Page 3 of Surprised By Her

“You sure it was fine?” Mom asked, tucking some of my hair behind my ears.

“Uh huh,” I said, nodding a little too vigorously and then pushing my glasses back up my nose.

They shared a look. One of those parental looks that spoke a thousand words, but in only a language they could understand.

Mama put her arm around Mom and leaned into her. Visually, they didn’t seem to go together. Mom had played softball and had her gray hair cut short and only wore clothes from the LL Bean outlet store. Mama’s hair was long and dark brown and she always did something pretty with it. She sold real estate, so she had a closet full of suits and pencil skirts and pretty dresses, but the second she got home it was off with the work clothes and on with the matching sweat set and her old fuzzy socks.

“It was a great day,” I said with false enthusiasm.

The two of them just waited. They knew I’d crumble sooner or later. I always did.

“Okay fine, I have never been more embarrassed in my life,” I said, leaning down and resting my forehead on the counter.

“What happened?” Mama asked, rubbing my back in soothing motions.

“I was getting coffee for this customer and spilled it all over her,” I said, cutting myself off before I could tell them that the customer had kissed the hell out of me after. That part was going with me to the grave.

“Oh sweetie, I’m sure they know it was an accident,” Mama said. I stood up and could feel my face blazing.

Normally I told the two of them just about everything, but I couldn’t tell them this. My therapist and I had been working on me setting better boundaries with them. I was a grown woman and didn’t need to tell my parents every single detail of my life. Easier said than done, though.

“I know, but it was still mortifying,” I said.

They both hugged me and then helped me with the rest of the groceries as Mom told me about her day. She was the PE teacher at Hartford High School, and I could always count on her to tell me funny stories about her students.

“So then I said that filming dances to post online doesn’t count as exercise and they were really upset about that. I gave them the choice of basketball, badminton, or jump rope,” she said as Mama cut up chicken for stir fry.

“I can’t believe people are still playing badminton,” I said. “It seems so old-fashioned.”

Mom shrugged. “It’s easy to set up the nets and it doesn’t require a ton of expensive equipment or athletic prowess.”

“I wasn’t good at it,” I mumbled.

“You were fine. It’s just not your sport,” Mom said, slinging her arm around my shoulder.

“What is my sport?” I asked, going through all of the sports I had tried and failed at in my life.

Mom thought about that for a second. “I don’t think we’ve found it yet.”

“That’s a nice way of saying I suck,” I said, slicing through a tomato.

“Hey, don’t talk about my daughter that way,” Mama said, touching my back.

The three of us settled into our usual dinner routine and then cuddled together on the couch to watch our favorite show.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have a social life or make friends. It was just…really hard.

A year ago, I’d been living in my own apartment a few states away and working remotely doing random jobs, and I’d managed to isolate myself so completely that I barely left the apartment. My lease had been up and my parents had just bought the house and said I could come and have the entire third floor of the house to myself with a gorgeous bathroom and big tub and I could relax and stop worrying about paying rent and just take a pause for a while.

I hadn’t been able to say no, even though there wasn’t much in the way of a social scene in Arrowbridge. There were a lot of queer people, which was why my parents had looked at it as a potential place to move. The two of them had made tons of friends already and had a much better social life than I could ever hope for.

Sydney, my boss, had invited me to hang with her friends, but I hadn’t been able to get up the nerve to do it yet. I’d flaked a few times, but she hadn’t seemed offended when I canceled at the last minute, so I had hope that, one day, I could make it happen.

After the show, I went upstairs and slid into my bathtub with a lavender bath bomb.

“You’d better fix my life,” I said to it as I dropped it into the water.

No such luck, but it did help me relax a tiny bit.

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