Page 16 of The Impossible Princess
“What are you doing here?” I say, kissing my mother on the cheek, nodding to my father.
“Can’t a mother visit her son?”
Not during Queen’s Week. “Aren’t you supposed to be organizing a parade float somewhere?”
My mother is short and cuddly, camouflage for her formidable nature. Only a fool would underestimate her and, as she reminds me often, she did not raise a fool.
“Don’t speak to me of floats. Or glue. We put the finishing touches on last night,” she tells me, “and my fingers are still sticking together.” She holds her thumb and pointer finger like the bill of a hand-puppet duck, the skin stretching as she pulls them apart.
I follow her into the cottage, wondering if I can execute a maneuver where I march with her and then manage to turn us about without her realizing it. In my ingenious plan, she’d be gone before she knew it. “What was the theme?”
She arcs a hand as she punctuates the words, “Three Glorious Grains of Sondmark. We made a ship out of rye, sailing on an ocean of wheat, populated with fishes of barley. The dust was unbelievable.” She brushes her hands with a grunt. “I’m switching to white bread.”
I choke out a laugh. “Why did you come?”
She lifts a brow, but by some miracle, she gets right to the point. “Why haven’t you asked out that girl yet? Don’t you care about giving me grandchildren?”
My mouth dries up, but I have to remain calm. “Grandchildren?” I look to Dad.
He’s wearing his customary summer outfit. Golf shirt. Long shorts. White tube socks. Loafers.
“Don’t drag me into this,” he says, taking a seat on the couch and commandeering the remote. He doesn’t shift the channel, only turns up the parade coverage. There is a contingent of ecological protestors with patchy beards holding a massive papier-mâché representation of the Sondish coastline, a brass band is playing a traditional Sondish waltz, and the boozy crowd is seeping into the parade route to stagger drunkenly into one another.
“How’s Susi?” I ask, sure their trip this morning took them past my sister’s house. I willingly throw her under the treads of Mom’s advancing tank.
“That one—” Mom starts.
I have half an eye on the television, watching Princess Clara’s party coming down the road when fear brushes lightly down my neck. That crowd is too big, too loud. It’s beginning to choke off points of exit in the medieval town square. I remind myself that the princess has guards to handle these kinds of things—people paid to see she comes to no harm. What in the hell are they thinking?
Mom bustles around the kitchen, opening and shutting cupboard doors, her voice hardly a buzz in my ear. Clara’s detail stops her at the edge of the crowd, and she is approached by a stooped old man wearing his corporal’s uniform from the great war. His medals hang straight off his chest and his back is a bow, but he salutes her in a formal fashion, and she smiles, saying something the mics don’t pick up. She waves off her attendants and then she curtsies when he raises his shaking left hand. She fits herself neatly into the shape he has made for her, and he sweeps her into an old-fashioned waltz.
For a few moments, everyone, even the unkempt protestors, is entranced by this unscripted scene. The men wearing beer hats and face paint lurch backward as magic fills the square, and the borders of the parade route are quietly reestablished.
The brass band finishes, the old man spins Clara away from him in a flourish and a swirl of skirts. It’s over. The man salutes. Clara curtsies. The parade continues.
“Would you look at that?” says Mom. A muscle jumps in my jaw. I have been staring at the television with heaven knows what emotions written all over my face.
But when I turn, she’s staring into the fridge, her mouth hanging open.
“Max Josef Andersen,” she begins, her tone sorely tried, “child of my heart, sunshine of my golden years, who are you having over for dinner?”
Vede.I glance to my father for help.
“Run for cover,” Dad whispers with a chuckle.
There is no retreat, not under my mother’s piercing gaze. Like any good officer, I quickly begin to shore up my position. “My personal life is—”
“No, no, there be dragons,” Dad mutters from the side of his mouth, of no help whatsoever.
“His personal life?” repeats Mom, her voice pitched high and quivering with outrage. She’s talking to Dad now, and he shoots me a glare. “He was a four-and-a-half kilogram baby, and I have an entire parade ground of stretch marks from growing him inside my own body. I race to the bathroom twice a night because his enormous head crushed my bladder to the size of a thimble, and your son has the nerve to talk about his personal life?”
“It’s only a date,” I say, attempting to head off the meddling.
“Liva?” Even now, Mom is careful about Liva, trying not to let me see how she never warmed to my last girlfriend.
“No one you know,” I assure her, feeling a twinge of guilt. It’s not quite a lie, and maybe being vague will work for once.
But her eyes narrow into tiny, triumphant slits. “I knew it. You asked her. You asked the—”
