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Mom and Dad chuckle but I scoff. “Hey! I object!”
Dad laughs. “On what grounds?”
“I…” I point at Maya and Amelia. “On the grounds that I don’t like being ganged up on by my sister and girlfriend.”
“Overruled,” Moms jokes, making us all laugh.
“Not my fault she likes me better than you already.” Maya sticks her tongue out at me before looking at Amelia. “Us girls gotta stick together.”
“Too right, as the Spice Girls said...” She lifts her palm up toward Maya for a high five. “Girl power.”
Maya slaps her palm against Amelia’s hand but her face screws up. “What’s the Spice Girls?”
Mom gets up from the table and I stand to help her get plates out of the cupboard.
“What?” I hear Amelia splutter, and when I take a quick look back, her mouth is hanging open. “You… you don’t know who the Spice Girls are?”
I carry the plates over to the table at the same time as Mom places dishes of food in the middle with serving spoons to help ourselves.
“If it’s not Justin Bieber or some weird indie band, I’m not sure she’s heard of it,” I say.
>
“Oh, God,” Amelia groans. “Izzie just found out about Justin Bieber and it’s all she wants to listen to.” She looks back at Maya, demanding, “I really need to introduce you to the Spice Girls.”
Maya shrugs, picking her phone up off the table. “I’ll Spotify them.”
“Oh no you don’t,” Dad says plucking her cell out of her hands and placing it into the basket Mom holds out toward us all.
I pull my cell out of my pocket as Maya sighs and put it in the basket. Amelia stares at me like she’s lost and I chuckle. “No electronics allowed at the table. Family rule.”
“Oh.” She pulls her own cell out. “I only have two people who ever contact me regularly and you’re one of them.” She laughs, placing it into the basket.
“What about your mom and dad? Don’t they call you?” Maya asks innocently, spooning chicken onto her tortilla wrap.
I wait on bated breath for her answer, wanting to know myself. She’s mentioned her parents briefly before but never said anything about contact with them.
“I talk to them every now and again,” she replies distantly, grabbing one of the spoons. “They’re both really busy so we don’t talk often.” There’s a hitch in her voice, but if I wasn’t paying so much attention to her I wouldn’t have noticed.
“What do they do for a living?” Mom asks, placing salad into her wrap.
“My dad is the sheriff in the town I grew up in and when I moved away, Mom went back into nursing. So between the two of them, neither are rarely home.”
“Your dad’s a sheriff?” I ask curiously.
She finishes making her own wrap, folding it over before she answers, “He is. Has been since before I was born.”
I like that she’s opening up, even if it is just a snippet into her private life.
“What does he think about you dating a lawyer?” Dad asks.
I bite into my fajita knowing the underlying question. Cops, unless we’re on their side, don’t take a liking to lawyers. I mean, I get it, we pick apart their cases and make them look like amateurs sometimes.
“I… well…” Her eyes connect with mine and I see the apprehension in their depths. “I haven’t spoken to my dad for a little while. But…” She turns back to face my dad. “Either way, they live a long way from here, so…” She leaves it hanging in the air, staring down at her plate as she goes inside her own head.
I can see she’s starting to get uncomfortable from the subject so I steer it onto something completely different. “Mom, this is delicious as always.”
“It really is,” Amelia says, jumping on my subject change. “I see where you get your cooking skills from.”
