The Belle and the Beard by Kate Canterbary (good book club books .txt) 📕

"What…does that even mean, Mom?"

"It means you're backed up. You don't let anything out."

Maybe she was high. My mother popped cannabis gummies all the time. Oddly enough, it prevented her from reverting to her naturally scatterbrained ways. "That's the situation, huh?"

With a young spruce tree between us, she jabbed a finger in my direction. "Don't get smart with me, young man. And don't think you can tell me you're thirty-six so you're not a young man anymore. As long as I'm alive, I'll always be older than you and I'll never be able to breathe easy while one of my babies is unhappy."

"Believe me, Mom. I'm happy. I'm great." I peered at her, not knowing what the hell this was about. When she offered no explanation, I continued, "What brought this on? What happened to replacing your bayberry bushes? Have you been hitting the candy already? It's pretty early for recreational use, don't you think?"

Bent over a collection of five-gallon azaleas, she replied, "We can do two things at once and I'm bringing this up because I can sense it, Linden. I feel it in my heart and that has nothing to do with my medicinal herbs. You're holding something in and you're giving me a distinctly unsatisfied vibe." She stood, a hot pink azalea cradled in her arm. She had nowhere to put it but she'd squeeze it into her garden somewhere. "Why don't you just tell me what's going on? Is it one of your intimate friends? Or…more than one of them?"

It felt as if screws were turning on either side of my jaw, drawing everything tight and close and on the verge of snapping, but there were two reasons I allowed this conversation to continue instead of enforcing some boundaries.

First—and the thing most people found surprising about me—my mom was one of my closest friends. Not in some fucked-up way where I leaned on her to wash my clothes and cook my meals in exchange for the smallest insight into my life, but as an actual friend—or whatever it was when you and your parents were finally adults and your interactions weren't moored by the stagecraft of parenting.

Obviously, as this moment proved, the stagecraft of parenting was never completely absent.

The meddling aside, Mom and I shared some of the same interests and I enjoyed her perspective on things. She was big into gardening and my job was looking after trees. She volunteered with several conservation causes in the area and I supported those efforts. She championed lots of small, local restaurants and bakeries and I liked to eat. It worked out for everyone when she didn't pull a lunch hour shakedown.

Second—and probably most importantly—I wanted to fast-forward this day. I wanted to get back home and get in front of Jasper before I lost my damn mind. I needed the full, unabridged story of how she came to be married and living an ocean away from her husband.

Since my mother would carry on this conversation as long as she wanted, I couldn't dodge her and expect it to get me out of here any sooner.

Even on the topic of intimate friends.

Ever since my mother let herself into my hotel room and encountered me in the middle of a sweaty, sticky pile of pansexual skin the morning after my sister's wedding last summer, she'd made the occasional pointed statement about my romantic life. The overarching message was one of support, but at the same time she was growing weary of my avoidance of serious relationships. She wanted me to settle down and she didn't mind needling me about it when she got the chance.

I inclined my head. "There's nothing going on. Nothing to tell."

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips in a grim maternal smile that invited me to go ahead and lie to her face. "Have you met someone? Is that why you're distressed today? Someone new?"

The quick answer was yes, I'd met someone, and yes, she was the source of most of my problems right now.

But I hadn't met someone the way my mother wanted me to meet someone. I had a painfully beautiful belle of a neighbor who shouldn't be allowed to use power tools or kitchen appliances without supervision. She was naked in my house every day which meant she was naked in my dreams every night but she was also the pain in my ass intent on poisoning me.

None of this was tracking in the direction my mother wanted and it wasn't what I wanted either. I liked chill, uninhibited people who understood I wasn't looking for anything serious.

Jasper was serious like dynamite. Every moment with her was explosive and there was a very good chance one of us would die.

For reasons that had nothing to do with self-preservation, I still liked her. I still wanted to understand her marital status and the circumstances of her arrival next door, and if given the chance, I wanted to get her under me. That was all it would take to get her out of my system.

My mother cleared her throat, arched her brows up. I rubbed my forehead again. "Is that really the conversation we need to have right now?" I crossed my arms over my chest. "We need to find a replacement for those bayberries and I have two tree warden stops to make today. Can we set this aside for another day?"

"You'll only be more backed up with emotional shit the longer you wait," she muttered.

"Is there a different metaphor you could use? Literally anything else? I'm not a fan of this one."

Very much ignoring me, she peered at a five-year-old dogwood that was much too big for her yard. "Has it ever occurred to you," she started, strolling down the aisle again, "that every time you've been presented with a path in life, you take the solitary one? Even if it means you're forging your own trail and blindly hacking your way