Anatomy of a Meet Cute, page 17
“Oof. Long story,” Sam sighed.
“We’ve got time. Unless you don’t want to talk about it.”
She rarely wanted to talk about her mother, but something in the way Grant said it made Sam want to be honest with him. After all, their situations were different, but if anyone could understand struggling with family expectations, it was him. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I love my mom. I have to start with that, because otherwise the rest of this sounds kind of . . .” Pausing for a moment, she nodded her head a fraction of an inch from side to side until the right words came to her. “It just sounds mean.”
“Okay,” Grant said, stopping with his ice cream about six inches from his face to look at her. “Mean how?”
“She wouldn’t admit it, but my mom thinks of her kids as extensions of herself. She is proud of us, but she doesn’t actually want us living separate lives away from her. Our lives are her hobby and, in some ways, her personality. She gets super worked up if we deviate from her plan.”
“What do you mean by deviate?”
“She was convinced I should be a biology teacher like her and stay close to home. Even when I was accepted to medical school, she just kind of pretended I wasn’t becoming a doctor. Then when I left Ohio . . .”
Sam paused, and Grant looked over at her. Grimacing, he asked, “Was it yikes?”
“Worse. She refused to speak to me for two months. That would have been fine. But with her it isn’t just silence. She does passive-aggressive stuff like getting my dad to encourage me to ‘see her side,’ like I’m the one being ridiculous.”
“All this because you moved?” Grant said, doing his best to keep his shock under wraps.
“It gets weirder. She started leaving me off the group chat, so my brother had to screenshot or call with important updates. For example, when their basement flooded and they needed to stay in a hotel for a couple days. Or when Mom needed to get a mole checked out. According to my father, hearing my voice was too painful. But like all things with my mom, eventually she gets tired of whatever punishment she has imposed and comes up with a reason to reengage with us. It’s weird, but stuff like helping her throw a party puts her at the center of attention and reminds her that we love her. The parties are my and Isaiah’s way of compromising with her.”
“I think being starved for attention happens to a lot of moms. In my case, my mom just has a job that gives it to her, so our family isn’t her only source of specialness.” Grant’s voice was gentle, as if he were holding a delicate idea on the tip of his tongue and speaking too plainly would cause it to break. In some ways, her and her mother’s relationship was as fragile as he made it feel. Realistically, Sam had nearly shattered it just by moving to the Bay Area.
Trying to laugh off the uneasy feeling, Sam said, “Grant, we may not always agree, but when we do, it’s because of our mothers.”
“Probably.” Grant shrugged. “What do you think caused her to behave this way?”
Sam took a big chunk out of her ice cream to buy herself thinking time. Eventually, she said, “My parents married young, and my dad was in the navy, so we moved a lot. Her kids were her social life, which I kind of understand. Creating rich friend connections is hard when you move around a bunch, so she has tons of casual friends but can’t really call anyone to dish about her life. I think that by the time we settled down, she’d forgotten how to develop hobbies or deep friendships, so she just kept leaning on Isaiah and me.”
“Where is your dad in all of this?”
“Possibly willfully oblivious but stepping in with the occasional reality check when her demands get too outlandish. Since she hasn’t asked for an animatronic elephant for the party, he isn’t required to speak up yet.”
Grant looked over at her to judge how serious she was about the elephant, so Sam did what anyone with a deadly serious friend would do—kept a straight face for exactly five seconds, then burst into laughter.
“So I take it the elephant isn’t an actual demand then?”
“Not yet.” Sam shook her head and crunched down on her cone.
“Good, because I was gonna say that the Lost Key was very clear about not being able to do that.”
“But wouldn’t you love to see that person at the front desk’s face if we tried,” Sam chuckled.
“Talk about a catastrophic request.” Grant laughed. “We’d probably stop her heart.”
“Which is fine, because you told everyone that I’m a doctor.”
Grant tilted his head back and let out a big rumbling laugh. “I won’t apologize for that.”
