AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ChapterSeventeen
“What a dirtbag,” Julia muttered under her breath as she scanned something on her phone. She was slung over the living room couch, her freshly manicured toes wiggling across a pillow. Alana sat beside her in their mother’s terrycloth robe, an avocado face mask smeared across her cheeks and forehead.
“Hey, sis. What’s going on?” Alana asked.
Julia swung her feet off the couch and blinked through her own face mask. It was probably comical, the two of them seated there together in face masks as the sun eased hazily into the Nantucket Sound to finish out the day.
“He’s not cooperating,” Julia answered.
“Who?”
“You know who,” Julia returned with a sigh. “Your high school lover boy.”
Alana’s stomach twisted. “You’re kidding.”
“I asked him a few questions to clarify the paperwork,” Julia explained. “And he’s pushing back. I wouldn’t be surprised if this process took six months, maybe longer.”
“Gosh.” Alana scanned the email Jeremy had sent Julia.“These files do not belong to you. They belong to the state,”she mocked. “How self-important.”
“They’re probably stuffed in a cabinet somewhere in a big warehouse,” Julia grumbled. “I’m sure nobody has looked at them in twenty-five years.”
That moment, Greta fluttered in from the kitchen with a big platter of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Julia shoved her phone into the cushion of the couch as Alana teased, “Mom! What have you done?”
Greta placed the platter on the coffee table and waved her hand. “It’s a new recipe I wanted to try out. Sea salt and dark chocolate. Since the teenagers came over the other day, I’ve felt overwhelmed with fresh ideas for recipes. You two are my taste testers. Eat up,” she ordered.
Julia and Alana locked eyes as they took a cookie each. Although they hadn’t discussed it, they wanted to keep their digging around in their father’s criminal case away from Greta. They didn’t want to upset her, a woman who’d already been through so much.
Alana bit into the chewy chocolate cookie, her eyes fluttering closed as the chocolate oozed across her tongue and sparkled with big chunks of sea salt.
“Mom…” Julia moaned as she pressed her lips with three fingers, her eyes closed. “You’ve outdone yourself.”
Greta blushed and perched on the chair across from them, looking as nervous and proud as a child. “Is there anything about them you would change?”
Alana took another bite, getting a small droplet of avocado face mask on the edge of the gooey morsel. “I guess I wouldn’t mix the cookies with homemade avocado face masks,” she suggested.
“No. That’s a combo that doesn’t work,” Julia replied with a laugh.
Greta chuckled. “You two look hilarious. Let me see…” She reached for her pocket and produced a smartphone, which Alana and Julia had just helped her pick out at the downtown tech store. “I wonder if I can figure out how to take a photograph on this thing.”
“Mom! Your first photo on your camera phone cannot be of this,” Julia teased, gesturing at the tragic scene. “Two forty-something divorcées, eating chocolate chip cookies and nursing their wounds.”
“Hey, speak for yourself,” Alana said. “Once I re-emerge from behind this face mask, I’ll be reborn.”
Greta managed to snap a shot of the two of them. Pleased with herself, she turned the camera around to show them the image.
“Just as suspected,” Julia said. “Tragic.”
“Adorable,” Greta corrected as she shuffled back toward the kitchen, leaving them with a massive platter of chocolate chip cookies.
“She really is our mother,” Julia said with a happy sigh.
Alana reached across the couch and nabbed the remote control, hungry for something beyond the reckless chatter of the inside of her brain.
“Be careful to avoid you-know-who,” Julia muttered.
“Julia, you can’t just call everyone ‘you know who’ and expect me to get it every time,” Alana joked.
Julia’s eyes widened beneath her face mask. “Q-U-I-N…”
