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If she only knew.
“Let me take a wild guess,” Birdie said, pulling out the fitted sheet. “He asked Noam to do him a solid and wire him some money?”
“Um, yeah, Mom. How else do you counter an extortion attempt?”
“So, the fact your friend is a third generation Jew, who attends synagogue on the reg, with skin like alabaster and parents who own half of Boston, wasn’t a clue that this Nigerian prince, claiming to be a long-lost brother, might be a scam?”
“Geez, Mom, xenophobic much?”
Angus jumped off the bench to grab another bracket. “Your little friend is a daft eeijit.”
Mia looked up. “Yeah?”
Seriously? That was all it took from Angus to make her daughter question herself?
Angus jumped back on the bench. “Have ye and yer friends never watchedThe Office?”
“I’ve seen it before. Do they have a Scottish version? I heard there was a British version, but I didn’t know there was a Scottish one.”
Birdie chuckled at the expression on Angus’s face.
“No, there’s no a Scottish version. I’m talkin’ about the U.S. shoo with the wee man and the big hooter.”
“What’s a hooter?”
“A big noos. The wee man with the big noos.”
Angus jumped off the bench and picked up the first set of blinds. “Have you no seen the episode when the big-noos man gets the email from the Nigerian prince?”
Mia dragged across the room and plopped on the bench with dramatic flair and boredom. “I don’t watchThe Office. That’s a show for old people. Me and my friends watchSchitt’s CreekandModern Family.”
Angus looked on the verge of crumpling the metal blinds in his huge fists, so Birdie came to his rescue and to save her blinds.
“What Angus is trying to tell you is, it is a well-known hoax, decades old, where people have been scammed by emails from a so-called Nigerian prince. Sending money to probably some twelve-year old hacker with eight monitors in his parents’ basement hopped up on Red Bull and Doritos.”
“Yeah?” Mia said, coming around and suddenly concerned. “I should call Noam and let him know. He started a GoFundMe to make it easier for the kids at school to donate toward the prince’s cause.”
Angus snorted as he attached one side of the blinds to the bracket. “Your wee freen might ken a deal more than I give him credit fer.”
Mia jumped on the thick glass-covered counter that Birdie couldn’t help but notice was the same spot Lucas had pinned her against.
Her cheeks flushed as she whipped the fitted sheets to release some of the deep grooves in the what appeared to be twenty-count cotton.
Mia, her legs swinging back and forth asked, “Hey, Mom, can we see your old house today?”
Birdie wasn’t prepared for that request. Even though she expected Mia to be curious about the home where Birdie grew up, she wasn’t prepared to respond to it. Instead, she worked the sheets, fluffing them and refolding them, thinking through a response that didn’t smell of anxiety and mental scars.
“Tell you what,” she said, “I’ve still got some things to do here. Angus brought me the steamer trunks with all of my clothes and mementos. It all needs unpacked. Why don’t you let him take you by the house? From what I understand, no one’s living there. I assume it’s been locked up tight by the owners, but I’m sure you can drive by and maybe look inside the windows.”
“You don’t want to see it? You know, for old times’ sake?”
“I’ve already been by.”
Total lie. When she would drive by, she kept her eyes straight ahead. Her pulse racing until she was well past the property line. There was no way she was going there. Wasn’t ready to face those memories. “Angus can take you.”
Mia wouldn’t let it go. “But he won’t be able to tell me things like which bedroom was yours and which one was Aunt Maisie’s. Or funny stories about Grandma cooking in the kitchen and Grandpa making her stop to dance to old time music on the radio.”
Birdie bit her lip, thinking those idyllic scenarios couldn’t have been further from the truth, but refusing to be the one to dispel her daughter’s innocent musings. More like, mother dearest closing all the blinds in the house and her father escaping once again to the basement, shutting the door behind him to drown out her pleas for help.