“I would never ask you to.” Sam smirked, then looked over at him.
Grant’s features had softened again, as if he was thinking about something he held close. After a moment he said, “It’s not my place to tell you how to manage your relationship with your mom. But if you want a boundary, it seems like you may need to set it yourself.”
Sam knew objectively that she hadn’t stopped walking, yet it felt like Grant had hit pause on all her thoughts in the most painful way. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, he had a point. There was absolutely no evidence to suggest that if she managed to pull off all her mother’s requests, then she would magically be okay with Sam making her own choices. But how could she just stop doing all this? What would happen to their relationship if she tried to renegotiate the terms? She wasn’t ready to give up on her mother. The compromises were still better than letting her parents down and getting cut off again. She’d rather be spread too thin than not know if her dad went to the hospital or force Isaiah to speak on her behalf. The strain was just too much when a solution was at hand. A boundary might have helped Grant with his family, but Sam would have to take baby steps.
The feel of uneven pavement underneath her feet pulled Sam out of her reflective moment. She could sense Grant monitoring her. He wasn’t watching her, more reading her energy and giving her space to process his words and respond. She just wasn’t sure she was ready to be quite that vulnerable with him. After all, one ice cream didn’t make him a trusted confidant or anything. And like he’d said after the Anjo interview, he had a vested interest in her resolving things with her mother so she could focus on opening the center and keep crises off his desk.
“You are probably right.” Sam took another crunchy bite of ice cream cone to break the tension. “On the upside, Isaiah may be the favorite, but with the Lost Key, I’m gonna give him a run for his money.”
Grant chuckled under his breath, as if he could appreciate the joke but wasn’t quite ready to let his line of questioning go. As he took a bite out of his sugar cone, Sam focused on their surroundings. They were at the edge of a grassy park dotted with people lying on blankets, enjoying bottles of wine and lying out to catch a bit of sun. She heard kids shrieking as they rolled down the hill, sweaty from running as their parents pestered them about sunscreen and drinking water. A vendor was dragging a cooler and a basket of baked goods that Sam strongly suspected contained more than just flour and sugar in them, occasionally stopping to offer people a cold drink or a cookie.
“Is that a weed man?” Sam asked the first question that came to her mind.
Grant’s laugh was full as he shook his head. “It’s Dolores Park. You have to have a weed man. Otherwise, you don’t know if you are in the right place.”
“Go figure. Dolores Park is good for weed.”
“It’s really more edibles. They run articles about the best ones in a couple of the alt newspapers,” Grant said, offhandedly, as if “The Best Edibles in the Park” were a normal newspaper story. After a beat, he grinned and added, “They also do movies in the park. I took my little cousins to watch Finding Nemo a couple of years ago. It was actually delightful.”
“Was it delightful because you ate an edible?” Sam teased.
“I’m a medical professional and won’t confirm or deny anything.” Grant snorted at his own joke. “Really, I was thinking more about how uncommonly warm it was. Usually, the little ones get cold, and you end up giving them all of your layers and carrying them to the car halfway through the movie when they pass out.”
“Well, that’s adorable,” Sam said, fighting to keep the look that accompanied cartoon hearts off her face. “I’ve always wanted to go to a movie in the park, but my friends and I could never get it together back in Ohio. The only time we managed to plan something, a freak summer storm rolled through and crushed the dream.”
“Whomp whomp.” Grant’s tone gently mocked.
“It was whomp whomp,” Sam said, laughter seeping into the edge of her voice. “Thank you for acknowledging that.”
“You’ll just have to go to movies in the park in California. The parks department is running them now, I think. I’ll text you the schedule. So not to change the subject, but Duke waving from the window,” Grant said, reaching out toward a trash can to throw out the napkin that had once been wrapped around his ice cream cone. “You said he had questions. Are you going to tell me what they were now?”
