Free Tangled Truth by Delphine Dryden

she wants to meet
you.”
    It made no more sense now than it had the first time Eva had
told him, a few minutes earlier.
    “And you’re okay with that?”
    “I’m so far from okay with it, I can’t even tell you.”
    “Well, that’s something, I guess. But you still want to do
it.”
    Eva’s mother. Her whackadoo and possibly evil mother. Taking
them out to dinner on Christmas Eve, because she would “happen to be in town”.
    Drew pushed his linguini around on his plate, noting that
the clam sauce was starting to congeal. They had both wanted something rich,
some cold weather comfort food, but now he regretted his order. The heavy meal
had been so much more appetizing ten minutes earlier.
    “I think ‘want’ is far too strong a word,” Eva objected.
“But I do think I probably need to go. She is my mother, and it’s
Christmas. I only wish she hadn’t found out I was seeing somebody. You really
don’t have to come though. Have dinner with your family. I can meet your
parents another day. They’re staying with Seth until after Christmas, right?”
    “Right. Would you have told me about it, the thing with your
mom, if I hadn’t asked you to spend Christmas Eve with me?”
    Eva frowned at her minestrone, looking about as thrilled by
it as Drew was by his pasta. “I don’t know. Probably, at some point. I mean,
you’d have to meet her some time, if we—I don’t mean that I’m expecting a
long-term relationship just because of the other night, but if—”
    “I am.”
    “I guess it’s…oh. Oh.”
    Nothing like a declaration of intent to bring a conversation
to a roaring halt.
    “And not just because of the other night,” Drew added after
a few moments of torrid silence.
    “Do we have to go back to talking about my mother now?”
    The waiter cleared his throat, interrupting their overloud
burst of shared laughter, to ask if their meals were satisfactory. When he departed,
Drew reached across the table to twine his fingers through Eva’s.
    “I really did want to bring you to Seth’s for Christmas Eve,
but you have to do what you think is right. Obviously you think the right thing
is to have dinner with your mom, so I will come with you and protect you if
necessary.”
    His tone was light, but he meant what he said. He felt
protective of Eva in general, lately, wanting to keep the rest of the world
from spoiling the fresh, childlike wonder that had started to emerge as her brittle
shell dissolved. She had been shy about sharing it with him at first, but now
she would relate the beauty of a new painting in the gallery, or her joy at a
snow-covered field that reminded her of Currier & Ives, and he loved it.
Like a kid offering up a noodle painting she’s worked on all afternoon, she
presented these glimpses into her soul, and Drew cherished each one.
    * * * * *
    Wherever that sense of joy and wonder had come from, he
decided later, it hadn’t come from Eva’s mother.
    Dinner with Carolanne Damron, formerly Godfrey, turned out
to be an exercise in forced civility. Drew suspected Eva had just as much
difficulty remaining polite; he could swear at one point during the meal he saw
a vein throbbing on her forehead, like a visible indication of an impending
migraine. Was Eva’s mother evil, Drew wondered, or simply nuts? Or possibly a
combination of the two? He kept himself as entertained as possible by debating
the question with himself. He had to do something to distract himself from the
conversation, that was for sure.
    “So Mr. Brantley, you’re one of those computer people?”
    “Yes, ma’am, kind of. I supervise a lot of those computer
people, at least.”
    “Supervise?” The older woman tapped her fork against the
edge of her plate, putting Drew in mind of the way a lawyer might twirl a
pencil. “I heard—that is I gathered, from what Eva said, that you were an
independent consultant. Isn’t that code for being between jobs, these days?”
    The smirk on her face might have angered Drew