Prom Mom by Laura Lippman

Author:Laura Lippman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

“You ever go there?” Joe asked his assistant, Bobbie, as they drove past the sign touting “attractions” for MD 272. “Plumpton Park Zoo?”

“Never heard of it,” she said.

“I thought you grew up here.”

“I grew up in Maryland,” she said. “My ‘here’ isn’t your ‘here.’ I’m from Howard County. Did you go to the Howard County Fair when you were a kid?”

“Why would I go to a county fair when the state fair was fifteen minutes from my house?”

“Exactly,” Bobbie said. Joe had no idea what she was talking about. Joe frequently had no idea what Bobbie was talking about. They were thirteen years and a galaxy apart.

If the zoo hadn’t been in the opposite direction on MD 272, he might have insisted on stopping there. Plumpton Park Zoo wasn’t just any small zoo. It was a perfect oasis for little kids, scaled to them, unlike the Baltimore Zoo, and never mind the National. Plumpton Park Zoo had been a sacred place in Joe’s childhood. Pop-pop, his father’s father, had lived up here in Cecil County and taken him every year until he outgrew it.

“I wonder if zoos will even exist in fifty years,” Joe said.

“The planet’s not going to exist in fifty years,” Bobbie said. “But if it does, it’s people who are going to be in zoos.”

A lot of his conversations with Bobbie seemed to go this way. Joe definitely felt a generation gap, even more pronounced than the one between him and Jordan, who wasn’t that much older than Bobbie. Or maybe it was just that he was continually surprised at how little deference Bobbie paid him. When he was coming up, he dutifully affirmed his bosses’ points of view. He could not imagine saying to his uncle Tony, Your here isn’t my here.

He liked Bobbie, though, despite, or maybe because of her sass. He felt—not fatherly, not brotherly, but sort of uncle-y. He was her uncle Tony, or aspired to be. Despite the circumstances that had led to it, Joe had nothing but fond memories of his gap year in Houston. What he learned in his uncle’s office when he was eighteen had been of far more use to him than the four years at Trinity. Not that he ever regretted Trinity, because he had met Meredith there. Still, college was more of a credential than a utility, a conversational lubricant. Where did you go to school? Although in Baltimore, when someone asked that, they were curious only about your high school.

Anyway, it was his ongoing desire to impress his uncle that had encouraged him to take the flier on their destination today, Nottingham Ridge, a Class C shopping center in North East. For years, Joe had been pushing to do more local deals. His uncle insisted he didn’t see any potential in the mid-Atlantic—too built up, too union friendly. So Joe had decided to find a property on his own and flip it in order to prove to his uncle that the Baltimore office could be a true division of the corporation, not just a nepotistic convenience.

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