Page 17 of Fireworks & Forehead Kisses

“Where is my grandmother?”

“She’s resting. Upstairs.”

“Thank you.” I walked past her to the stairs.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t bother my grandmother while she was in her room. But she’d not only fired Ellen, again, she’d also gotten into a death trap of a vehicle with a woman and gone down to the pier. That place was a petri dish of germs and bacteria. At ninety-two, her immune system was not what it once was.

By the time I made it to my grandmother’s room, I could feel that my blood pressure had risen. I didn’t want to snap or be disrespectful, so I paused a moment and took a deep breath before knocking on the door. After calming myself down, I lifted my hand and knocked twice.

“Come in.”

When I opened the door, I found my grandmother sitting in her chair in the corner of the room. She was looking down at her phone, smiling at a video playing on the screen.

Rufus was curled up at the head of her bed on her pillows. Grandad had to be turning over in his grave. He would never have allowed a dog in his bedroom, much less on the bed. When he saw me, he stretched out his legs, and I walked over and gave him a scratch behind his ears. As soon as I felt his soft fur and he rested his head in the palm of my hand, all the tension and frustration I’d felt drained out of me.

When the video she was watching ended, her head lifted, and her eyes met mine.

“Hello, dear.”

“Did you fire Ellen again?” I asked a question I already knew the answer to as I pulled out my sanitizer and squirted it on my hand.

“Yes, I did.”

“We agreed?—”

“Iagreedthat you could hire Ellen. I did notagreethat you could fire Ashley.”

Technically, she was right. We hadn’t discussed me letting Ashley go. But I didn’t see the point of having two people here. “So you did this to prove a point?”

“If you are asking if I hired staff to prove a point, the answer is no. Ashley has a pivotal role in the new direction I’m taking Wolfe Clothing.”

“What direction is that exactly?” Gran had always fought to have a hand in some designs and certain lines of Wolfe Clothing. She had a title in the business, but my grandfather wanted her at home, where she “belonged.”

“We are going to design, produce, and launch a sustainable athleisure line for Wolfe Clothing.”

This was the first I heard about any sustainable athleisure line. “A sustainable athleisure line?”

“Yes, I have been telling your grandfather that I wanted to do one for years, but he never saw the benefit.”

Had she? It wouldn’t surprise me if she had. Grandfather had blinders on in business and didn’t take other people’s opinions or wishes into consideration, even his wife’s. Maybe even especially his wife’s.

“When you say that she has a pivotal role, what exactly is her position?”

“COO.”

“COO? That’s Raquel’s title.”

“Exactly.”

Wow. My grandmother had a little savage in her. I wondered if she’d told Raquel that she had been replaced or if that would be news to my sister-in-law. Either way, I had a sneaking suspicion that Ashley’s lack of experience may have worked for her and not against her. I could be reading way too much into the calculated gleam in my grandmother’s eye, but I had a sneaking suspicion that Gran had a point to prove that Raquel’s job could be done by someone with little to no qualifications.

“Is that why you went down to the pier? For the clothing line?” I asked, trying to put the puzzle pieces together of why my grandmother had driven in that car and gone to that cesspool.

“Oh no, we went down to the pier so we could film Ashley’s audition tape.”

“Audition tape for what?”

“For the television show Married by a Matchmaker.”

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