Page 106 of Promise Me Sunshine

“Oh, Lenny-girl.” Mom grips me so tight it hurts and then releases me all at once. “Give me your phone.”

I do as she says because when she’s in this mood, it’s way easier to just succumb. She’s scrolling my contacts. I know who she’s looking for.

I watch in suspended animation while she texts herself his contact info from my phone.

She tips her phone away from me and texts him something.

I cover my face with my hands again. “You just invited him to dinner, didn’t you.”

“I need to befriend him if he’s going to keep tabs on you for me.”

“Mom. Come on—please don’t—things between us are weird right now and I—”

“Why are they weird? Oh, he just texted back. He asked what he could bring. That’s sweet. Doesn’t seem weird to me.”

The flood of emotions from earlier is receding and I’m left with some good old-fashioned sheepishness. “I don’t know.” I play with my sleeve. “I, like,justrealized how I feel about him. So, now I…don’t know how to act…or if I should tell him…and I know that he cares about me, but that could be so different than howIfeel about him and wait, yeah, how do I know if he likes me?”

Mom’s pretty green eyes grow wide. “You’re not together? I thought—Oh, Helen. Youdoneed Lou, don’t you?” She says this on a laugh and I’m smiling in spite of the stab of pain that comes with it. “Regardless. Bring him to dinner. Bring the after-dinner fruit. Tomorrow night. We’ll do Sunday dinner on a Monday. Just for you. He already agreed to come, so don’t try to get out of it.”

I hold up my hands in surrender. She loops her armthrough mine and I think I’m walking her to the train until she stops next to a dinosaur of a Subaru. I blink, my eyes widening. “You got it out of long-term parking?”

“You think my long-lost daughter finally calls me and I’m going to fool around with the subway? Get in.”

“Mom, you’re not going to drive me all the way to the Upper West Side.”

Her eyes widen a little at my mention of the neighborhood she didn’t know I was staying in. But apparently, that’s exactly where she’s driving me, because she stuffs me into the car. We spend the next hour and ten minutes fighting traffic and mildly arguing. When we stop in front of the studio apartment, Mom puts on her hazards and gets out to take a picture of my front door. She even drops a pin on her Google Maps. She’s got my location and she’s holding on with two hands. I hug her goodbye on the sidewalk but she follows me up the stoop.

“Should I come up? We could order in.”

Now that we’re separating, her alarm lines are creasing her face again.

“I’ll be there tomorrow, Mom. I promise.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

A UPS truck lays on its horn and makes us both jump. It can’t get past Mom’s idling car. “Okay. I’ll go.” She gives me one last hug and then I stand on the stoop and watch her drive away.

It’s chilly. And I’m hungry. And I should really go inside now. But instead I just sit there and think about how tightly she held on to me.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“This fruit is wrong,” I tell Miles. We’re standing in a ludicrously expensive Italian market. T minus one hour until we’re due on my parents’ doorstep.

He blinks at me and then at the assortment in his grocery basket. “How could fruit be wrong? It’s fruit.”

“She didn’t mean apples and oranges. She meant fancy fruit.”

“Fancy fruit?” He pulls out his phone and squints at the text my mother sent to him. “She said to bring after-dinner fruit. That means fancy fruit?”

“Where are your glasses?” I don’t let him answer because I can’t actually chat about his super hot glasses right now. I’m doing a barely passable job of not acting like a panicky, lovestruck fool and I don’t want to blow it. “My mom was raised proper Italian. Well, the Brooklyn kind. We’re doing the full-course menu tonight, my friend. And that’s not a euphemism. The fruit course is after the main course but before the cookie course.”

He’s gaping at me. I take pity on him and bodily turn him back toward the produce section. “Go ask somebody what’s in season and buy the prettiest ones,” I advise.

He toddles off and I wander the store, rubbing my palms on my pants and trying to forget the warm-soft of his shirt under my hands. I make accidental eye contact with anobviously DTF cheesemonger behind the counter, and he and I engage in a brief and intense affair. But he turns quickly back to the wheels of cheese when Miles appears at my shoulder.

“The applesarein season,” he tells me. “So I kept them, but she also recommended…” He holds them up one at a time. “Plums, persimmons, and pomegranate.”

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