“You might note that I’m not exactly a duty, honor, country kind of girl.”
“I know. But some things are more important than our preconceived notions of what we will and won’t do, or what kind of community we fit in, aren’t they?”
Typical West, trying to bully her into seeing his point of view, rather than accepting that they disagreed.
Exactly why she didn’t want to have him in her life 24/7.
She tugged her robe back down to hide her exposed body and pulled it tight against her chest.
“I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” he said before she could compose a proper comeback.
“Doing what?”
“Trying to bully you into seeing things my way. I told myself I have to stop that, but…Old habits.” He smiled weakly. “I’m trying.”
Not much she could argue with there. He knew what he was doing to annoy the hell out of her, and he was trying to change it. Maybe they’d be able to work well as coparents, at least, even if long-distance.
“I appreciate that,” she said.
A sound from the front door caught her attention, and Soleil sat up, her ears straining to hear if it had been a key in the lock that she’d heard.
“Hello? Soleil? I’m home.”
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “It’s my mom.”
“We finally get to meet?” His wry smile suggested he was enjoying her discomfort a little too much.
“No! Not now!” She stood and hurried to shut the bedroom door. Before closing it, she called, “Hi, Mom. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s crazy, and I’m not ready for it. I’ll never hear the end of it from her, once she has specific details about you to grill me with.”
“She’s going to have to meet me sooner or later.”
He stayed on the bed, naked, looking as though he was in no hurry to get dressed.
Soleil stopped in the middle of tugging on her panties and jeans. “Fine, you want to meet her? Get dressed and come right downstairs. You’ll see.”
He chuckled. Taking his sweet time, he eased himself up and started gathering his clothes. Soleil put her bra and sweatshirt back on, smoothed her hair and began straightening the duvet to hide the evidence of their midday sex.
“Maybe I should take a shower first. Get cleaned up so I don’t smell all musky when I meet your mom.”
“Just hurry up. She’s going to eat you alive, either way.”
West pulled on his jeans and took the rest of his clothes with him to the bathroom, while Soleil went downstairs.
She found her mother in the kitchen, unloading a paper bag full of groceries-all meat and vegetables, of course.
“Weren’t you a vegetarian before you went on this cleansing diet?”
Anne turned and gave her a look from head to toe. “Smells like you’ve been-”
Yikes.
“Painting?”
Whew.
“Yeah, putting a second coat of paint on the baby’s room. It’s still not finished.”
“You shouldn’t have chosen such a dark color. Aren’t nurseries supposed to be pastel?”
“Yes, and if I were painting the room pink or lavender,” Soleil said in her sweetest voice, “you’d criticize me for gender stereotyping the baby.”
“Yellow is a good nursery color. I’ve always loved the effect of yellow on walls.”
Soleil turned on the kettle and started making tea. It was damp and cold outside, and the dreary weather was seeping into the house, into the room and into her mood all of a sudden. And her mother was not helping matters.
“Next time you paint a nursery, you can make it as yellow as you want,” she said as she tried not to clench her teeth.
“What’s that sound upstairs? Is someone taking a shower?”
“Yes, someone is taking a shower.” Soleil slammed the sugar container on the counter a little too hard, and the lid slipped off and clattered onto the counter.
From upstairs, she could hear the water shutting off. She had three minutes max before West would be down here getting tortured by the great Anne Bishop.
Her mother finished putting away the groceries and began to assemble a salad. She eyed the sugar Soleil was about to put in her tea.
“Do you know how bad for you refined white sugar is? And for your baby?”
“It’s pure evil, I know.”
“Are you going to tell me who’s upstairs, or shall I wait to be surprised?”
“It’s West, the guy who knocked me up,” she said, knowing how much her mother hated that phrase and relishing the sound of it as it tripped off her tongue.
Knocked me up.
So satisfying to say, and so perfectly crude, so base in its imagery. It was the perfect phrase to infuriate a feminist poet.
Though, for West’s sake, she probably shouldn’t have been trying so hard to get under her mother’s skin.
“Oh? So you two are still fooling around. I thought you weren’t a couple.”
“You know how us postfeminist girls are, always having sex without commitment. It’s exactly what your generation envisioned, isn’t it?”
“My generation did not ever envision intelligent women like yourself getting knocked up, as you put it. And we never expected those younger than us to be so entirely crude and disrespectful of all we worked for.”
“You were working so hard for the feminist cause when you cheated on Dad, weren’t you? It was all about sexual liberation and had nothing to do with your own fragile ego, did it?”
She hadn’t planned to say it, but now it was out there, hanging in the air between them like a rotten odor.
Her mother spun, pinning her with a dark look as she pointed a knife at her, ever the drama queen. “I will not stand here and be abused,” she said, her voice barely steady.
“Is telling the truth abuse?”
“The history of my personal life is my own business.”
“Oh? Does that mean my personal life is my own business, too?”
“Why are you so hostile?”
How like her mother to change the subject when the argument wasn’t going her way.
“I’m not answering any questions while you have a knife pointed at me.”
“And I’m not staying here if you’re going to abuse me.” She slammed the knife down on the counter.
“I thought you enjoyed pain. Or is that just what you claim in your writing because it sounds good?”
“Hello, ladies.” It was West, standing in the kitchen doorway.
He must have overheard part of their conversation, because he looked as if he was about to jump into shark-infested waters.
“Captain West Morgan, meet my mother, Anne Bishop,” Soleil said.
“Captain?”
“Yes, Mom. West is an air force officer,” she said, lapsing into her chirpy fifties housewife voice again. “He bombs innocent civilians for a living.”
Her mother’s expression neutral, she looked from Soleil to West. “How nice,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be leaving now. If you care to stop acting like a monster, you can reach me via my cell phone. I’m going to find a vacation rental for the rest of my time here.”
“You don’t want to stay here? But why?” Soleil, blinking innocently, hadn’t managed to infuse her voice with anything resembling sincerity.
Her mother began packing up her groceries again, furiously flinging heads of lettuce and sides of meat into her shopping bag.
West watched the whole scene, bewildered. Probably not sure if he should be offended at her description of his profession or relieved that he wasn’t in the line of fire at the moment.
Without planning to, Soleil had rescued him from her mother, she realized. And, she understood, too, she actually wanted to be the villain in her mother’s eyes, for reasons she didn’t quite understand.
“Ms. Bishop, I hope you’re not leaving on account of me,” West said, stepping into the room now, his voice sounding confident. “I remember reading your poetry in college. It’s an honor to meet you.”