She's Up to No Good(4)

“You’re not helping, Mom.”

“Not helping you maybe. Jenna, darling, am I helping?” My dad started to laugh, which he tried to hide behind a fake coughing fit when my mom glared at him. Grandma pursed her lips. “On second thought, don’t answer that. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”

My mom shook her head and changed the subject. “Have they set a date for the wedding yet?”

“Whose wedding?” I asked.

“Your cousin Lily. She’s marrying that boy from the bog thing,” Grandma said.

She meant my cousin’s blog. I raised an eyebrow. “And she’s actually having a wedding?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Huh. Good luck finding anyone willing to be her bridesmaid.”

Grandma waved a hand in the air. “Water under the bridge. That was all ages ago.”

I opened my mouth to say, It was just a couple of months ago, but stopped myself. It wasn’t. It was a year ago that my cousin had been a bridesmaid in five weddings over one summer and had blown up her life by writing a blog trashing the brides, which of course went viral. Lily always had a flair for the dramatic, which, to be fair, did run in the family. It couldn’t not when you were descended from our grandmother. But it had been a year, hadn’t it? Which meant I had been living in my childhood bedroom for . . . Oh no.

“Good for her,” I murmured half-heartedly.

My grandmother looked at me sharply again, then reached over and patted my hand. “Brad wasn’t the one,” she said. “You’ll see. I never liked him.”

Couldn’t you have told me that six years ago? I thought. But then Grandma turned her attention back to my mother.

“Sometime in the spring, I think. Staying local. Nothing big or fancy.”

“I’m glad it worked out for her,” Mom said. “Joan must be over the moon.”

Grandma rolled her eyes, but there was a gleam of amusement in them. “Joan is already trying to plan some huge wedding. It’s her last one, after all. She wants to go out with a bang.”

A muscle tensed in my mother’s jaw. I was the eldest of her three girls. Beth was thirty-one and had just had her second baby. But Lindsey was twenty-nine and showed no signs of settling down anytime soon. And a nearly thirty-year-old unmarried daughter paired with a soon-to-be-divorced nearly thirty-five-year-old daughter put her at a distinct disadvantage in the lifelong competition between the two sisters.

“But,” Grandma continued, cutting into the chicken piccata on her plate. “I didn’t come here to talk about Lily tonight.” She speared a small piece with her fork. “I came to say goodbye.”

I felt my blood turn to ice. Cancer. It had to be cancer. She didn’t look sick. But she always looked the same. My breath came in shallow bursts as I heard an unfamiliar sound from across the table. I looked over to see my mother, deathly pale, holding a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Mom,” she choked.

Grandma put her fork down and calmly dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, looking at the effect she’d had on us. “Such a fuss. I’ll be back in a week or two. And I’ll have my Apple phone thing with me.”

“Wha—what are you talking about?”

“I’m going home. To Hereford. Tomorrow.”

“You’re . . . what?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“I have some business to attend to.”

“What business?”

“My own.” She crossed her arms.

My mom looked at her mother warily. “How are you getting there?”

“Why, driving of course.”

“Absolutely not.”

Grandma perked up significantly at her daughter’s declaration of war. “Absolutely yes. I’ve driven there a thousand times.”

“Not in the last thirty years!”

“You don’t know everything I’ve done. And I’d like to see you try to stop me.”

“Mom. You’re almost ninety. You can’t drive from Maryland to Massachusetts.”

“Watch me.”

My mom opened her mouth to argue, but a voice stopped her. “I’ll drive her.”

The voice was mine.

“You?” Mom asked.

I found myself nodding.

Grandma leaned back in her chair, looking at me appraisingly. “Why?”

“I—” I didn’t know the answer. I turned to my mother. “You said I needed to get out—”

“I meant on a date!”

“And . . . well . . . I’ve never been to Hereford.”

“Yes, you have,” they said in unison.

“I—I have?”

“We took you when you and Beth were kids,” Mom said. “You loved the beach there.”

I could suddenly picture standing on a rock jetty, watching a tiny snail crawl around a tide pool. “The rocks?”

Grandma nodded. “You’ll know it when you see it. It’s in your blood.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I continued. “And—well—it’d help everyone out. And it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

Grandma cocked her head at me. “Go pack. We leave at eight. I want to be there in time for dinner.”