Page 10 of Mom-Com
“I’m here, woman!” Gabby let herself in the front door, as usual. Once you’ve known someone for thirty years you give them free rein to come and go as they please.
I clapped my hands. “Excellent. Now we need to go to the store. I made a list.”
Gabby rolled her eyes. “Of course you did. I assume you put coffee on that list for your bestie?”
I nodded graciously. “We can make a coffee run on the way back.”
With that, we were on our way to the grocery store, no Jameson sighting, thank God. I filled Gabby in on the conversation yesterday, leaving out his physical attributes. She’d see him soon enough and I didn’t want her teasing me about my hot-but-weird neighbor. If I didn’t watch her closely, she would be setting me up on a date with every eligible man we encountered. Trust me, it had happened before.
We pulled into Vons and I grabbed my cloth grocery bag from the trunk before we crossed the parking lot and grabbed a cart. An old lady cut right in front of me, stealing the only cart in the carousel. How she managed it moving at a snail’s pace, was beyond me, but the evidence was there. She rolled off into the store, smug smile and pokey pace her elderly version of the middle finger.
While counting to ten and walking to grab an empty cart off to the side of the store, I remembered my abbreviated list of Fifty Ways. Number three clearly stated to be nice to everyone as they may have an eligible son, father, brother, uncle who could ride off into the proverbial sunset with me. So instead of being passive aggressive and mumbling under my breath about her rude behavior or “accidentally” ramming my cart into hers as I entered the store, which I’d been known to do in the past, I pasted on a smile and called out a jaunty, “Good morning to ya!” as I passed her.
Gabby looked at me in horror. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you feverish?” Her cold fingers probed my forehead as I tried to swat them away and still handle the shopping cart. “I’ve seen you verbally cut down lil’ old grannies who just looked at you wrong at the grocery store before. You’re kind of infamous with your old lady kerfuffles at the store.”
“I’m fine. I’m just following my list. ‘Be nice to everyone.’” I found the baking aisle and turned down the lane, scanning for white sugar and flour, hoping my blood pressure would get the message and calm down.
Gabby snorted and grabbed a box of sugar. “I’m telling you. This list is going to be downright comical. I won’t even get into how sexist some of those items are on the original list. It’s like sitting in a car watching a train wreck happen right in front of you. You want to look away, but you just can’t miss all the gory details of the disaster, you know?”
I finally relinquished the cart to jab my fists onto my hips and narrow my eyes. “Thank you so much, bestie, for your vote of confidence. It really means the world to me that you’re motivating me to find my happily ever after.” The sarcasm was so tangy I’d need another box of sugar to cut it down.
Gabby looked unconcerned by my anger. “Careful. I might have a brother or uncle. Better be nice to me...”
The narrowed eyes turned into a full-on glacial death glare. “I’m rethinking sharing everything with you. Clearly, I need to put a filter on my mouth. You can’t be trusted.”
She broke out into a smile and put her arm around my shoulders. I remained stiff as a board. “Ah, come on, Lil. I’m just teasing. You know you love me.”
I shrugged her arm off and grabbed a bag of flour. “Yeah, yeah. Come on. Let’s get out of here so I can make my man-pies.”
Gabby followed me toward the checkout stands. “I’m not even going to comment on what those are. See? Totally supportive.”
My eye roll was thwarted by the sight of the little old lady with her infamous cart holding exactly two items: a loaf of bread and a pack of gum. Perhaps the cart was just a substitute for a walker. Besides the utter emptiness of her cart, whatreallyfroze my eyeballs was the man walking next to her. He appeared shorter than my son and as bald as my daughter when she was first born. She smacked him in his belly with the back of her age-spotted hand when he tried to rush her to unload her two items onto the conveyer belt.
A tingling sensation crept over my skull. It may have been embarrassment or shame, I wasn’t quite sure. Maybe it was just the sudden realization in real terms that my list of ways to get a husband might be as silly and unfruitful as Gabby thought it to be.
“You were so right,” Gabby whispered in my ear. “You should totally get his number now that you were nice to her.”
“Shut. Up.”
She nudged me in the kidney with her elbow. “Seriously, bald guys are hot, didn’t you know?”
I eyed the man in front of me, now trying to get dear old mom to push her cart through the checkout stand and collect her items on the other end. His pants were at least three inches above the back of his orthopedic black tennis shoes. And Gabby was wrong. He wasn’t bald. He had two long, curly black hairs that originated on the back of his head and were combed to the side with the help of a generous glop of gel.
I swallowed hard and put my groceries on the belt, unable to look away from the old lady smacking her son with a grocery bag when he was too slow in bagging her stuff.
“I need you to shut up right now,” I whispered savagely out of the side of my mouth.
Choked laughter fanned the flames of my embarrassment.
“You know, number twenty on my list is to make and sell toupees because bald guys are easy catches. Just be glad I had the sudden insight to nix that from my to-do list.”
Gabby whooped out a loud laugh, turning the head of the old lady and earning us a frown. I just smiled serenely and waited for them to move along. Clearly, notallthe things on the list were going to work for everyone. Hopefully the pies gave a better result than being nice.
Back at home, with coffee in hand, Gabby and I got busy rolling out dough and slicing apples. I tried three different ways to steer the conversation to Gabby’s boyfriend, Hewitt, but she was avoiding my obvious traps and moved the talk to something far less personal. I was now officially worried about what was going on with them, but I knew Gabby would talk to me about it when she was ready. And today was not that day.
“Oh, crap.”
Gabby spun around, rolling pin in hand. “What?”
