Just Do This One Thing for Me by Laura Zimmermann

Author:Laura Zimmermann [Zimmermann, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2023-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Make her pose with a cactus,” Carna wrote across the whiteboard.

I muted myself. “A cactus?” Darden’s grandma didn’t notice. She was trying to give me a video tour of her place in Sun City, but she didn’t know how to flip the camera on her phone, so I was mainly getting a tour of her chest.

“Something Arizonish. Cactus. Iguana. The Grand Canyon.”

I unmuted. “Um, Mrs. Mac?”

“I know the headboard looks like it’s wicker but it’s something called rattan.”

“Mrs. Mac?” She brought the phone close and flipped the screen several times before we were looking at each other. “Since it’s so cold here, it would be fun if you could record the message outside in the sun.”

“Good idea! Should I go to the pool? The pool here is very nice.”

I glanced at Carna over the top of my phone. She shook her head and underlined “cactus.”

“Sure.” Carna drew an angry cactus on the board.

“Now where did my pool key go?” She set the phone down and I watched a ceiling fan spin for several minutes before she returned to view in a visor and sunglasses. “This is so sweet of you to do, Drew—I don’t know why they’re always saying you’re not very warm.”

She had to know that not flying back to Wisconsin for Darden’s last-ever high school hockey sectionals would move more points from her column to the other grandparents’. The good-luck video message, though, recorded over FaceTime by me was going to get her out of trouble, which would have been rather thoughtful of me if I hadn’t had my own motives.

Facing into the sun, half her face covered, she could have passed for any white Midwestern grandma saying hello from Arizona, which was my actual motive.

“Can you hold the phone up higher?” I was mostly talking to a Proud Grandma of a Larch Leap Honor Student T-shirt. (That would have been for Dard’s sister.) “Okay, I’m going to start recording and STOP RIGHT THERE. You’re good where you are, GRANDMA MAC!” She’d been trying to get the pool in the background by walking backward toward the edge of it instead of lifting up the phone. I didn’t want to kill Darden’s grandma while I was pretending she was mine, though if I did maybe I could teach Dard how to collect her Social Security, too.

All I wanted was a fuzzy screenshot to post to Heidi’s social media (“Mom having fun in the sun while we freeze here” with some LOLz after it). Carna didn’t get her cactus but we did get a nice row of palm trees in the background. The quality was pixelated enough we could have claimed it was Darth’s own mother and he’d have had to look twice. Perfect.

Darden got the full recording, which included a lot of “proud of yous” and even a “leave it all on the ice, Dardy!” He cried when I showed it to him. He cried because it was his grandma and he cried because I arranged it, which he interpreted as romantic.

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