Page 59 of Such Sharp Teeth

I shrug. “Maybe.”

“How’s Ian?” she asks, grinning.

“Wouldn’t know.”

She frowns. “What do you mean? Did something happen?”

“It’s not serious,” I say. The words come to me, and I can’t help but laugh. “I’m a lone wolf.”

“I just think you’d be so good together.”

Luca interrupts by stripping naked and flailing around on the floor. Mom and I take it as our cue to go.

On the drive home, Mom tries to bring up Dave again.

“I love her,” she says of Ash. “She’s always been such a good friend to you girls. When everything happened, she was there for you and your sister. She’s done a lot for us.”

“Yep.”

“I know you have a lot of resentment toward me,” she says. “I can feel it.”

“Mom. I don’t.” The lie is so big, it barely fits through my lips.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she says. “Up in your room. I was hoping we could finally talk.”

“This is the first break I’ve had,” I say. “Undergrad, MBA, work . . . I’m enjoying being lazy, that’s all.”

“I don’t know what happened,” she says. “It never used to be like this. Even when you were a teenager, it was never like this. You always talked to me. Now you don’t talk to me. I rarely get any time with you.”

“Well, let’s not ruin it by bringing up the past,” I say. “Let’s do something else. Let’s go to the mall.”

This gets her. She can’t resist a mall. Honestly, neither can I.

We drive an hour away to the ritzy mall. We browse designer bags, waltz around Fendi and Chanel and Nordstrom, pretending to be rich but not actually buying anything. Not for ourselves anyway. We get Scarlett an assortment of fancy lotions.

We find a baby boutique nearby and go nuts. We buy onesies and little outfits and blankets and bags full of organic baby products.

It’s the best time I’ve had with Mom since I can remember. Nothing like throwing money at a problem.

I’m in a fine mood until on the drive home when she says, “Tomorrow morning I’m going to need you to get the balloons.”

“Okay. Where?”

“Party City.”

Maybe the wolf did kill me and I’m in hell.

—

It’s late. I’m smoking a cigarette out of my bedroom window like a teen delinquent when my phone rings.

It’s Ian.

When we were kids, sometimes we’d talk on the phone for hours. We traded numbers so we could text each other complaints about Rich and Scarlett’s excessive PDA, but our conversations quickly evolved beyond that. We’d talk about music and movies. I’d speculate wildly about the private lives of our teachers, and he’d occasionally chime in with something ridiculously specific, like how he suspected our history teacher Ms. Bleeker would whisper-sing ballads to her houseplants, and our gym teacher Mr. Shandy would cry whenever he lost at board games.

“Like, openly weep?” I remember asking.

“No, in private,” he’d said. “He’d go to the bathroom. Lock the door. Muffle the sound with a towel.”