Tangled Truth(22)

“Right. Would you have told me about it, the thing with your mom, if I hadn’t asked you to spend Christmas Eve with me?”

Eva frowned at her minestrone, looking about as thrilled by it as Drew was by his pasta. “I don’t know. Probably, at some point. I mean, you’d have to meet her some time, if we—I don’t mean that I’m expecting a long-term relationship just because of the other night, but if—”

“I am.”

“I guess it’s…oh. Oh.”

Nothing like a declaration of intent to bring a conversation to a roaring halt.

“And not just because of the other night,” Drew added after a few moments of torrid silence.

“Do we have to go back to talking about my mother now?”

The waiter cleared his throat, interrupting their overloud burst of shared laughter, to ask if their meals were satisfactory. When he departed, Drew reached across the table to twine his fingers through Eva’s.

“I really did want to bring you to Seth’s for Christmas Eve, but you have to do what you think is right. Obviously you think the right thing is to have dinner with your mom, so I will come with you and protect you if necessary.”

His tone was light, but he meant what he said. He felt protective of Eva in general, lately, wanting to keep the rest of the world from spoiling the fresh, childlike wonder that had started to emerge as her brittle shell dissolved. She had been shy about sharing it with him at first, but now she would relate the beauty of a new painting in the gallery, or her joy at a snow-covered field that reminded her of Currier & Ives, and he loved it. Like a kid offering up a noodle painting she’s worked on all afternoon, she presented these glimpses into her soul, and Drew cherished each one.

* * * * *

Wherever that sense of joy and wonder had come from, he decided later, it hadn’t come from Eva’s mother.

Dinner with Carolanne Damron, formerly Godfrey, turned out to be an exercise in forced civility. Drew suspected Eva had just as much difficulty remaining polite; he could swear at one point during the meal he saw a vein throbbing on her forehead, like a visible indication of an impending migraine. Was Eva’s mother evil, Drew wondered, or simply nuts? Or possibly a combination of the two? He kept himself as entertained as possible by debating the question with himself. He had to do something to distract himself from the conversation, that was for sure.

“So Mr. Brantley, you’re one of those computer people?”

“Yes, ma’am, kind of. I supervise a lot of those computer people, at least.”

“Supervise?” The older woman tapped her fork against the edge of her plate, putting Drew in mind of the way a lawyer might twirl a pencil. “I heard—that is I gathered, from what Eva said, that you were an independent consultant. Isn’t that code for being between jobs, these days?”

The smirk on her face might have angered Drew if he hadn’t recognized the look. It was Eva’s nervous smile, the same edgy, lopsided twitch of the lips, and it was more than a little eerie to see it on a face that looked so much like he suspected Eva would in thirty years. She was still quite beautiful, the former Mrs. Godfrey, with the figure of a much younger woman and skin that had been jealously guarded from the sun. But Drew hoped Eva would never have the look of suspicion and potential for malice that made her mother look almost ugly despite the good bone structure and fine features.

“It may be,” he acknowledged, “but in my case it means I own a company that employs consultants. And they deal with computer systems at other companies. As long as they’re doing good work, and as far as I know they are, then we all still have jobs.”

Eva, clearly mortified, interjected. “Mom, who did you hear that from? It wasn’t me. Are you talking to Dad again?”

“Emailing now and then,” her mother replied with a careless laugh, as though email correspondence was a frivolous game. “I still can’t stand to look at him or talk on the phone unless I absolutely have to, but somehow it’s not so bad through email. It’s like it isn’t really him.”

“Like Monopoly money,” Drew volunteered. Eva glanced at him with a quick smile, but it was pretty clear the analogy was lost on her mother.

“I know Dad is familiar with Drew’s company, we’ve talked about it. I can’t think why you got the impression he was unemployed.”

“Well, it isn’t as though your father is the most trustworthy source of information. I hate to say mean things about him behind his back…”

Drew said it in his mind before Eva’s mother actually spoke the word. But…