Man of the House(47)

I nodded. “He’s good to me.”

“Carter is a good person,” she said, carrying some onions and peppers over to the frying pan. She tossed them in with a satisfying sizzle. “He’s just distracted by all that life has to offer.”

“Boys and their toys,” I said, laughing.

“Something like that. He has a brilliant mind, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. I think he’s bored most of the time, and I think most of his media stunts have been ways to keep the boredom at bay.”

“Maybe,” I said, fascinated. Mom had never talked about her employer so much.

“Just be careful. He changes his mind a lot and quickly. I don’t want you to get attached and have him . . . “

“Leave?” I asked. “Like Dad?”

“Something like that.” She smiled at me. “Flip.”

“What?”

She nodded at the pan. “Flip.”

“Oh.” I quickly flipped the two arepas. They were a nice golden brown on the other side.

“It’ll be okay,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Carter might not seem like it, but he knows what he’s doing. I trust him with all this.”

“If you do then I do too.”

“Just be careful,” she said, and went back to chopping.

The conversation moved on to more normal things, but I couldn’t help but keep thinking about what she had said about Carter. She seemed genuinely in awe of him, extremely complimentary, but her warning mirrored exactly my greatest fears about him. I worried that I’d get too close and he’d get too bored.

So far, he hadn’t justified that worry at all, but he did have a pattern in the past. I just kept wondering if I really thought that I was any different from those other girls he was with before me. Maybe in that he was my stepfather, however fake, but otherwise I was completely normal and boring as far as I could tell, or at least compared to those girls. He dated models and actresses and musicians, there was no way he was interested in a boring normal communications major like me.

As we finished cooking the meal, there was a knock at my door. I cleaned my hands on a towel and quickly went over as Mom set the table. I opened it and was surprised to see Carter standing there.

“Good evening,” he said, leaning toward me, kissing me quickly.

“Hi,” I said. “My mom’s here, we were just putting dinner out.”

“I know. She texted me.” He grinned.

“Oh, did she?”

We walked into my apartment together and Mom was smiling. She kissed Carter on the cheek.

“Did you get that brief finished?” she asked him.

“Mostly. The idiot Chinese interpreter didn’t understand some of the nuances in the second clause, so I had to go back and change them.”

“We’ll find someone better next time.”

“I like Wu, she just doesn’t get patent law, especially not American stuff.”

“I understand.”

“Stop it,” I said, and they both stared at me. “No work talk. I’m serious.”

They both laughed and we all sat down around the table. Mom handed out the arepas, already cut open to form a little pouch on the inside. We filled them with veggies, cheese, pork, whatever we had out on the table. It was absolutely delicious.

Eating with Carter and my mom was almost surreal. They talked to each other like real friends and Carter seemed like a normal, down-to-earth person. He was definitely toning down the asshole attitude big time for her at least. I didn’t know what Mom was up to warning me away from him and then inviting him to dinner, but I felt good sitting in their company, laughing and talking.

Carter talked about growing up and starting a company, and Mom told embarrassing stories about me. That drove me crazy, but I couldn’t really complain. I had a smile on my face the whole time even when she talked about the night I decided to turn myself into a Smurf.

“So she comes downstairs, covered in blue marker,” Mom said, laughing, barely able to talk. “I’m talking covered in it, but because she used a marker it was all streaky.”

“Like a blue zebra?” Carter asked.

“Exactly!” Mom cracked up. “Okay, okay, so she comes up to me and says, ‘Look Mom! Gargamel is going to eat me!’ It seriously took me twenty minutes before I understood what she was saying.”

I blushed but smiled. “I don’t remember any of this, even though she’s told that story a million times.”

“How did you clean her off?” Carter asked.

“Just soap and water and a scrub brush. Took way too long but god was that funny.”

We leaned back in our chairs, smiling and feeling the warmth of a genuinely close and comfortable friendly moment. There was a few seconds of silence before Carter finally sighed.