AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Well, Lord, I don’t know what to tell you,” Mother said as she primly hovered her spoon over her ice cream.
Heidi had long thought the woman acted more like she could claim recent ancestry to Buckingham Palace than a connection to some obscure Colonial bureaucrat.
“I do wish you’d try,” Heidi said because Mother’s focus was starting to drift around the dining table. She’d been keeping the woman busy with a nonstop hour of talking about anything and everything. She’d even made up a few tall tales she had no shot in hell of being able to recall or repeat later. Heidi had been on a roll, so no one else had needed to get a word in edgewise. Dinner had fed the contrary monster inside her, and there was just something about the sight of her mother’s uptilted nose that got under Heidi’s skin.
Mother huffed and lifted a mound of ice cream onto her spoon. “That’s not a nice way to be on Momma’s birthday.”
“What?” Nana raised her head from the cake icing she was scraping off her slice. She wasn’t rejecting the frosting. She was rejecting what held it up.
“Nothing, Momma,” Mother said in an overloud voice. “Just wondering why nobody can ask any questions around here. Every time I try to open my mouth, she’s got something to say.”
“She who?”
“Heidi, Momma. We’re at Heidi’s. Don’t you remember?”
“Uh-oh,” Kalimah said in a discreet undertone.
Heidi could only hear her because Kalimah was seated immediately to her left. Valerie had shuffled her mental seating chart last-minute to ensure that neither “child” was directly next to or across from a Murray who wasn’t Heidi.
“What do you mean, don’t I remember? Of course I remember. My head’s still right.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t,” Mother said in a volume that was still too loud for dinner table conversation. She probably thought Nana was deaf in addition to senile. Everyone except Mother had figured out that Nana only heard what she wanted. That was a perk of being eighty-five.
“What’s Heidi going on about?”
“Well, I was trying to ask her about her friend, and she started going on and on about some boat.”
“It’s a fantastic boat,” Tim chimed in from across and one seat to the left of Heidi. “Already have ten deposits for preorders on that model, and we weren’t even sure we’d sell one. It’s got some pretty niche features.”
“Oh, is that the one with the full-sized closet?” Valerie asked.
“No, sweetheart, that one’s still in the planning stage. This is the dual-engine one with the solarium.”
“Nice.”
“What about a dual-engine?” Daddy roused himself from his expert-level conversational detachment and looked at Tim over the tops of his reading glasses.
Heidi didn’t know why he even bothered wearing them. The prescription hadn’t been right in years, but he had a penny-pinching farmer’s mindset and never threw anything away. One day, she was going to sneak them out of the house and replace the lenses just to see if he noticed.
“I’ll tell you all about it later, James,” Tim said in a conspiratorial tone. “Don’t want to bore Eunice.”
“Oh, all right. Just curious. Hadn’t seen the insides of too many of the new ones. Heidi doesn’t invite us down there anymore.”
Nana grunted and pressed frosting onto her tongue.
“So, we can talk about boats, but we can’t talk about anything I want to talk about?” Mother asked.
“What do you want to talk about, Mother?” Heidi asked blandly.
Heidi already knew what the options were. Mother’s gaze gave away everything she had a mind to nitpick about. That didn’t mean Heidi was going to actually humor her.
“So, is everyone paired off tonight, or what?”
“What kind of silly question is that?” Nana asked, scowling at her daughter-in-law as she pressed her teeth back into her mouth.
Carine, at Heidi’s right, barely managed to swallow her giggle.
