“Rocks?”
He nodded, then, remembering she couldn’t see him, said, “Yes, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Have a seat before you fall down,” I murmured, steering him toward the couch. His sudden case of nerves was a combination, I thought, of his claustrophobia in the small trailer and the realization that we were all alone with my mother. It was only five o’clock, and she had plenty of time to ask us whatever she wanted.
When I’d first met Neil’s daughter, Emma, it had not been under the best of circumstances. She’d come home unexpectedly and overheard her father and I having headboard-slamming, obscenity-shouting sex. I’d felt so super awkward around her for longest time after that, so I couldn’t help but feel that Neil’s discomfort around my mother was a little bit of life balancing the scales.
“Thank you for letting me stay in your home,” he said, trying again to break the ice.
“It’s no trouble at all,” Mom replied, coming into the room with a glass of Jack over ice for Neil. “You let my daughter stay with you for, what, has it been a year already?”
“It’s less ‘staying with’ and more ‘I live there now,’“ I corrected her.
“Do you want anything, Soph?” she asked, smoothly ignoring me. “I have Snow Creek Berry.”
“Ooh, I haven’t had that in so long!” I even clapped my hands a little at the thought of some good, old-fashioned, cheap as hell Boone’s Farm. “It’s going to give me a wicked headache.”
When Mom came back, she had two plastic tumblers of the gas station wine and handed one to me. “Okay. So. Neil. You’re dating my daughter, and I know practically nothing about you.”
“Yes, Sophie informed me on the drive here from Marquette that you had no idea the boyfriend you were going to meet was twenty-four years older than you were expecting. I wasn’t quite thrilled at that surprise, myself.” He looked to me with a lifted eyebrow, and I pointedly canted my eyes away as I sipped my drink.
“Well, tell me about yourself. I know you’re British, and I know you have family in Iceland. And you have a daughter I just found out about today, so you’re… I take it you’re divorced?” Mom sipped from her cup.
“Yes, but not from Emma’s mother. Emma was a happy accident with my girlfriend from
university. We never married.” He grimaced at the taste of the whisky and was totally unsuccessful at hiding it. “I had just gotten divorced when Sophie and I reconnected.”
Oh, fuck you, Neil. He knew that casual “reconnected” was going to open a can of worms I wasn’t interested in digging into.
“You two have known each other for a while then?” Mom looked to me, and so did Neil.
“Okay. I get it. This is my punishment for secret keeping.” I took a gulp of my Snow Creek Berry. “I met Neil seven years ago, at the Los Angeles International Airport.”
Mom blinked. “Seven years ago you were here. And then you were in New York when you left for college.”
“She made slight detour,” Neil said quietly.
“I was heading to Japan.” When Mom still didn’t look like she was getting it, I added, “I was running away.”
“You were going to run away to Japan and you never told me?” Mom shrieked, leaning forward so fast the Lay-Z-Boy creaked.
“I didn’t make it to Tokyo. My flight was delayed, we spent the night together, and Neil stole my boarding pass. I had no other choice but to go to New York.” I shrugged off Mom’s look of horror at my open admission of teenage sex-having.
“She told me she was twenty-five,” he said uncomfortably. “And I didn’t strand her when I took her boarding pass. I left her four thousand dollars.”
“Ah. So you had sex with my eighteen-year-old daughter and left her four thousand dollars on the nightstand?”
The question hung in the air like the worst balloon since the Hindenburg, and I held my breath.
Neil didn’t apologize. Not for sleeping with me, not for stealing my ticket, not for any of it. “It was the only way I could think of to prevent her from going to Tokyo and throwing away her chance at college. Or, her chance at an advanced degree, since she’d told me she was going for her Masters.”
There was no ammo there for my mom to strike back with. If he hadn’t intercepted me at LAX, I would have run away to Tokyo. She was backed into a corner.
She chose to go for the aerial attack, dive bombing him with, “So…this was while you were married?”
I lunged into the fray again. “Neil wasn’t married when we first met. After our one-night stand, he went on and met someone else, then six years later he got divorced and—”
“I was her boss.” He wasn’t going to let me tiptoe around that, either. “I took over for Gabriella Winters briefly when my company bought Porteras and the magazine needed restructuring.”