Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 143382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 717(@200wpm)___ 574(@250wpm)___ 478(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 717(@200wpm)___ 574(@250wpm)___ 478(@300wpm)
“Oh, you mean the black and white thing?” I queried.
He again didn’t answer with words.
He looked down at my black jeans with the ripped knee to my white tee with the black transfer of Debbie Harry’s face on it.
“It makes things easy to match,” I told him.
Another little fib, because it did, but that wasn’t the only reason.
“I can see that with clothes. But Jess, it’s everywhere.”
I turned to look at my living room, with its crisp gray sectional in the corner. The black toss pillows mixed with the black and white striped ones. The round black coffee table in the middle. The black lamps. The black and white photos that I’d taken and framed with white mattes and black frames, arranging them on a gallery wall above one angle of the couch.
I thought it was the shit.
And it felt like something twisted in me when I looked back at him.
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s fantastic,” he declared. “But I sense there’s a story behind it.”
I felt such extreme relief he liked it that it tweaked me.
I opened my mouth to say something, but then jumped again, because there was a sharp rap on the picture window behind us.
We both swiveled to see Martha standing there, her hands cupped beside her eyes, looking in.
When she had our attention, she marched toward my door and, without knocking, walked in.
“Thank God you’re here!” she exclaimed, still marching, this time to my kitchen.
Of note: Martha was another tenant at the Oasis. She was somewhere in her late fifties, early sixties. She could live elsewhere, she had the means, but she lived here, because she’d lived here in her younger years. Thus, it reminded her of the days before she fell in love then had to spend years helping her husband fight cancer at the same time she raised three boys, and she did this until the boys left the nest, whereupon her beloved husband died from said cancer.
I adored Martha. She had no filter, said what she wanted, did what she wanted, didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of her, and by some miracle still managed to be loving no matter how irascible she was. And she was pretty damned irascible.
For me, Martha was goals.
And now was no exception, as both Eric and I watched her opening one of my cupboards, commandeering a glass, slamming the cupboard, going to the cocktail shaker that sat on the bar by Eric and me, then upending it over the glass.
Only a few drops of my Thanksgiving cocktail leaked into the glass, since Eric and I were drinking what had been in it, so she turned the shaker right side up and shook it demandingly at me.
I could take a hint, therefore I slid off my stool and rounded the bar.
I took the shaker from her, snatched up the jigger cups and started doing my thing before I asked, “Everything all right?”
“I love my sons. I love their wives…sort of,” she started.
My gaze flew to Eric, who was staring at Martha with an expression I couldn’t read, until he felt my attention and looked to me.
I was smiling.
He smiled back.
His packed its usual wallop, so I had to battle to keep mine in place.
Through this, Martha spoke.
Or complained.
“I love my grandchildren. But all of them together? For hours? Those women arranging platters and bowls like a surgeon navigates a chest cavity, and taking pictures of them so they can post it on social media and prove to all their friends they make the best homemade cranberry sauce? No.”
I was getting ice when I asked, “Are you all in your apartment?”
She had a one bedroom, like me.
In other words, not a lot of room and no dining room.
“That’s the other thing,” she stated. “We were going to eat in the courtyard. But by the time everything was ready, Alexis and Jacob were out there with their families, so one of my daughters-in-law said we should just join them. Regrettably, we did. And thus, I learned very quickly Alexis’s father is a horse’s ass.”
Oh shit.
I saw where this was going.
“Martha—” I started.
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “I tried! Honest to Christ, I did. But he’s just that much of a horse’s ass.”
“You said something,” I surmised while measuring gin.
“Trust me, Jessica, you would too.”
I called them as I saw them as well, so she probably wasn’t wrong.
I put the lid on and began shaking the cocktail as I asked, “Why are you up here?”
“For your liquor,” she answered.
Huh.
“Spill,” I pushed.
She blew out a breath and spilled.
“Well, me laying it out to that horse’s ass set Alexis’s mother in a tizzy, and do not ask me how, it seems the nature of things, but one woman’s tizzy set off a chain reaction to other women’s tizzies, so we had a table full of women in a tizzy. All except Alexis, who backed me up, and Jacob’s mom, who laughed through the whole thing.” She nodded her head smartly. “I like that one. She’s got her head on straight.”