Chapter 7 Deli
Deli
In all the years they’d been friends, Deli and Chloe had only spent two birthdays apart. The first when Deli had pneumonia for Chloe’s seventh birthday, and the second when Chloe missed her connecting flight on her way to celebrate Deli’s twenty-first during her semester abroad in Spain.
People said friendships changed as you got older—that sometimes they just faded.
But that couldn’t be true of Deli and Chloe.
They weren’t just friends. They would forever be two little girls giggling in the shade of a sycamore, even when they were old and gray and so touched by time no one would believe the photos of them when they were young.
Sisterhood was much more than who was born in the same family.
They had grown up together and been each other’s witness for all the life they could remember. Chloe was Deli’s sister.
Chloe wouldn’t fade.
Deli watched the screen in her palm, hoping for her best friend’s name to pop up. Instead, she got a text from her mother.
Delilah—I need you to come by after work today. It’s important. Love, Mom.
Deli let her head fall against the headrest.
Okay, Mom.
She fished ibuprofen out of the purse pocket she let them loosely roll around in.
It’s efficient! she’d once said while Trey looked on, disgusted.
It’s chaos.
She popped three into her mouth and sped toward her apartment, newly sure she hated all her clothes.
Twenty minutes later, Deli stared at the mess left from trying fifteen outfit options, wishing she could have sent pics of them to Chloe for help.
She chose a little black dress that hung off her hips in just the right way, grabbed her keys, and hobbled to her car.
By the time her slingback heels clicked against the hardwood floors of her childhood home, it was 4:15 p.m.
“Mom?” Deli searched through the house until she reached the kitchen and stopped to pull an errant guard petal from the deep red and sterling silver Valentine’s roses her dad had sent her mom as a re-creation of their wedding flowers.
She always wondered if they knew what they’d chosen—one rose whispering of shame, the other declaring love at first sight. It left a sour taste in her mouth.
She found Lorraine in the backyard, basking in the sun of a Los Angeles February, complete with Pamela Anderson hair in a hot-pink towel and giant cat-eye sunglasses obscuring most of her face. Her nipples, however, were on full display.
Deli held her hand up to block the Mother Breasts. “Oh, come on!”
Lorraine smooshed them together with a pout. “Oh please. You used to love these, Delilah.”
Deli’s lip curled against her will. “What do you need, Mom?”
“Your birthday presents just arrived today—that package on the counter. So sorry I was too busy to wrap it.”
Deli hadn’t noticed the lack of a gift from her parents the night before. She slipped the cardboard box on the counter into her bag and turned to go.
“Open it, Delilah!” Lorraine called as she continued melting into her lawn chair.
Deli ripped open the package and saw a thick black-and-yellow book titled Dating For Dummies, and a series of memories thudded into her mind like darts, echoing through her head.
Her grandmother’s voice—Girls your age should be married, Delilah.
Chloe’s saying, If it was going to happen for you, it would have happened by now.
She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers to her temples.
“Do you like it?”
Deli jumped three feet in the air at her mother’s voice behind her. She turned, clutching the book to her chest, and found Lorraine tucking the edge of a towel into itself under her arm, looking uncharacteristically timid.
“I just wanted to get you something that really felt like you.”
Deli glanced at the dating guide in her arms, fighting to keep her face neutral and voice positive. “Like me?”
“Well, yes . . .” A strange note of real concern touched her mother’s words. “I thought . . . Aren’t you looking for someone?”
Deli watched her mother revert into an unsure, self-conscious girl—like she so often did—and Deli’s anger drowned under a wave of responsibility. She had her role to play.
“Thanks, Mom. That’s really considerate. I’ll give it a read.”
Lorraine’s voice was pulled thin with fragile sincerity. “I just want you to be happy, Delilah.”
Deli’s stomach tightened and churned at the naked, trembling wanting of her mother—the minefield routinely laid for Deli alone. “I know, Mom. I am happy.”
“If you could be realistic and move on from Trey, you could be.”
Deli stared, stunned by the words so casually fired, like they weren’t an arrow aimed at a heart.
Lorraine mistook her silence for agreement and beamed, clapping her hands together and pointing one stiletto acrylic back at the box. “There’s another present!”
Deli repeated her mother’s advice over and over in her head as her hand moved robotically.
Be realistic—such a nonchalant admittance that, to Lorraine, her daughter had no hope of winning a boy she loved.
She pulled a plastic-wrapped box set of the first five seasons of The Highlander from the package.
Grandma Rosemary and her mother had talked her ear off about their favorite show so many times, and every time, Deli expressed that she had absolutely zero interest.
Yet she stood in her childhood kitchen, clutching her hurt feelings and a kilt-wrapped reminder that she should be more like them to her chest as a birthday gift.
“The Highlander is the best, Delilah. You’re going to love it. It’s my and Grandma’s favorite show.”
“So thoughtful,” Deli managed through a clenched smile.
Lorraine drifted to the fridge and removed a bottle of rosé, making little wee sounds as she wrestled the cork before palming an unopened pile of mail on the counter. Deli slipped the gifts into her bag as her phone rang.
