And if you call me Miss Marks again you’re fired;)
-Molly
As I have no further emails, this constitutes work for the day. I place an Amazon order forBustedso I can reread it, then resume myReal Housewivesmarathon while daydreaming about Seth.
I wonder if he’ll call me tomorrow. Wake me up with sweet words.
I go to bed with my ringer on, so I don’t miss it if he does.
But in the morning, I wake up with no missed calls.
Instead, there is a string of texts from my mother.
Mom:Good morning my darling baby.
Mom:I had a dream about you last night. We were shopping in Miami for your sixteenth birthday. You got that sheer lime-green shirt that always made your armpits stink. Do you remember that shirt? HA! And then we fell down a sewer.
This is not the kind of sexy content I was hoping for.
Mom:I miss you.
Mom:Someone at Publix yelled at me and Bruce this morning for wearing masks!
Bruce is the man she’s been seeing. They met when she sold him a mansion a few houses down the street from hers. Over the course of the pandemic, her “I” has slowly morphed into “we” as they’ve spent more and more time together. I guess now they are at a “shared trips to the grocery store” level of courtship.
It’s cute.
Mom:Can you believe it?? YELLED.
Mom:No one here will take precautions. We are all going to get the plague.
Mom:Are you sleeping?
Mom:Call me when you’re up!
Mom:If you want to.
Mom:Love you!-Mom
I putter to the kitchen to make tea. I call her back while I’m waiting for it to steep.
“Hellooooo!” she sings on the first ring. She always answers the phone like she just drank six Red Bulls.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Have you heard the news?”
“I just got up.”
“Atnoon?”
She gets up every morning at six to work out on her twenty-year-old elliptical and is on to her work emails by seven, including on the weekends. She found the lackadaisical schedule of a creative professional horrifying even before Covid. Now that I have nothing pressing to do, she thinks I’m basically in a coma.
“It’s barely nine a.m. here,” I say. “Relax.”
“You’re sleeping your life away!”
“I have nothing to get up for!”
