She looked to me.
And then she laid it out.
“When I was young and in college, I thought my mother’s generation did all the work. Burned their bras, yada yada yada.” She circled her now-empty oyster shell. “Then the first job I had, my boss called me ‘Sunshine.’ The whole time I was there, even in meetings, he’d say, ‘Sunshine brought this to our attention.’ Or, ‘Sunshine found it in the brief.’ It was humiliating.”
“Oh my God, I’ll bet,” I replied.
“I worked for a lawyer. I was a paralegal,” she informed me. “I asked him to stop. And he told me to stop being so sensitive. It was a compliment. I had a sunny disposition. I tried to explain it didn’t feel like a compliment and again asked him to refrain. He was not pleased I was telling him how to behave, even if what I was telling him was how I wished to be addressed. Within a month, I was laid off. But before that, it was clear I’d been branded a troublemaker. In order to stay employed, the next time something like that happened at another job, and it happened, I kept my mouth shut.”
That was the worst.
“I’m so sorry,” I said like I meant it, because I so totally did.
“What I’m saying is, Ryn, that a woman who judges a woman on the decisions she makes about her life is no woman at all. Even if you grew up your whole life wanting to be an exotic dancer, that would be your choice and the instant a woman makes another woman feel badly about her choices, or worse, tries to take them away, we’ve lost.”
“Are we at war?” Porter asked conversationally.
“Not with you, you’re enlightened,” Anne-Marie answered blithely.
“Well, thank God for that,” Porter muttered, reaching for his beer.
“I’m glad you understand,” I said to Anne-Marie.
But Porter answered, “My wife’s point is, sweetheart, there’s nothing to understand.”
Oh God.
This was great!
Because Boone’s parents, especially his mom (but also his dad), were totally awesome.
I smiled at him then at her.
They smiled back.
Then Anne-Marie’s face turned stern when she aimed it at her son. “And now you can just relax.”
“I will remind you that I asked you not to bring that up with Ryn,” he returned, very unhappily.
Uh-oh.
“And you asked that because she’s clearly embarrassed by it and I wanted to set her mind at ease,” Anne-Marie shot back.
“I still asked you to let her bring it up, and I didn’t think that was too much to ask,” Boone retorted.
Anne-Marie looked a trifle abashed.
But only a trifle.
“Son, when has your mother ever done as asked?” Porter noted and looked to me. “This is how I’m enlightened. She steamrolls me.”
“I do not,” Anne-Marie declared testily.
“Are we eating oysters?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Do Boone and I like oysters?” he pushed.
“You like them fine,” she sniffed.
“I’d rather have shrimp cocktail,” he said. “But oysters are your favorite food.”
“We’re not destitute, Porter Sadler.” She flipped an elegant, buff-polished, perfectly-rounded-long-nailed hand at the table. “If you want shrimp cocktail, order it.”
He appeared horrified and did not hesitate to explain why.
“Woman, you don’t eat seafood in a landlocked state. The only reason we’re at this restaurant is because it’s your favorite one in Denver and we always come here when we see Boone.”
She turned her eyes to me. “This is his rule. No seafood in landlocked states. Like airplanes haven’t been invented. And refrigeration.”
“It isn’t a hard and fast rule,” Porter told me swiftly, like he didn’t want me to think he was crazy. “We eat it at home and we’re landlocked.”
“Barely,” Anne-Marie muttered.
I turned to Boone and declared, “I totally love your parents.”
Boone looked in my eyes a beat.
Then he leaned my way, caught me behind my neck, pulled me his way, and with his handsome face in mine, he burst out laughing.
* * *As had become our drill when Boone and I went to his pad together, he went in first, I stood at the door, he turned on the lights to make sure no bad guys were lurking in the dark, and I wandered in when he gave the all clear.
And this was what we did that night after dinner with his folks then going to El Chapultepec to listen to some jazz before Porter noted the time change and declared himself “pooped.”
Though he looked like he could take on the night, but Anne-Marie was pretending like she wasn’t waning.
They were Ubering over in the morning to have coffee and doughnuts to tide us over here, late brunch at Racines after we showed them the house.
And then, on the way home, I’d talked Boone into letting me cook them my lasagna tomorrow night. Something which I assured him was my mother’s recipe, she’d taught me how to make it, and it was the only thing in my culinary repertoire that I could promise was delicious.