a cake?”
“How about you?” Grandma asked Lula. “Do you like to bake?”
“I’ve never thought about baking,” Lula said. “I think I’m more a savory person than a baking person. Not that I’d ever pass up a donut. And, anyways, I don’t have a oven.”
I finished my cake and wondered if I was a baking person. The cake had turned out okay. It had tasted better than it looked. It had been a little lopsided, and I couldn’t figure out how to get a nice swirly pattern in the frosting.
