Page 20 of The Usual Family Mayhem

“Damn.” I made an exploding gesture with my hand. “I have to rethink everything I thought I knew about this household.”

“I figured you were old enough to hear the truth.” She reached down and picked up my phone.

The force of the adrenaline running through me threatened to knock me over.

“Here you go.” She handed it over without looking at the screen. Of course she did. Celia was big on privacy. Fresh air and privacy.

That made one of us. “You could—and hear me out on this—tell Gram the truth about the tea. Like I did.”

“Oh, no.” Celia shook her head. “I remember that day.”

Who could forget it?

“I have a good excuse. You see, right after we first met, Mags served me sweet tea and a piece of her lemon chiffon pie and, well, it was early in our relationship. I didn’t want to be negative, so I drank two glasses of her tea.”

That was pretty adorable. I could almost see Gram trying to woo Celia with baked goods. “You condemned yourself to a life of sweet tea misery because once, long ago, you were determined to get on Gram’s good side.”

“We never lie about the big stuff. Only cherry pie and sweet tea.” Celia glanced at the notebook on my lap. “Are you writing stories?”

Was I...? “What?”

She treated me to an encouraging smile like she’d done for most of my life. “You wrote your first story at seven.”

In crayon on construction paper. Even designed the cover, which highlighted my complete lack of drawing skills. “‘The Great Possum Race.’”

“I think you revised it four times. You read it to us over and over again.”

“Well, it was a masterpiece.”

“True.” Celia laughed. “Mags bragged about it for a year. She bragged about all the stories you wrote. Talked about your potential.”

Gram was supportive but she wasn’t the type to hand out praise over nothing. I’d been chasing her approval since I moved in. “Does she talk about the part where I can’t keep a job?”

“I’m afraid the law school issue was our fault.”

Celia had alluded to this many times over the last two years. I dropped out of law school right after Gram went to the hospital. There was a connection of sorts. Almost losing Gram made me reexamine my priorities and law school didn’t make the list. That wasn’t Gram and Celia’s fault. It was law school’s fault.

“You’ve struggled because you’ve been in the wrong career,” she said.

No one bothered to tell me that before. “Meaning?”

“With your vivid imagination you’re a born storyteller. When you were younger Mags feared you’d become a con artist or something because of the grand stories in your head.” She shrugged. “Happily, that didn’t happen.”

I hadn’t moved off the job comment. “How does writing translate into a paying job? It would be helpful to know because I don’t have a clue.”

Celia stayed quiet for a few extra beats. Long enough for the hesitation to be obvious. “I know what I think you’d be happiest doing, but you have to figure that out for yourself.”

Maybe it wasn’t too late to try that con artist thing. “Could you give me a hint?”

“I already did.” She sighed. “So, fried chicken for dinner?”

Crap. Right. I forgot to give her a heads-up. “Can we bump that one night? I’m supposed to have dinner with Jackson.”

“Really?” The question consisted of one word but came loaded with an unspoken opinion.

“Is that a bad idea?”

She patted my knee. “I think it’s a great idea.”

---