Page 47 of The Impossible Princess
“Teach, huh? Susi’s going to find a way to make you do it. She’ll impale her index finger or something and end up with stitches.”
Mom jabs me in the ribs. “I said I would teach her, and I meant it.”
We’re through the front door now and I kiss her, hoping it feels like a period at the end of a sentence. “Sounds like a long day.” Better get to it.
A furrow lines her brow as she reaches for the car door. I can taste the freedom, but then she spins back to me. “I’m worried about you, you know.”
I expel a small, silent sigh and place my hands on her shoulders. “You always worry about me. It makes more sense to do so when I’m in the middle of the North Sea than when I’m sleeping peacefully in my own cottage.”
“You usually come into town for dinner, but you haven’t been in ages. We’ve hardly seen you at all since Queen’s Day.”
The morning is silent, but I can practically hear Clara’s car speeding down the drive. Tension tightens my stomach. “There’s a lot to do with the house.” I play her off.
She gives a dissatisfied sigh. Not silent. Her gaze arcs over the roofline of the cottage lit with morning sun. “You work too hard. If you waited until tomorrow, your dad and I could—”
She’s like a barnacle and I have to scrape her off. “Things are fine, Mom. I need to get going on the painting.”
“Is it to do with Princess Clara? I never asked how things went.”
“I know,” I say, opening the door for her. I grin. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Max,” she chides, sliding into the driver’s seat. I shut the door and breathe a little more easily.
“Mom,” I answer and she tugs the front of my shirt and then my ear, bringing me down to her level so that she can kiss my face.
“I’m sorry it didn’t go well. But you can lick your wounds just as easily over a pot roast with your family as you can out here.”
“There are no wounds.” Not yet.
We smile at each other, and I can see that she doesn’t believe me. She pops her sunglasses on, making her look a little like a middle-aged Brigitte Bardot, and turns the key, pulling away to the sounds of ABBA.
Safe. I’m safe. I am already congratulating myself on the near-miss of my worlds colliding when she slows to navigate around a nondescript blue Fiio at the neck of the drive. My stomach drops.
Clara continues, but Mom hits the brakes and leans her head out the window, tipping her glasses back. “Never mind about the pot roast,” she shouts.
Clara slides out of the car. The embarrassment and awkwardness we ought to be consumed by has been displaced by my mother.
“Pot roast?” Clara asks, the commonplace question papering over memories of being tangled up on the sofa and in the tiny entryway of the cottage.
I close my eyes for a long moment. It didn’t paper over all the memories.
“You just met my mother,” I say, whipping my phone from my pocket and tapping out a message.
It’s nothing. Also, you’re allowed to tell Dad but not another living soul.
Send.
There is no sense in locking Mom all the way down. If she couldn’t talk to someone, she’d be like a pressure cooker, in danger of explosion and taking someone’s head off—my head. Better that my love life stay quiet.
It’s not a love life, I remind myself. That’s what I’ve promised Clara, but the memory of her low laughter against my lips tells another story.
“She won’t tell anyone but Dad,” I assure her, tucking the phone in my pocket again and swallowing away the urge to pick things up where Clara and I left them. She’s here to help me as a friend.
On the chance she didn’t have the right clothes for painting in, I have a neatly folded pile on my bed—an old pair of jeans and one of my shirts. I open my mouth to make the offer when I notice.
“You’re in shorts.” The words are jerked from me as she brushes past.
“You’rein shorts,” she shoots back.