“It’s Grandma,” Deli said.
Her mother’s eyes went wide. She shook her head and whispered, “Don’t tell her you’re here! I’m not here!”
Deli answered the call. Before she could say hello, her grandmother was off to the races.
“Delilah? It’s Grandma Rosemary. Listen, I believe I have a nasty case of malaria.”
Deli took a deep breath and summoned the patience she kept on a shelf marked just for her grandmother’s eccentricity. “Grandma, it’s very unlikely you have malaria.” She exchanged a look with Lorraine.
“Well, if it’s not malaria, it’s Ebola, Delilah. Your mother’s phone is going to voicemail—so typical. I think you need to take me to the hospital.”
Deli mouthed Ebola and hospital to her mother, who held a finger gun to her temple and mimed pulling the trigger. “Grandma, you haven’t traveled beyond Beverly Hills in ten years. There’s no way you have Ebola.”
“I got takeout from a Jamaican restaurant last week. How do you kno—”
“No, Grandma,” Deli interrupted, horrified. “Absolutely not.”
There was a brief, tense silence. Her grandmother sighed in a very familiar way.
“Fine,” she said, then she hung up.
Deli shook her head. Lorraine sighed, too, blissfully oblivious to how indistinguishable the sound was from her own mother’s. “How many rare diseases are we up to now, do you think?”
Deli stared at the ceiling, trying to average how often Grandma Rosemary diagnosed herself with something terrible on any given week. “Gotta be five hundred plus.”
“At least,” Lorraine said, dropping her eyes back to the stack of mail in her hand. Deli soaked in the camaraderie of being the only two people Rosemary McDonnell called to insist she had mad cow disease. It was a strange club. But they had each other.
“What the hell?”
The tone in Lorraine’s voice snapped Deli’s head up, scanning for the cause so she could snuff it out. Lorraine squinted at a photo pinned against the envelope it had come in. There were Royal Mail stamps next to a return address.
“What is it, Mom?”
Laurie shot her a withering look that sent a spike of panic up her spine. “It’s just something my sister sent. God knows why.”
Deli thought of the email with photos of a place that felt so far away. If she closed her eyes, she could almost smell the sea-salted wild. “Aunt Mo?”
“Aunt Maureen,” her mother practically growled. “But why she thought I’d want a reminder of her abandoning us for that horrid town, I’ll never know.”
Lorraine tossed the envelope and its contents in the garbage and turned to rummage in the refrigerator. Deli knew it was a bad idea, but she slid the trash open as quietly as possible and lifted the envelope.
There were the same two photos Aunt Mo had emailed her, but with a handwritten note.
She ran her finger along the edge of the photo of her as a child and slid it behind the stack as quietly as she could to examine the next.
Again, Deli’s eyes were pulled to the man beside Aunt Mo in the pub.
His shoulders were broad, and his sleeves were rolled to reveal skin both freckled and tanned.
Deli’s gaze caught on his forearms and his hands.
Then his eyes—like pooling honey—pure and warm.
She felt the thing in the rafters of her memory beat its wings for freedom as she slipped the note out of the pile.
Aunt Mo’s handwriting was scrawled across thick paper. Deli hadn’t seen that looping cursive in so long. She began to read.
Dear Laurie,
I know this is out of the blue, but I—
Her mother’s pink claws nearly scored her nose as Lorraine tore the mail from Deli’s hands. Her eyes were too close, burning with a cold fury. The frozen dread that had so often glued Deli’s feet to the floor of this house held her still again.
Her mother’s voice was a blade. “That woman is not a part of our family, Delilah. Understand?”
Deli’s mind raced to calculate her options and outcomes, but there was really only one choice. She would calm her mother’s rage, repair the fraying wire that threatened to burn things down, and quiet the part of Deli that whispered words like unfair and why.
“I’m sorry, Mom. You’re right, of course. I barely even remember her.”
Lorraine examined her daughter’s expression—a warden searching for signs of dissent. She tore everything from Aunt Mo in two and shoved the pile back into the trash. Her eyes narrowed, scanning Deli’s body for the first time. “Why are you dressed like that?”
“I have plans tonight.”
Lorraine’s lips pressed together. “So I’m wasting your time?”
It was too late. “No, Mom. You’re no—”
“Fine.” Her mother cut her off, tone final. “Just go.”
Her mom gripped the bottle of rosé by the neck and paused long enough to look up at her with watery eyes before they turned dark and she returned to the backyard.
Deli stood in the empty kitchen. She silently pieced through the garbage until she found the mail from Aunt Mo.
Wet coffee grounds slid off the glossy photos without much harm, but the note was now an illegible kaleidoscope of fountain ink and dark roast. She shook off the mess and slipped the photos into her bag, then held her flattened hand at eye level and counted until it stopped shaking.
She opened the fridge and slid her mother’s last bottle of wine into the tote to jostle around with the kilted actors and humiliating tome.
Sometimes her family made her want to run away, like she was a little girl.
Happy birthday to me, she thought, squaring her shoulders and moving toward the door. Some family you were born with, but some you got to choose.
And Trey was waiting to choose her.