Mom and I bustle around the kitchen, working on my mom’s specialty—vegetarian lasagne—while her wife works in the office on her latest novel. I like my mom’s wife, Trish, but it’s also nice to just spend some alone time with my mom.
After getting over the shock of me saying Dominic’s name, my mom seems to have taken the news pretty well. At least, she has so far. Then again, she hasn’t had a chance to grill Dominic to a nice char-broil. Yet. Sometimes, I think my mom thinks she has to make up for me not having a dad—at least, one that stuck around—and so she plays the part of both parents. If she owned a shotgun, she’d totally clean it when my boyfriends came over to meet her.
Thank God she’s a vegetarian lesbian pacifist who refuses to actually do something like own a gun. She’s scary enough without one.
“How is work going?” mom asks as she hands me greens to tear up for the salad.
“Pretty good. I got to operate on a patient the other day. Came into the ER with a perforated—”
“I think my imagination can take it from there,” my mother interrupts me with a pained smile.
I definitely didn’t get my love of the human anatomy from my mother. Blood, needles, and puke, or even the mention of such things, makes her squeamish. Not that puke rates very high on my list either, but as an ER doctor, I got more than my fair share of it.
“Anyway, they’re going to send me to a conference in Florida. In July! I think my boss hates me. Everyone knows you don’t visit Florida in July.”
“You don’t?” my mom says, surprised.
“It’s hot and humid and miserable in Florida in July. You go to Florida in January, when you’re sick of slipping on ice—”
Ding dong
The front door bell rings, and I quit ripping the spinach to pieces to hurry to the front door to let Dominic in. He's looking so damn handsome, I almost can’t breathe for a moment, looking up at him.
“Hey baby,” Dominic says, pulling me forward, into his arms. “You look good enough to eat.”
He proves his words by nuzzling my neck and then moving his lips up to mine. He runs his tongue along the seam of my lips and then dips into my mouth with a muted groan.
“There you are,” my mom says, bustling into the room, interrupting our nookie. Dammit. I was quite enjoying that lip lock. I pull back with an unhappy sigh, which my mother ignores.
“Okay, Dominic, you and I need to have a talk while the lasagna is cooking,” she says seriously, directing us toward the family room. “A whiskey?”
“Do you have Yamazaki Bourbon Barrel?”
“Of course. As soon as Daph told me it was you, I bought a bottle.”
I won’t lie, hearing my mom talk like that—that she knows more about Dominic than I do—sent a little spark of jealousy through me. It’s weird to be jealous of my own mom, but dammit, she used to fuck Dominic every night. Surely she’s regretting leaving him behind, right?
Trish comes in and settles down next to my mom, and as I look back and forth between them, watching the happiness light up both of their faces at the sight of the other person, I realize—my mom may know Dom’s favorite brand of whiskey, but that doesn’t mean she wants to be married to him. There’s a world of difference between those two things.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” my mom says with a happy laugh, and gets up to get Dominic his whiskey. “Daph, what are you wanting?”
“Do you have the makings of a cosmo?” I ask hopefully.
“No, sorry. Gin and tonic instead?”
“Sure, that’s good.” It’s free alcohol; I’m not going to turn up my nose at it.
After my mom distributes drinks for all—including red wine for her and Trish—she settles back down next to her wife and pins Dominic to the couch with her laser-focused gaze. Dominic is stroking his thumb over my hand, reassuring me. I’ve never been nervous before, bringing a boyfriend home like this—usually, whether my mom likes a guy or not, I’m still going to date him. I’m way too old to get permission from my mother on who I date.
But Dominic…? This is a whole different ball of wax.
“What are your intentions with my daughter?”
So, my mom totally beats around the bush, if by beating around the bush, you mean takes a baseball bat to the bush and whacks it to pieces. She has all the subtlety of a pissed-off giraffe.
“Moommmm, don’t—”
“It’s okay,” Dominic says, squeezing my hand. “Mary, before I say anything else, I want you to know that nothing ever happened between Daphne and I when I was married to you. Not even in a vague way. It wasn’t until I met her at the Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel that I looked at her as anything other than my ex-wife’s daughter. We didn’t set out to have this happen, it just did.”