I was laughing too. For about four more seconds.
Then his mother stood up.
Diane always stands up to make a toast. She likes to be the tallest person in the room.
She raised her glass toward the ceiling, and she smiled at everyone around my table. Her son. Her grandkids. Greg’s sister, Karen, and her husband, Phil. Me, last.
“Finally,” she said. “Now I can start making this house my own.”
Glasses clinked.
Mine didn’t.
I sat there with my glass in the air, sure I’d heard her wrong.
Then I looked at Greg. I waited for him to laugh. To say, “Mom, it’s our house.” To say anything at all.
He just looked at his mother.
And he smiled.
That hurt more than anything she’d ever said to me.
And she’d said a lot.
My name is Lauren Mercer. I’m thirty-nine. I’m a pharmacist at Bell’s Pharmacy on Route 9, the old family one with the soda fountain nobody uses anymore. I’ve worked there for fifteen years.
