Page 7 of Things We Hide from the Light
“There you are! I was worried.” Bonnie Solavita hadn’t been born a worrier, but she’d accepted the mantel that had been thrust upon her with an enthusiastic dedication to the role.
Unable to sit still during these daily conversations, I got off the lumpy couch and headed to the table. “I was carrying something up the stairs,” I explained.
“You’re not overdoing it, are you?”
“It was one suitcase and one flight of stairs,” I said, flicking the lid off the box of files. “What are you all up to?” Redirection was what kept my relationship with my parents intact.
“I’m on my way into a marketing meeting, and your father is somewhere under the hood of that damn car,” she said.
Mom had taken a longer-than-necessary hiatus from her job as a marketing executive so she could smother me until I moved three states away to go to college. Since then, she’d reentered the workforce and climbed the ladder as an executive in a national healthcare organization.
My father, Hector, was six months into his retirement from his career as a plumber. “That damn car” was the in-desperate-need-of-some-TLC 1968 Mustang Fastback I’d surprised him with for his birthday two years ago courtesy of a big, fat bonus check from work. He’d had one when he was a young, studly bachelor in Illinois until he’d traded it in on a fancy pickup truck to impress a farmer’s daughter. Dad had married the farmer’s daughter—my mother—and spent the ensuing decades missing the car.
“Did he get it running yet?” I asked.
“Not yet. He bored me to death with a twenty-minute dissertation on carburetors over dinner last night. So I bored him right back with an explanation of how we’re changing our advertising messages based on the demographics of East Coast suburban sprawl,” Mom explained smugly.
I laughed. My parents had one of those relationships that no matter how different they were from each other, no matter how long they’d been married, they were still the other’s biggest cheerleaders…and biggest annoyances.
“That’s very on-brand for you both,” I said.
“Consistency is key,” Mom sang.
I heard someone ask a rapid-fire question on her end.
“Go with the secondary deck for the presentation. I made some tweaks to it last night. Oh, and grab me a Pellegrino before you go in, would you? Thanks.” Mom cleared her throat. “Sorry about that, sweetie.”
The difference between her boss lady voice and her mom voice was a source of endless entertainment for me.
“No problem. You’re a busy boss lady.”
But not too busy to check in with her daughter on her designated days.
Yep.Between my mother’s iron-fisted itinerary and my parents’ desire to make sure I was okay at all times, I spoke to a parent nearly every single day. If I avoided them for too long, they had been known to show up on my doorstep unannounced.
“You’re still in DC, aren’t you?” she asked.
I winced, knowing what was coming. “Thereabouts. It’s a small town north of DC.”
“Small towns are where busy professional women get seduced by a rough-around-the-edges local business owner. Ooh! Or a sheriff. Have you met the sheriff yet?”
A coworker had gotten my mother hooked on romance novels a few years back. They took an annual vacation togetherthat always lined up with some book signing somewhere. Now Mom expected my life to turn into the plot of a romcom at any moment.
“Chief of police,” I corrected. “And actually he lives next door.”
“That makes me feel a thousand times better knowing you have law enforcement next door. They’re trained in CPR, you know.”
“And a variety of other special skills,” I said dryly, trying not to be annoyed.
“Is he single? Cute? Any red flags?”
“I think so. Definitely. And I haven’t gotten to know him well enough to spot any. He’s Knox’s brother.”
“Oh.”
Mom managed to pack a lot into one syllable. My parents had never met Knox. They only knew that we’d dated—very briefly—when I was in college and had remained friends ever since. Mom mistakenly blamed him for her thirty-seven-year-old daughter still being single and ready to mingle.
It wasn’t that she was desperate for a wedding and grandkids. It was that my parents wouldn’t take an easy breath until I had someone in my life who was going to take over the role of worried protector. It didn’t matter how self-sufficient I’d become. To my mom and dad, I was still a fifteen-year-old in a hospital bed.
