“What?”
“Your phone’s ringing. You need to get that, or…?”
“Um…” I look down and see ‘Mom’ flashing over and over. “Probably.” I swallow and hit accept. “Mom?”
“Put her on speaker.”
“Honey?” Mom’s voice automatically turns louder when she hears the noise on my end. The truck, the wind, the nagging driver. “What are you doing?”
“Ally! I said put her on speaker.”
I plug one ear. “Mom? I can hardly hear you.”
“Put her on speaker.” Luke snatches my phone as he pulls up at an empty intersection, hits speaker, and tosses the whole device onto the dash. “Hi, Mrs. Moore. This is Luke Hart here. How you doing?”
“Oh hey there, handsome. Are you the tall drink of cold water from the bakery my daughter told me about?”
“The one and only. Which makes you Ally’s mother, and Sonia’s granddaughter?”
“Wow,” Mom chokes out. “He knows too much.”
“No. He doesn’t.” I snatch up the phone, and though I leave it on speaker, I bring it closer to my ear. “He found out today that Sonia and I are related. The rest, he’s assuming.”
“Right,” Luke cuts in. “I also found out that Ally is the kind of woman a guy would wanna keep forever, and Sonia has a husband she’s managed to tame for almost a century. What’s up with you, Mrs. M.?”
“Well, first of all, I’m Mrs. Laramie, since I married a few years back. Stanley’s gone now, but I never dumped the name.”
“My deepest sympathies,” Luke says seriously. “I’m sorry you lost your husband.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. He was a good man. Since Ally’s sperm donor wasn’t around to give us his name, I gave her mine, I dumped the first guy off the side of the earth, and then I married Mr. Laramie. Lots of names to remember.”
“Lovely,” I drawl. “At least half of me comes from someone you dumped off the face of the planet.”
“You’re all the best bits, honey. Now tell me about your kin,” she says to Luke. “Tell me everything.”
“Well, they’re all blissfully crazy,” he answers easily. “In love, passionate, oftentimes weird. But we’re all reasonably normal on the Richter scale of what’s acceptable. Tell me something odd about Ally.”
“Oh, um… okay. She—”
“Mom!”
“She collects Polly Pockets,” Mom says brightly, ignoring my protests. “Not the new kind. But the kind from the nineties. She’s got almost all of them, but there are a couple that are still elusive. Now tell me something about you.”
“I’m an identical twin. Mom and Dad were having trouble conceiving back in the day, so as is often the case when you move into the area of fertility treatments, they got two of us.”
“I already knew that,” Mom replies. “The twin thing, not the infertility bit. Tell me something else.”
“Oh… hmm…” He brings a hand up to rub his stubbled jaw. “Ally and I slept in the same bed on the weekend. But we didn’t have sex. That was the first time in my life I’ve done that.”
“Well, good for you, honey. I’m proud of you.”
“You’re both freaks,” I groan. “Mom, why did you call?”
“I need a reason to call now? Geez, Allyson. How quickly things change. You move out, get a fancy degree, move to a town with cute twins, and now you’re too busy to talk with your own mother on the telephone? It wasn’t so long ago you thought they all rode horses still.”
“We don’t have horses,” Luke says. “But for twenty bucks, I can get you a ride on a cow.”
“Drama.” I exhale and close my eyes as Luke turns off one street, and onto another. The second is narrower, less busy. “How are you, Mom?”
“I’m good, sweetheart. Luke, honey, how do you treat your mother?”
“Like the queen she is,” he answers without pause. “But with a side of smartass. She’d get way too comfortable if we were nice to her all the time.”
“Fair call. And if I asked her to describe you in five words or less?”
“She’d say I’m kind but weird. Smart, but I lack common sense. And that I’m the most protective and loyal person she knows, not including her husband and her other son.”
“Sounds good to me. If you and Ally stop being friends, I want you to know you can still call me. I don’t have to hate you just because she does.”
“Mom—”
“Sweet offer, Mrs. Laramie. Now describe your daughter in five words or less.”
“Ooooh.” She’s having way too much fun with this. “Loyal, smart, kind, much too uptight, and somewhat afraid of making waves.”
“Mom!”
“I make waves every single place I go,” Luke inserts. “It’s my calling card.”
“Yeah,” I jump in before anyone else can, “and because of it, Luke and I are now tasked with undoing a crime we committed while intoxicated. Sonia knows about it, Mom, and I’m basically out of a job unless we can fix this.”
“Well, I sure hope you succeed, honey. It would be awkward to explain to future potential employers why your own great-grandmother fired you.”
“You’re not helping!” I clamp my elbows to my side when Luke laughs. I want to hit him. I want to push him out of this moving vehicle and feel his head pop under the tires. “And you didn’t even ask what crime we committed. Do you even care?”
“If it was truly horrible, you’d have already told me. Not to mention, you’d already be on your way home… or to a penitentiary. Since you’re doing neither, I’ll assume it was a petty crime that was more laughs than it was serious.”
“We sure laughed a lot,” Luke inserts. “Ally walked a bit like a duck for a while there, because she had to pee from all the laughing.”
“Ugh,” I drop my head back. “Classy.”
“It was funny as hell,” Luke adds. “She was grabbing at her crotch, Mrs. Laramie. She was in desperate need of a bathroom, so we had to make a side trip down an alleyway off Main so she could go.”
“Wait, what?” I whip my head in his direction. “You’re not serious?”
“As a heart attack,” he laughs. “You squat like a champ. In heels and everything.”
“Stop it.” I slap my hand over my eyes and groan. “I can’t be in this town anymore. Mom, I’m coming home.”
“Ask Luke to drive you. I’d like to meet him.”
“You got it, Mrs. Laramie. I’d like to meet the ham in the Sonia and Ally sandwich anyway. Here we are.” He pulls up outside a massive wrought iron gate, winds his window down, and does something to a security box that looks an awful lot like an iPad taped to a brick structure.
A melodic beep sounds, then he settles back inside the truck and smiles as the gates slide open like it’s normal to have such easy access to a protected place.
“Er…” I lean forward to study the homes that spread out ahead of us. “Are we visiting the Gestapo, or…?”