of meetup groups and getting involved with volunteer organizations. Her latest obsession was volunteering her time at the ACC. “That’s where you meet the hottest men,” she’d said to Carly at happy hour once. She’d waggled her brows before sipping her skinny margarita. “You should try it, sweetie.”
The thought of taking advice from her mother about where to find a date and, even worse, the thought of checking out single men with her mother was enough to make Carly never want to date again.
Obviously, the ACC was where her mother had gotten the idea of picking up a depressed basset hound and dumping it on one of her kids. Carly’s mother was famous for pulling shit like that when everyone was least expecting it, for deciding what was best for her children without consulting them. When her parents were married, her father provided the ballast. Without him, her mother was all over the place. How she could have thought Mia could handle an untrained basset hound was beyond Carly’s ability to imagine. Mia’s husband, Will, was in tech. He was Asian-American, spoke Mandarin fluently and flew to China at least once a month for his job, leaving her with three kids under the age of five for a week to two weeks at a time. It was hard enough for Mia with three small kids, and then here came Mom, all happy and excited to add a mopey basset hound to the mix.
Her mother had actually gone through the entire adoption process, then had shown up at Mia’s house and presented the dog to the same three kids who had terrorized a cat so far into crazy town that the cat rarely came out of hiding.
Predictably, Mia had lost her mind and had threatened to have a full nervous breakdown in the middle of the street so that her entire neighborhood would know how dysfunctional her family was. Carly had stepped in to save a nuclear fallout between her mother and sister. And the dog.
Since then, her mother hadn’t seen much of her because Carly had the problem of Baxter, which meant that she had to rush home to let him out instead of stopping off to see her mother or father or anyone else at the end of her day. And what really annoyed Carly was that her mother seemed to think it was all perfectly fine now—no harm, no foul.
One of the dogs had wandered over to get a good sniff of her mother’s bare leg. “Goodness, here is one of them again. Two basset hounds, Carly? I thought you were against dogs.” She leaned down to pet Hazel. “Aren’t you a cutie,” she said.
“I’m not against dogs. I love dogs. I’m against irresponsible pet ownership. I don’t have time in my life to pay proper attention to a dog.”
“Then why on earth did you get two?”
“I wondered the same thing,” Victor said.
Seriously, Carly was beginning to think that when she talked, the sound was disappearing into a void. “I didn’t get two. One, I rescued from my sister before something awful happened.” She paused to look meaningfully at her mother. “The other is the result of a mix-up with the dog walker, and somehow I got talked into dog-sitting while this guy flitted off to Chicago.”
“I’ve always admired how helpful you are, sweetie. Well, I hope the rest of your week has gone well,” her mother said cheerfully.
“That’s not . . .” Carly shook her head. There was no point—her mother wasn’t listening. She’d walked into Carly’s kitchen, crowding in next to Victor as he took his dish from the microwave. Her mother opened the refrigerator door and stared at the contents. She finally picked up a carton of blueberries and came back to her seat. “Well I’ve had the most delightful week,” she said, and popped a blueberry into her mouth.
“Oh yeah?” Victor asked.
Her mother cast a golden smile at both of them. “I may have met someone.” She waggled her brows.
“Like, who?” Victor asked.
“I’m not ready to say just yet. I don’t want to jinx it. Everything is very new, and we’re taking it slow to see if this is a thing or not.”
Carly was confused. “But . . . but you weren’t taking it so slow a couple of days ago.” She was referring, of course, to the phone call with her mother where she’d proclaimed her joy at having been sexually liberated.
“What?” Her mother looked thoughtful for a moment. “Oh, that was Bob,”