Magical Midlife Madness (Leveling Up #1)(2)

“Mom,” I repeated, this time tapping her shoulder.

She jumped, screamed, and let go of the pan. It clanged into the sink, throwing up a sploosh of water that covered her front. She rounded on me with wide eyes.

Not turned to me.

Not flinched from me.

Rounded on me, as though this seventy-year-old woman was about to beat the ever-lovin’ crap out of me!

“Oh, Jessie, it’s you!” A smile replaced her look of crazy. She pulled her ear buds from her ears. “How are you?”

Her hug soaked the front of my shirt, and her gloves wet my back.

“Martha, what are you doing in there?” my dad hollered. “The race is on. I can barely hear a thing!”

My mom rolled her eyes. She didn’t bother to reply.

“Let me just finish this up and I’ll show you to your room,” my mom said, gesturing at the sink.

I scanned the loaded dish dryer perched over the second sink…and the dishwasher beneath it. “You have a dishwasher, why are you doing these by hand?”

“Your father never wanted to waste the electricity on the dishwasher, remember?” She turned back to her task. “I’ve always had to do them by hand. Well, since I retired, I’ve had just about enough of chores. He barely earns any money any more, did he tell you? He doesn’t take a paycheck most of the time. I don’t know why he doesn’t retire. Anyway, we’re living off of my retirement. So I thought, you know what? If I want a machine to make my life easier, I’ve earned it.” She nodded adamantly. “But the thing was so old, it broke after the second wash.” She sighed. “So I went to Wired Right down on the square there. You know the place. With the green awning?”

She turned back to make sure I was on the same page so I nodded even though I had no idea.

“Well, I bought the very best they had,” she said. “With all the bells and whistles. Cost me an arm and a leg, but you know what? To heck with it. And he can’t say anything, because he spent all that money on that new motor. So there.”

“Right…” I leaned against the counter. “So where is it?”

“Delivers on Tuesday. Boy will I be glad to get these dishes out of my hair. Then I can go upstairs to my sewing room and shut the door. You can barely hear yourself mutter down here.”

“Cool. I can just head up to…my old room, right?”

“Just wait there. You want a beer?” She paused and drew her hands out of the soapy water, white bubbles shivering on her yellow gloves.

“Sure,” I said, because that’s what this house did. If people came over, everyone drank a beer. What else did I have to do? The future stretched wide open ahead of me. All I needed was the courage to walk into it.



With one beer down and another in my hand, I followed my mother up to my transitionary room. My dad still had no idea I was home, but all the dishes had been dried and put away.

Why I needed a guide, I did not know. I’d stayed in this house multiple times with Matt and Jimmy for the holidays, and we’d always slept in my old room. This was the first time I’d been given guidance. It made me suspicious.

We tread up the worn russet-brown carpet that had long since put up the white flag. My mother had started painting the wall beside me a turd brown, only she hadn’t finished, possibly hoping my dad would get the ladder and finish it up. The project cars out front apparently hadn’t made an impression on her. The wall looked like a crap-striped zebra, white stripes between the brown, but nobody seemed to notice or care.

Speaking of noticing or caring, the cool painting I’d given them three years ago sat in the little alcove that overlooked the living room, resting on the ground against the scuff-marked wall.

Happy anniversary, indeed.

“Mom, I know where the bedroom is,” I said as we passed the hall closet that still didn’t have doors thirty years after my dad had designed and built the house.

“Yes, I know, but I made a new quilt and want to make sure it’s okay,” she said.

“It’ll be fine, Ma, I swear—” I fell mute as we reached the room’s open doorway. A stiff-looking turquoise and brown quilt rested on the double bed in the midst of a sea of books. “That’s…lovely. What’s the story with all these books?”

“You think so?” She beamed, heading into the room and pulling up the corner of the quilt. It moved like thin plywood. “I took up quilting. That sewing room is the only place I can get out of the heat!”

I glanced at the open windows, letting in the chill fall air. “Oh yeah?”

“Yes! Your father is so fat, you’d think he’d be insulated enough, but still the house is a furnace.” She huffed. “I found some patterns for quilts at the fabric store. I made them extra warm.”

I paused for a moment, contemplating the irony of that, but decided to press her about the state of the room instead. “What happened in here?” I asked. “What’s that?”

In addition to the books that had been stacked horizontally on every surface and heaped around the bed, a random pile of fur sat in the corner.

“Oh, that. Well, your dad shot an elk last year, but it wasn’t big enough to warrant stuffing the head, so he took the skin. It struck me—what was that Native American tribe that scalped people?” I stared at her, struck mute. “All the white men at the time acted so superior about that, didn’t they? How barbarian to scalp a kill, they said. And look at this! He cuts off heads and hangs them on the wall, and when that isn’t glorious enough, he scalps their bodies. Who’s the barbarian now?”