“To help you clean up!” I exclaimed. “There was no way I was going to spend my Sunday measuring Katie’s belly with toilet paper and eating little mints that taste like toothpaste.”
“Well, you’re about two hours late to help with cleanup.”
I looked up at the sky, gauging the height of the late-afternoon sun. “Oops. I must have lost track of time.”
“How could you skip your own cousin’s shower?” Mom demanded.
“Because I have eighteen cousins, not counting second cousins, and at any given time, at least one of them is pregnant?”
Mom gave me a sharp look and stalked toward the village. Mo gave me a sympathetic grimace.
“Oh, don’t you stand there all pious and pretend you had a good time at the shower,” I told her as we followed Mom’s trail through the trees.
She made a face and whispered fiercely, “You know I didn’t. Hell, I didn’t have a good time at my baby shower. Baby showers should be reserved as punishment for betrayers in the Seventh Circle of Hell. But I went. Why? Because that’s what being part of a family is all about, spending a Sunday afternoon doing stuff you really don’t want to do.”
“Says the woman who moved three thousand miles to be away from her parents,” I said, shrugging into the Carhartt jacket Mo shoved at me. My brother’s light autumn coat practically hung to my knees and could wrap around me twice.
“Yeah, because my parents would have the mother-to-be naked in a drum circle, drawing down the moon goddess. By comparison, your werewolf stuff is downright Rockwellian.”
I snorted. Mo’s parents were unapologetic hippies. Two years before, Mo had moved to Grundy all the way from Mississippi just to get away from them, only relenting and allowing them to visit for Eva’s birth. Now that I’d met them, I couldn’t blame Mo for picking werewolf pack drama over constant hovering and deep discussions of colonics.
I picked up my pace to catch up with Mom. “Wasn’t I sweet as freaking pie to Mo the whole time she was pregnant?” Mom and Mo both raised their eyebrows. I added, “For at least the last trimester. Didn’t I show up when Mo had her pup and present my new niece to the pack like Simba in the damned Lion King?”
“Please stop calling Eva a pup,” Mo muttered. “You know I hate that.”
“My point is that I’m plenty supportive of the women in the pack when they have babies. I just don’t want to be there for the frilly free-for-all,” I said.
Mom, who’d given up on correcting my colorful vocabulary years ago, simply stared at me.
“Mom, please don’t make me pull the alpha card on you.”
“Being the alpha doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want to do without regard for the feelings of others,” Mom intoned in her “important pronouncement” voice, turning away and walking out of the tree line.
“Kind of does,” I countered, but softly, under my breath.
“I can’t wait until you get pregnant,” Mo said. “And you’re forced to sit through your own shower. We’ll probably have to duct-tape you to your pink-bedecked mother-to-be throne.”
The very idea of being pregnant made me stop in my tracks and burst out laughing.
“Oh, haha, laugh as much as you want, Scrappy,” Mo told me as I braced myself against my knees for support. “You’re planning on marrying a male wolf—”
“I didn’t say ‘plan,’ “ I clarified. “I said, when I get around to mating, I’m going to marry another wolf.”
“Well, you’ll be pregnant before you leave the altar. You know you have superabsorbent eggs. It’s hereditary. Your brother’s ninja swimmers scoffed at modern prophylactics.”
“Damn it, Mo, I did not need that picture in my head.” I scowled at her. She preened a little and loped after my mother.
My brother and his mate were nearly sickening to watch. They were a combination of every nauseating chick flick ever made and the complete catalogue of Barry Manilow’s love songs. But in its own twisted way, their Disney-movie love affair helped me reconcile with said brother after years of not speaking and/or knock-down, drag-out fights. (The knocking and the dragging were mostly done by me.) So I was the tiniest bit fond of her, as fond as I could be of a human outsider.
Mo and I were a study of contrasts. I was small and what I prefer to think of compact and sporty—like one of those Porsche coupes. Mo was one of those “shouldn’t be hot but somehow through the combination of interesting features is” girls. She was willowy and tall, with a curly black halo of hair that had grown out to her shoulders while she was pregnant with Eva. I had stick-straight, aggressively brown hair that I never cut. She tried to be nice to everybody, where I never really bothered with that kind of crap. I charged into situations; she actually thought them through . . . which usually meant I got the first swing in.
Thanks to Mo, my mom was finally able to do all the froufrou girlie bonding shit she wanted to do when I was growing up. You’d think I’d be jealous, but honestly, I was happy for my mom. She’s a smart cookie. She knew that stuff made me miserable and that I would only be suffering through it for her. While Mo actually enjoyed getting her nails done and going shopping for something besides hiking boots.
Mo cleared her throat and pitched her voice into an intentionally cheerful tone. “Speaking of your brother—”
“If the next words out of your mouth have anything to do with sex, I can and will hurt you.”
“Fine,” she said, frowning. “Then the next words out of my mouth will be ‘fire extinguisher.’ “