in unison.
Lucille heaved a sigh and nodded grudgingly. “Okay.”
Isobel’s mouth strained at the corners as if she were trying to force her lips into a smile, but all she managed was a sneer. “Whatever,” she spat, her eyes narrowing to hostile slits.
Yup. There was going to be trouble.
As a troupe of Shakespearean players paraded past us, reciting extraneous lines of prose to any tourist willing to listen, Nana grabbed my arm and dragged me aside, concern etched across her face.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I offered preemptively. “You’re afraid that glaring jealousy issues on Team Five might lead to trouble, and I have to admit, that makes me a little nervous, too, but here’s the thing.” I raised a determined finger. “It’s going to be different this time because Etienne is with us. Guests will not be creeping around, trying to knock each other off, with a former Swiss police inspector watching their every move. So, even if the ladies of Team Five get into it with each other, I don’t expect it’ll escalate beyond snotty name calling or an occasional cat fight.” I flashed a confident smile. “I think we’re good!”
“Whatever you say, dear.”
My smile morphed into a wince. I hung my head. “I’m in denial, aren’t I? Those women hate each other already and the tour has just begun.”
“I don’t wanna be no alarmist, Emily, but we got bigger problems than them four women.”
“We do?”
“You bet. Team Five come up with a snappy slogan for themselves. The rest of us don’t got one.”
I stared at her, non-plussed. “That’s a problem?”
“You bet it is. They’re makin’ the rest of us look bad, so we’re gonna have to think of one, too.”
“Is that going to be difficult?”
“Emily, dear, we got one Catholic, two Lutherans, one birther, and a vegetarian on our team. How are we s’posed to compromise? That don’t give us no common ground to work with.”
Ew. She had a point. I just hoped their diversity didn’t set them up to get sucked into knockdown-dragouts over issues of a more ideological nature—like, if Catholic priests should be allowed to marry, or, which Gilligan’s Island character was hotter, Ginger or Mary Ann? That could get really ugly.
I gave her a hug. “Chin up. You’ll think of something.”
“I just did. I’m gonna let Tilly figure it out.”
Nana had three chins, blue hair, and stood four-foot-ten in her bare feet. She’d won millions in the Minnesota lottery a few years back, but the experience had changed neither her outlook nor her practical spending habits. She was the treasurer of the Legion of Mary at church, a card-carrying computer geek, and an enthusiastic subscriber to every TV channel offered by her cable provider. She had only an eighth-grade education, but given her addiction to the Discovery and Smithsonian networks, she was the smartest person I knew.
“Uh-oh,” Nana fretted in a sudden panic. “I don’t mean to ditch you, dear, but I’m outta here.” Like a video playing at warp speed, she raced behind me in her size five sneakers and ducked into a shop displaying a selection of tartans and kilts on headless mannequins.
I stared after her. What in the world? And then it hit me.
I turned slowly.
She was barreling toward me with her laptop slung over her shoulder in its trusty carrying case and her fannypack riding her opposite hip like an oversized jellyroll. Her little moon face was flushed from exertion, and her salt and pepper hair was disastrously windblown, but her girlish excitement made it quite apparent that she wouldn’t have missed this for the world. The tour guests knew her as “the timekeeper.”
Nana knew her as Margaret.
I knew her as Mom.
TWO
“I HAVEN’T HAD THIS much fun since I alphabetized the IRS forms in the new public library.”
Mom was addicted to alphabetical order like a shopaholic is addicted to outlet malls. Nana blames the disorder on a dormant gene that apparently sprang to life when Mom started volunteering at the library after she retired. Her Facebook page lists her favorite pastime as, “Alphabetizing grocery cans in the kitchen pantry.” In fact, she gets so giddy during Fareway’s annual canned food sale that Dad has to accompany her down the soup aisle to protect her from herself. The one time she sneaked out without him, she bought so many pallets of condensed soup that she had to store them in the machine shed and break out the forklift to stack them in order—an event the family refers to as,