Free Heartstopper by Joy Fielding

sentence being somewhat of an oxymoron. If that was the right word for it. Delilah made a mental note to ask Mrs. Crosbie about it.
    Delilah liked Mrs. Crosbie. Not only was she a good teacher and a kind person, she looked the way mothers were supposed to look. The sad truth was that Delilah barely recalled what her mother really looked like. Thenaturally beautiful young woman proudly holding her new baby in old family photographs was a complete stranger to her.
    Delilah enjoyed looking through the old family albums as much as her mother and grandmother despised it. She liked seeing her grandmother sitting imperiously on her folding chair at the beach, as if it were a throne, her fleshy knees up around her chin; she got a kick out of her grandfather clowning around in her grandmother’s big straw hat, and Kerri and her two sisters happily riding the ocean waves.
    Now her grandfather was dead, as was her mother’s oldest sister, Lorraine. Her other sister, Ruthie, had moved to California a decade ago and rarely kept in touch anymore. Which left just the three of them—Delilah, her mother, and her grandmother. The unholy trinity, her mother liked to joke. Where was her mother anyway?
    “Kerri, is that you?” her grandmother called from the living room.
    “No, Grandma Rose. It’s me.”
    “Oh.”
    There was no disguising the disappointment in her grandmother’s voice, although in truth, her grandmother had never tried to mask her disappointment in her only granddaughter. Delilah entered the cluttered living room. It was hard to say what exactly it was cluttered with. There weren’t any books or old newspapers lying around—neither her mother nor her grandmother ever read anything other than fashion magazines—and the room was certainly clean enough. It was just full of
stuff.
Lace doilies were everywhere—on top of the tan sofa, the brown leather chair, the television, the end tables on either side of the sofa. The latest issue of
Vogue
lay beside a small stack of
In Shape
magazines across the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. A glass-doored, mahogany cabinet stoodin one corner of the room, next to a grandfather clock that hadn’t worked in years. The cabinet was filled with dishes made of Depression glass in translucent pink and green, as well as Grandma Rose’s collection of old china figurines. Her grandmother called them antiques; her mother called them garbage. She confided to Delilah she was going to throw everything out—“the whole kit and caboodle,” she liked to say—as soon as Grandma Rose passed on.
    Kerri always said “passed on” instead of “died.” She also said things like “kick the bucket” and “bite the dust,” although never in front of Grandma Rose, who considered such irreverent expressions sacrilegious. Delilah knew Kerri put up with her mother’s ill temper and demanding ways because she hoped to inherit all her money when she died. Whoops, Delilah thought. Make that “passed on.” She might have laughed had Grandma Rose not been sitting there looking as if she’d just stumbled onto a nest of sleeping serpents.
    Was that a metaphor? Alliteration? Maybe both. Something else to ask Mrs. Crosbie about.
    “How are you doin’, Grandma Rose?” Delilah asked now, approaching with caution. Her grandmother sat at the edge of the sofa’s middle seat, her swollen feet stuffed into tatty pink slippers that barely touched the floor, her large, masculine hands entwined in her lap. Her hair was colored a deep auburn red, although the gray at her hairline betrayed her need for a touch-up. Her face was round, her features coarse, her brown eyes cold and unforgiving. Weren’t grandmothers supposed to be soft and kind? Weren’t they supposed to welcome you home with open arms and freshly baked cookies?
    “How do you think I’m doing?” came her grandmother’s response. “I’m worried sick.”
    “I’m sure Mom’ll be home any minute,” Delilah said, although she was