A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [16]
Bridget laughed. “Well, you can’t, which is why you’re going to have to come visit.”
“Oh promise you’ll invite me! I’m sure I must have something to wear to the country.”
“And speaking of which . . .” Paul’s partner Derrick slipped up behind Lindsay and kissed her on the back of the neck. “That dress is you, my dear. You’ve never looked more lovely. It breaks my heart to think of your talent and extraordinary beauty languishing in that misbegotten cultural desert.”
“And what about my beauty?” demanded Cici.
“And my talent?” insisted Bridget.
Lindsay sighed elaborately and caressed his cheek. “Why are all the good men gay?”
“Not all of them,” corrected Derrick, smiling across her shoulder at Paul. “Just most of them.”
“What I want to know,” insisted their neighbor Rosalee, joining them, “is what in the world you think you’re going to do with yourselves out there in the wilderness? Cici, this is the best party ever, and it just makes me want to weep when I think it’s the last one ever. How can you do this to us? Oh, give me a hug!”
“The house I can understand.” Jena, a broker at Cici’s firm, joined the conversation and the embraces. “Prices are sky-rocketing all along the I-81 corridor and getting the place at below appraisal was just brilliant. But three women living together? Are you crazy? You’ll be pulling each other’s hair out and chasing each other around the kitchen with serving spoons before a month is out.”
Derrick said, “I don’t know. Paul and I have lived together for ten years and we never chased each other with serving spoons.”
“Well, there was that one time,” corrected Paul, leaning back into his embrace.
Lindsay laughed. “Believe me, that house is so big we won’t even be able to find each other half the time. Did you see the pictures?”
And so it went, the compliments and the good-byes, the disbelief and the regrets and the eager urging for details. Promises to keep in touch. Curious inquiries about the new families moving into the neighborhood. Sentences that began with “Do you remember when . . .” It was not, of course, as though they would never see each other again. Each of their friends demanded an invitation as soon as the guest rooms were ready and groaned with envy as they described the house, the porch, the meadow, the view. It wasn’t an ending, they all tearfully insisted, it was a beginning.
Still, it was hard to say good-bye.
Cici slipped away from the crowd and approached Lori, who was happily chatting to a display of Christmas cards that framed a doorway. Snatching the earpiece from her daughter’s ear, she said, “She’ll call you back” and dropped the device into the capacious pocket of her skirt. Lori whirled. “Moth–er!” This was followed by an eye roll. “Very mature.”
Cici kissed her bangs and dropped an arm around her shoulder. “Merry Christmas to you, too, darling. Are you having a good time?”
Again a slight upward shift of the eyes. Cici wished she could remember when young girls outgrew that manner-ism. Age twenty-one? Could she hold out until then? “The crowd’s a little old for me, Mom.”
“You’ve known most of them all your life. It won’t hurt you to be nice for one evening.”
“True.” She shrugged. “It’s just hard being nice every single minute.” Then she grinned. “Tell Aunt Bridget the quiche was awesome. Of course it would have tasted even better with a margarita.”
“Don’t they teach math at UCLA?”
“Of course.”
“Then maybe you can help me figure out exactly how many months it is you have left until you are of legal drinking age?”
“Mom, you are so quaint.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. Long one of my goals.” She tidied the strands of shiny copper hair her initial embrace