her mother had been on another date? That meant her mother had been on half a dozen more dates in the last three months than Carly had had in a year. There was no reality where that was remotely fair.
“Either that, or she is with Dad and doesn’t want us to know.”
“Dad! What is wrong with you, Mia? They hate each other. She’s fine,” Carly had said impatiently. “Hold on a minute.” She’d put Mia on hold and called her mother.
Her mother answered on the first ring and sounded groggy. “Mom? Is everything okay?”
“Well of course! Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Mia tried to get hold of you and you didn’t answer. She’s worried.”
“Oh, I’m fine, Carly. I slept in, that’s all. What time is it?” There was a pause. “Oh no! Is it eleven?” Her mother had giggled like a schoolgirl. “I was out pretty late last night, if you know what I mean.”
She did know what her mother meant, and she didn’t want to know any details. Not a single one. “Okay, Mom, as long as you are okay—”
“I have to say, I really like this new sexual liberation you young women have embraced. I wish we’d had more of it back in the day. Like I told your father, I might not have married him if I knew then what I know now.”
“Mom!” Carly said quickly and desperately. “I’m begging you, don’t talk about sexual liberation. It’s disconcerting and a little frightening. I mean, do you even know these men?”
“Guess it depends on what you mean by know,” she’d said, and chortled gleefully.
Carly had squeezed the bridge of her nose to stave off a tension headache she could feel coming. “Will you please call Mia? You know how she gets.”
“Well, do you blame her? Her husband is gone half the time and she—”
“Gotta go,” Carly said.
That disturbing call with her mother had been followed with a call from Carly’s dad. Because why not call his daughter during a workday just to shoot the breeze? “Hey, Peach! How’s my girl? Did you find Mia’s dog? What happened there, did you leave the gate open?”
Where had he gotten that idea? But Carly was not about to stop what she was doing and explain the entire, convoluted basset mix-up situation to her father, and tried very hard to get him off the phone, but he tended to ask a lot of questions and he indeed proceeded to ask a lot of questions, and she ended up explaining most of it. To which he said, “Well if that isn’t the most millennial thing ever, hiring someone to walk a dog. When I was a kid, we walked our own dogs.”
“Oh my God, that is not what any of this is about,” she said with a sigh.
“You need to speak to your mother about this dog business anyway. You know, I don’t want to talk bad about Evelyn to you kids, but she never showed so much interest in dogs until the divorce. And now suddenly she’s the Austin Canine Coalition ambassador to all of Austin—”
“Dad? I really have to go,” Carly said, before he could launch into his litany of all the things her mother did wrong now that they were divorced.
“Wait, wait, before you hang up,” he said. “Have you had a chance to look at the information I sent you? It’s a really good deal, Carly.” He’d begun to rattle through his sales pitch about the benefits of a time-share on South Padre Island. His postdivorce plan was to sell time-shares.
It was official—both of her parents had gone off the rails since they’d divorced.
“Think how often you could get down to the coast and take a break from that kid you work for,” he said, wrapping up his sales pitch.
“Victor is not a kid,” she’d said defensively, and then thought the better of defending that statement. “Anyway, I can’t get into the advantages of youth when it comes to creative genius, because I really have to run.”
She’d ended the call from her dad, had managed to return one single email when she got a call from her other client, Gordon Romero.
Gordon was the son of an old Austin family who had made a name in oil and land development. At the age of seventy-two, he’d come into a vast fortune. He’d quit his law practice and had grabbed on to his hobby with both hands—specifically, hand-carved wooden objets d’art that he was interested in promoting and selling. Except that his objets