When I saw the crowd of passengers arrive and head to the baggage claim for the flight from Dallas, I got so nervous I thought I’d throw up. Then I caught a glimpse of my dad’s head towering above the crowd and I rushed forward. “Dad! Mom!” I called out.
It took them a second to find me, and in that moment I was astonished by how much older they looked. It had only been a year, but my mental image of them was one I’d retained from childhood, apparently. The current reality came as a jolt. My dad had silver hair, and there was more gray than blond in my mother’s hair.
But then they reached me and hugged me like they never wanted to let me go. “Oh, my baby!” my mother said over and over again. My dad just kept patting me on the back. I was glad that Ethan had to stay behind with the car because I didn’t want him to see me cry.
“It’s good to see you,” I told them when I’d regained enough control to speak. “I missed you so much.”
My mom held me at arm’s length. “Look at you! You’re so thin. Are you eating enough? If you didn’t have enough money to eat, you should have said something.”
I felt like I was right back at home. “I’m eating fine, really,” I said with a laugh. “You have to walk a lot in New York. That keeps me in shape.”
“You aren’t anorexic, are you? Like all those models?” She opened her tote bag. “Here, I brought some food with me since they don’t feed you on airplanes these days. I think I still have some fried chicken.”
I reached over and closed her tote bag before she could pull out an entire chicken dinner in the middle of baggage claim. “Mom, I don’t need any fried chicken. We’ll be having dinner soon enough.”
“You’ve been living here too long. You always loved my fried chicken.”
While we were talking, my dad had gone about collecting their bags. “Do you have everything?” I asked. “My friend is outside with the car. They probably made him circle around.”
“You didn’t have to come pick us up,” Mom said.
“I wanted to, and my friend offered to drive.”
Ethan pulled up almost as soon as we got outside. My parents took one look at the Mercedes, then looked at each other. When Ethan got out of the car to help them load their bags, they appeared even more intrigued.
“Mom, Dad, this is my um, friend, Ethan Wainwright. We work together. Ethan, these are my parents, Frank and Lois Chandler.”
Ethan shook hands with both of them. My mom caught his hand in both of hers and said, “It was so nice of you to offer to come pick us up. You must be a very special friend to our Katie.”
An impatient cabdriver waiting to unload his passengers spared me potential further embarrassment by honking. Everyone had to scramble to get in the car so Ethan could pull away. It was only a temporary reprieve from embarrassment, though, for once we got on the road, we were trapped inside a car with my mother, whose potential-wedding-for-her-only-daughter radar was pinging loud and clear. She’d probably make Gemma scrap the sightseeing expedition and take her shopping for mother-of-the-bride dresses instead.
“So, Ethan,” she asked. “What is it you do?”
“I’m an attorney.”
“And you work with Katie?”
“Sort of. I have my own firm, but I’m on retainer for Katie’s company.”
“And that’s how you met?”
I tried not to groan out loud. I hadn’t even thought of working out a cover story with him in advance.
“Actually, it’s kind of funny, but no. I’m a friend of Jim’s, Connie’s husband. You know Connie?”
“Of course. The girls were always coming home with Katie on weekends from college.” Connie was my other college friend who’d moved to New York with Gemma and Marcia. When she got married and a spot in the apartment opened up, they’d persuaded me to join them in New York.
“Well,” Ethan continued, “Jim originally set me up with Marcia, but we didn’t hit it off so well. But Katie and I did.”
I didn’t have to look at the backseat to see my mother’s satisfied smile. “So you two are dating?”
“Yes, we are.” He said it like he was proud of it, and that gave me a warm glow.
If I could read minds, I knew at that moment I’d be able to hear my mom rehearsing the speech she’d give her friends back home. “Oh yes, and our Katie is dating a very prominent Manhattan attorney. He drives a Mercedes, you know.”
“We only just started dating,” I said, before she got carried away with thinking of how she’d tell her friends that she was expecting an engagement announcement any day now. I changed the subject by saying, “I got you a room at a hotel down the street from where I live, so it’ll be easy for us to come and go.”