Free The Vinyl Princess by Yvonne Prinz

return to the living room, noticing the way that the dining table has been set with napkins, silver, crystal candlesticks and what looks to be fine china. It looks like an estate sale. I stick my head back into the kitchen.
    “Hey, where’d all this fancy stuff come from?” I whisper.
    “It’s Grandma’s.”
    “Does she know you took it?”
    “I didn’t take it. She gave it to me. It’s been in a box in the garage.”
    One might wonder, then, why we’ve been eating off of mismatched, chipped garage-sale plates all these years when we had access to the queen of England’s booty. Sheesh!
    I dig through my mom’s CD collection, all of which I’ve given her. I’m acutely aware that I’m being watched. I pull out Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon ; Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain ; Willie Nelson, Stardust ; and Mark Knopfler, Ragpicker’s Dream . All of my mom’s CDs have her name written across the front of them in black marker. When my dad left there was a lot of “this is mine and that’s yours” going on, and my mom wasn’t about to let him walk off with anything she cherished, so the day before he moved out she stayed up all night and wrote her name on everything. She probably thought that she was using an erasable marker, or maybe she just didn’t care, but it still says her name in big letters on the toaster and the teakettle. I load up the CD carousel and hit play. Jack is flipping through a book on Russian history that he found on the coffee table, or at least he’s pretending to. It was probably the best he could find. Most women have a copy of Vogue or People on their coffee table. My mom has Smithsonian magazine and a book on hieroglyphics of the Anasazi Indians in Arizona.
    “I think dinner’s almost ready,” I assure him, perching on the edge of an overstuffed chair across from him.
    “Great. It sure smells good.”
    I nod.
    “So, how long have you guys lived here?” he asks, looking around at the cleaned-up version of the disaster that is our home.
    I look around too, seeing our house from a first-time visitor’s point of view. A chaotic jumble of mismatched, overflowing bookshelves line the walls; African carvings, masks, weird sculpture, and paintings cover every available surface; and all the furniture is draped in brightly colored cotton throws that my mom brought back from her many trips to India in the eighties. I look down at my feet. The Oriental carpet is threadbare and stained. A trail of ants is energetically carrying toast crumbs from the table, onto the carpet and along the wooden floor to a toast-crumb ant banquet in an undisclosed location.
    “Forever,” I tell him.
    Dinner comes off without a hitch, except for one awkward moment when Jack asks how my mom makes her vinaigrette and I have to think fast and pretend to have a coughing fit to distract him. In the end I think he pretty much figured out that my mom was faking it, which is probably a good thing, because she’d never be able to keep this up; sooner or later he’d find the boxes, and we’d be out of money too.
    I watch Jack closely and I notice that he seems to really like my mom a lot. He listens to her carefully and laughs easily at her attempts to be funny. My mom behaves like a shy schoolgirl around him, blushing and talking about things that I never even knew she cared about. Why is she trying so hard to impress this guy? I wonder. Has she seen his socks? There are a lot of moments when I wish I could look across the table at M and roll my eyes.
    Just as we’re digging into our dessert, individual lemon meringue tarts, the phone rings. My mom looks at me and shakes her head slightly. I ignore her, put down my fork and leave the table. I pick the phone up off the coffee table in the living room.
    “Hello?” I look at my mom defiantly. Until she gets me a cell phone I’ll be answering the phone. She knows that.
    “Hello, Miss Allie?”
    “Oh, hi, Ravi.”
    My mom is watching me. Jack is watching me