Page 1 of Playing With Danger

1

“Sophie, are you listening to me?” my mother snapped.

Nope.

Not even a little bit.

Often times I stopped listening to my mother three minutes into our conversations. This was because it took her approximately three minutes to get through the pleasantries before she started in on my lack of…fill in the blank…motivation, ambition, drive…those were her favorites but she had others that included the lack of… a man in my life, or social life, or a country club membership—and yes, that was a real complaint. That was where a woman of my age should go to find a man.

My age was thirty-seven, not sixty-seven, so I was hardly getting ready to die an old maid.

Though if I didn’t end this conversation soon I might die of boredom.

And, wow, that made me sound bitchy or like I was a horrible daughter. I wasn’t. I loved my mother. But she was a mother, not a mom. Plus she was a good mother, so really I shouldn’t complain—even mentally—that I wanted to poke my eardrums with ice picks when she started on a rant.

“Sorry. I’m at the grocery store.”

“Grocery store?”

She sounded like I’d just told her I was at a female mud wrestling match and I was the main attraction.

“Yes, Mother. I need to eat.”

“On a Friday night?”

“Yes, Mother. I tend to eat every night of the week.”

“Bless. So much cheek.”

The woman couldn’t decide if she was a Southerner or British.

Side note: she wasn’t either. She was born in England but moved to Kansas when she was five. That’s where she met my father—not when she was five, when she was twenty. He was in the Army. According to her they had a whirlwind courtship, got married, and she followed him to Georgia when he PCSed. A year later I was born. She denies it, because a dignified woman didn’t have sexual intercourse before marriage—insert eye roll—but her math didn’t add up. She was pregnant with me before they’d made it to the altar. Not that it mattered because when his enlistment was up, which was two years after I was born, he took off to parts unknown, never to be heard from again. By then my mom had fallen in love with Georgia, or so she says, but really I think it’s because she didn’t get along with her very stuffy, stuck-up parents who were British.

Now, that’s not a dig on Brits. I’d been to England; I loved it there and the crap about the stiff upper lip stuff was total BS. The time I’d spent in London I found Londoners to be the opposite of everything I’d heard—most of it coming from my mother who was again five when she left and had only been back for visits since then.

So all of that to say, my mother was a complex and confusing woman who loved me. But damn if she didn’t ride my ass.

How her husband put up with her ranting I’d never know.

Now, Nathan, he didn’t rant and drone on. He was neither confusing or complex. Too bad she only met him seven years ago and got hitched to him two years ago. My childhood would’ve been much warmer.

“Excuse me.”

That didn’t come from my mother.

That came from next to me.

The voice smooth like velvet but with a hint of grit.

“Sorry.”

I quickly grabbed what I wanted and stepped away from the boxes of linguini I’d been rudely blocking while chatting with my mother.

Why I perused I’d never know. I always got the same brand. I liked what I liked and I didn’t deviate.

One could say I lived a narrow life.

One could also say I had zero situational awareness as well. This became embarrassingly apparent when I promptly collided with a black-clad chest.

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