The Checklist by Addie Woolridge (color ebook reader TXT) 📗

grin at anyone from fellow PhD students to benefactors. Whatever. It worked for him, and she needed to leave right now, before it worked on her too.

“Yup. See ya!” Dylan waved and executed one of her better speed walks to the car, willing herself not to look back. She hopped into the driver’s seat, buckled up, and started the car with the kind of efficiency a NASCAR driver would envy. Exhaling, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror.

“Okay, Dylan. For everyone’s sake, please never use the word ‘yup’ again.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dylan let herself sit idle in the driveway for a second, wondering if helping Mike with Crescent really made sense. Didn’t she have something good with Nicolas? Should she really be palling around with some other guy for a community service project?

Pushing herself out of the car, she decided that there was nothing going on between herself and Mike that constituted a threat to her relationship with Nicolas. This was her mind making some impressive mental leaps. Her imagination really had nothing to do with the guy next door and more to do with her and Nicolas’s dry spell. It was just kind of hard to feel sexy when he was shouting into his phone all the time.

“That you, Dyl?” Neale’s voice singsonged from the kitchen as Dylan crossed the front door threshold and shrugged off her coat. She looked down at her heels and then the rug and decided to keep her shoes on.

“Coming.” Dylan pressed her cold fingers to her cheeks to mask the flush, then pulled her shoulders back and strutted into the kitchen.

Giving Dylan a once-over, Bernice scratched a fleck of dried glaze on her neck. “You’re home early. How was your day?”

“Busy. I decided it’d be good for Kaplan and Technocore to pick a pro bono project.” Dylan felt the white lie slip off her tongue and hid it by turning toward the sink for a glass of water. Her mother could smell lies; she was sure of it.

“Really? What is it?” Neale asked.

“I think everyone at Technocore recognizes they haven’t been a community player, and Crescent Children’s Museum is looking to do some pretty cool cutting-edge tech stuff.”

Dylan turned away from the sink as her mother’s eyebrow stretched toward her in-need-of-a-touch-up roots. “Oh? The good-looking boy across the street’s place?”

“Mom. You know his name.” Dylan exhaled.

“I know his last name. But I can’t blame you, sweetheart. The good-looking ones are always a bad idea. Don’t worry—we’ve all made that mistake. Trust me.” Bernice winked at Neale.

If Dylan hadn’t already swallowed her water, she would have choked on it. “Mom. No winking. It’s gross, and I know for a fact neither Neale nor I want to hear the story behind it.”

“Actually—”

“No, we don’t.” Dylan cut Neale off and shot her a look that wielded more than daggers.

“Fine. Another time. Let’s just say your mom really lived her wild oats.”

Dylan gagged, torn between repulsion and her urge to correct Bernice’s expression.

“How did all this come about?” Neale asked, an unusually present look crossing her space-queen visage.

“Today was tough. Trying to set up procedures with Tim.” Dylan ignored Bernice’s scoff at the consultant jargon. “So I went out and ate a hamburger, and I still didn’t feel any better, and then I decided on a pro bono project. A feel-good thing to wash the taste of Technocore out of my mouth.”

“Who doesn’t love a ‘feel-good’ project in the middle of the day?” Bernice used air quotes around the words feel-good, as if her meaning might not have been conveyed by her shit-eating grin.

“Mike Robinson is a pro-BONE-o project,” Neale snorted.

“He probably tastes better than a hamburger too,” Bernice said, her deadpan playing to the extreme of Neale’s laughter.

“Okay, ew. Sex jokes with my mom and sister. Yuck.” She felt herself giggle and swallowed the laugh, irked that a little piece of her mother’s humor had found a way to amuse her. Mike must have been rubbing off on her if she was starting to find Bernice’s jokes funny.

“Dyl, that wasn’t even the best I could do. Mom and I haven’t devolved into jokes about washing your mouth out yet.”

“Give us credit. We didn’t say that’s what she said or anything,” her mother cackled.

“I’m not sure you deserve credit for only stooping to the second-lowest rung of raunchy humor.”

Dylan was spared further indignities by the doorbell ringing, followed by Milo’s bellowing from somewhere on the second floor. Stacy didn’t actually wait for anyone to answer the door; instead, she walked in just in time to catch Henry shouting, “Don’t ring the doorbell. It makes the dog bark.”

“Hi, Henry.”

“Hello.” Her father’s voice carried remarkably well over Milo, whose fervor had died down to a half-hearted yowl.

“Hey, Stacy. Don’t pay attention to Henry. He is in a conceptualizing phase. ‘Any small distraction.’” Bernice mimicked her husband, walking into the hallway to give Stacy a frigid hug. “Of course, you don’t need to ring the doorbell.”

Stacy wrinkled her nose at Dylan from over her mother’s shoulder but otherwise said nothing about the Delacroix’s notoriously fickle relationship with their front door. She knew Stacy found her family to be a blend of endearing and strange, an attitude pretty much anyone who set foot in the Delacroix’s home more than once had to adopt.

When they were younger, her friend had asked why her parents didn’t move to somewhere like Fremont, where all the other well-off artist types lived. With a motto like The Freedom to Be Peculiar and a giant troll statue under a bridge, Fremont was more the Delacroix’s speed. In the end, Dylan had explained that in Fremont, her parents were two of many peculiar artists. In Green Lake, the Delacroix had the distinct honor of defining peculiar. A long-standing feud with their neighbors was just poutine on whatever cuisine Bernice had managed to char that evening.

“Ready?” Dylan reached for her coat around Bernice, who looked like she was about to invite Stacy in for another