The Boyfriend (The Boss 7)

Though it had been years since I’d smoked a cigarette, I reached over and plucked hers from her fingers. She watched me with amusement as I took a quick puff from it. I coughed a little and handed it back. “I’d like that.”

The door behind us opened, and Sasha stuck her head out. “What are you girls doing out here still? You said a quick smoke! It’s freezing!”

Susan took a final inhale and dropped the butt into the snow. “Okay, mother. We’re coming.”

From behind Susan, Molly popped up and said, “Who’s playing Cards Against Humanity?”

Even though I’d never spent time with my father under that roof, even though I’d never lived my sisters, for a moment, I felt like I was family.

* * * *

The last day of my visit arrived. This time, Sasha, Susan, and Molly met me in Houghton for lunch at the Ambassador. With a promise to Molly that she could come to New York when school was out if she wanted to, I told them goodbye and headed back to Calumet a little bit sad. I was actually going to miss them. I’d never considered that would have ever been a possibility, with the exception of Molly.

When I arrived at my grandma’s house, there was a car in the driveway. I recognized it immediately; Mrs. Hanner had been driving the same Buick for as long as I could remember. A neighbor from the end of the street, Mrs. Hanner usually always walked down to have her coffee and chat; it was unlike her to have to drive the short distance. I hoped that wasn’t an indication that she was having health troubles. She was one of Grandma’s only remaining living friends.

I entered the mudroom to the rhythmic chugging of the brand new front-loader washing machine I had bought grandma when her old machine—an ancient drum on legs with an honest to god mangle on it—had broken, and no replacement could be found at the dump. The scent of dryer sheets was overpowering.

Mrs. Hanner was a tall, skeletally-thin woman, also in her eighties. She’d never changed her hairdo the entire time I’d known her. I suspected she slept perfectly still to keep her ultra-volumized bouffant from getting messed up between beauty parlor visits. She sat at grandma’s table, coffee mug clutched in her aged hands, a cigarette perched between two knobby fingers. The ash was at least an inch long and somehow remained attached; that was a skill I’d noticed most old ladies had.

“Oh, Sophie’s here,” she said, rising from her chair to hug me. She put her coffee on the table but kept her cigarette, which came dangerously close to my hair as she embraced me. “Look at you! You’re so beautiful. And so slim!”

“Thank you,” I said, though she said the same thing every time she saw me.

“But then, you always have been,” Mrs. Hanner went on. “Because you never had any children.”

“Sophie has a granddaughter, though,” Grandma said from her place at the sink, where she washed her breakfast dishes.

“Step-granddaughter,” I clarified.

“There’s no such thing as stepfamily. Family is family.” Grandma said, lightly scolding me. To Mrs. Hanner, she said, “The little girl lives with Sophie and her husband. Her parents died.”

“Oh, how awful.” Mrs. Hanner sat back down and took a long, slow inhale from her cigarette. Her eyes zeroed in on my arm. “Honey, come here, you’ve got a little string.”

She was right; a part of my sleeve had begun to unravel. I obediently put out my arm, and she finally ashed her cigarette so she could use the glowing cherry to burn my errant thread off.

“Joan had to come down and do her wash,” Grandma explained.

“My machine broke,” Mrs. Hanner said, shaking her head sadly. “Last year, it was the refrigerator. The year before that, it was the stove.”

“Wow, talk about a run of bad luck,” I said sympathetically. “Is the washing machine fixable?”

“Oh, no. But it’s just me these days, and your grandma said that since I come down here anyway for my coffee, there’s no sense in buying a new machine. Especially when I could go home to Jesus any day now.” She said the last part with a weird, grim sort of hope.

I’d been away from the realities of my upbringing for so long, I’d almost forgotten that appliances even broke. When I’d been younger, Mom’s oven had broken. The stove had worked just fine, though, so there hadn’t been a pressing need to replace the oven part. We hadn’t had any baked things in our house from the time I was eleven until I was sixteen. All my birthday cakes had been made right in the kitchen where I now sat.

“Mrs. Hanner,” I began cautiously. “Would you be offended if I offered to buy you a new washer and dryer?”