Meant To Be Mine. Marie Ferrarella

Tiffany took a breath. She stepped back and opened her door a little wider—her mother didn’t need much room to come in.

      Trying again, Tiffany asked in her best upbeat tone, “And to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure, dear Mother?”

      Mei-Li did not appear placated. “There is no need to be sarcastic, Tiffany.”

      Tiffany squelched the temptation to raise her voice in total frustration. Instead, she struggled for patience and tried a third time, keeping her voice even and respectful, despite the fact that to her own ear, it sounded almost singsong. “Mother, is there something I can do for you?”

      Walking in, the small woman scanned the room, taking in everything at once even as she rolled her eyes in response to the question. “More things than I could possibly enumerate in the space of a day,” she replied.

      “But you didn’t come to enumerate a long list of things,” Tiffany pointed out. “I know you, Mother. You came here for a very specific reason. You always do,” she added as her mom opened her mouth to deny the assumption. “Now what is it?”

      “How was he?” her mother asked without any preamble.

      Tiffany was caught completely off guard, her mind a total blank. “‘He?’”

      Mei-Li sighed, exasperated. “Surely you are not so dumb as you pretend, Tiffany. The young man I am paying to remodel your bathroom,” she said with emphasis. “Did he do a good job?”

      She made it sound as if renovating a bathroom could be done in a single afternoon. If only, Tiffany thought wistfully. But at the same time, the question irritated her. “Mother, he’s just gotten started.”

      To her surprise, her mother actually seemed pleased rather than annoyed that the job hadn’t been magically completed.

      “Oh. Good,” Mei-Li commented. Then, because they were supposed to be discussing remodeling the bathroom and not remodeling her stubborn daughter’s life, she requested, “May I see what he has done?”

      “Mainly, he left a mess,” Tiffany told her. “Right now, if you saw it, you’d probably be horrified.” And she had no desire to listen to her mother criticize what she saw. Why Tiffany felt almost protective of the man who had jolted her out of her bed was beyond her, but it didn’t change the way she felt. “Why don’t you wait until he’s finished and then I’ll show you just what he managed to do.”

      Much to her astonishment, her mother smiled and nodded. “I can hardly wait.”

      Tiffany wondered if Mei-Li was getting more eccentric as she got older—or if she was just becoming strange.

      Tiffany found herself leaning toward the latter.