Page 68 of The Cadence
Chapter 14
Iwatched carefully, alert for any clues about proper behavior. It was a tactic I’d learned after moving in with my grandma and discovering that, in terms of manners, I was more like a feral dog than a polite human.
She picked up the napkin that was folded next to her plate and smoothed it carefully over her lap, and then she took a small sip from her glass. It was iced tea but not how I was used to it, and I tried not to purse my lips at the bitter taste as I copied her movements.
Then she looked across the table and smiled at me, and I smiled back. “Thank you for coming, Calla.”
“It’s my pleasure, Miss Sloane,” I responded. Oh, that had come out with a lot of enthusiasm and had sounded much too loud for her quiet house. I took another sip of the unsweetened iced tea and calmed down.
“When you picked up my old bureau, I tried to connect you with my granddaughter,” she recalled. “I asked you how someoneyour age would make friends, and I thought having lunch together was a good way to get to know someone.”
“This lunch is a great way for us to get to know each other,” I told her. “I’m glad you asked me over.” I had been surprised, too, but suspected that it had something to do with her granddaughter Kirsten.
It did. Miss Sloane asked me questions about my life here as we ate the salads she had made, and she liked looking at the pictures of my furniture and of the renovations that Annie was accomplishing in the guest cottage. But she did steer the conversation around to Kirsten, and it was clear that topic was where her interest lay. She sat up straighter and frowned a little as she spoke about her, and I interpreted that as worry.
“My granddaughter tells me that you’re good friends with her boyfriend. Cully.” She spoke his name with a deeper frown, which I now interpreted as dislike.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re good friends,” I cautioned. We were definitely getting back on the track of friendship after the post-dinner party arguments we’d had, but he was annoying me, too. He stubbornly refused to listen to anything I said about Kirsten, all the good advice I was offering.
“What makes you the expert? What’s your relationship history, Calla?” he’d demanded a few days before. It was true that my own experience was mostly observational but he still needed to hear me, because I was concerned.
After Kirsten’s heroic actions surrounding the frozen eggplant, they’d kicked things up to even a higher level. Just yesterday,he’d scared me out of my mind. “What do you think about me becoming a dad?” Cully had casually asked, and I’d choked on the apple I was eating. No, she wasn’t currently pregnant, but it was something they were discussing.
Miss Sloane was obviously not a fan of her granddaughter’s boyfriend, which I quickly understood as she started to run through a list of his flaws. She didn’t have to think much as she enumerated them all, which told me that she’d been going over that mental list a lot.
There were problems big and small. “He seems lazy and unmotivated. His interests are only gaming and adding more flash to the car he drives, and he has no plans for the future.”
I thought of Cully’s question to me about fatherhood and kept my mouth shut about his future plans.
“He’s consistently late to pick up my granddaughter,” she continued. “When I had him here for dinner, he chewed with his mouth open.”
I glanced quickly at my fork and resolved to be even more careful with my manners.
She had more to say, too. “When they’re together, they’re all over each other. I understand physical attraction, but I don’t need to see it. Constantly.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I sympathized. Our manager at the grocery store had spoken to him about that several times, because it had become a much larger problem than his phone usage. Kirsten had been coming around a lot to visit and theyweren’t bothering to go out to the loading dock. When they were together, you didn’t need to turn on the heat in the building.
“Kirsten is still insisting that they have to live together,” Miss Sloane continued. “Frankly, I don’t care for the idea and neither do her parents.”
“Shouldn’t they be the ones to reel her in?” I asked.
Now she looked embarrassed. “My son and his wife seem to have given up on her,” she admitted. “I’ve stepped in,in loco parentis.”
The whole situation was a littleloco. “She mentioned to me that you were going to buy a house for her.”
“I want my granddaughter to settle down,” she said. “I thought that if Kirsten had a permanent place and I could be involved in her life, then she would begin to listen to my advice about returning to school and getting a job.”
It seemed like a stretch. I shrugged a little.
“Also, I really enjoy having her here,” she went on. “For so many years, I’ve only been able to see her sporadically and it’s been wonderful to get to know her better. She breathes a lot of energy into this house.”
“I understand that,” I said, nodding. “I lived with my grandma and she always…sorry.” I was never going to stop crying about her, I had realized. I cleared my throat. “Is there something I can help you with, Miss Sloane?”
“If you were me,” she said slowly, “how would you handle this?”
My index finger flew up to point at my chest. “You really want my advice?”
“You know them both,” she answered. “And you’re their age, but you seem so much more mature.”