Sam’s panic alarm sprang to life as she tried to come up with an answer that wasn’t my roommates will think this sounds suspiciously like a date. Although now that she thought about it, she could see how walking slowly around a park and eating ice cream might seem like she was on a date . . .
Nope. Sam checked herself. They had independently paid for their own ice creams, for crying out loud. There was no earthly way she was going to tell Grant that her friends—and apparently her myth-based, completely fabricated, scientifically nonexistent lizard brain—thought they might be dating. She might be willing to be honest about her mother, but there was not a snowball’s chance in hell she would be honest about why Duke had been in the window.
“Ah, well, Duke wanted to know what kind of car you drove because I said it was nice, and he and Jehan said that only drug dealers or trust fund babies have fancy cars as fellows. I said your parents worked in the arts and nonprofits, so a trust seemed unlikely. I guess Duke wanted to see the car for himself.”
For a moment, Grant just blinked at her, a stunned look glued to his face. And then he started to laugh, that same glowing look from the Lost Key flooding over him. Sam felt her pulse slow down and her own smile return as she watched him grin.
“Sam, I hope you didn’t put money on me.”
“Why?” She narrowed her eyes. Using her best suspicious voice, she asked, “Are you the Dolores Park weed man?”
Grant laughed even harder and shook his head. “No. I do have a trust fund, though.”
“What?” Sam balked. Maybe she misunderstood how much money opera singers made. Google could be misleading.
“My biological father—his name is Gary—is a banker based in New York and Hong Kong. He is where the trust comes from.”
“Oh,” Sam said, letting silence fall between them for a minute before echoing Grant’s words from earlier. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I actually don’t mind.” Grant smiled over at her, then said, “My mom got pregnant when they were both in college. At the time Gary didn’t want to be a father. My mom met my dad, Wei, not long after I was born. They married when I was two, and he legally adopted me. As far as I am concerned, I only have one dad—Wei. He read me bedtime stories, came to my soccer games, took me to some god-awful piano lessons, and saw me graduate from medical school. My dad did the emotional work that dads do, so that title remains his.”
“Makes sense,” Sam said, watching Grant’s face soften again as he listed all the things his dad did for him.
“Anyhow, I guess when I was around ten, Gary got in touch with my mom. She doesn’t like to talk about it, but as far as I can tell, she worked it out so that whatever he would have wanted to pay in child support, he would put into a trust. To be honest, I don’t think she thought about how much money was actually on the table. I think she thought maybe a year or two of college and then he’d get over it and move on.” Grant laughed, then added, “To her credit, she never lied to me. When Gary was in town, she would give me the option to see him. Sometimes I did; sometimes I didn’t. Anyway, when I turned eighteen, Gary actually made good on his promise. I didn’t need all the money to get me through school, so my trust turned into my car and house fund.”
“That is better than college. Those car seats feel like a hug.”
“I know, right? I love those things. They make traffic a luxury experience.” Grant beamed over at her as they walked back toward where they had parked.
For a moment, Sam let herself war over whether to ask Grant any questions about his story. Part of her was afraid that if she asked the wrong thing, he might close up again, and she would get Business Grant back. But another part of her wanted to know more about him. How he spent his time outside of the hospital, basketball, and apparently, having the time of his life in traffic.
“Do you still see Gary?” she asked, carefully watching his face for any signs that he might be done with the subject.
“If it’s convenient for me, we might grab coffee, but I don’t go out of my way.” Grant shrugged one shoulder, then scowled slightly. “I don’t typically tell people about Gary. Does that sound cold?”
“Not any colder than me saying my mom is controlling.” Sam chuckled and watched the lines on Grant’s face relax. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she registered that he might be nervous about what she thought of him, and it made her heart squeeze just a little. For good measure, she threw in, “But I’m coldhearted. Hence why I like ice cream so much.”
“In that case, I guess we’ll just be coldhearted together. Must be why we are engaged,” Grant said, beaming at her corny joke as they approached the block where the car was parked. Pulling his keys from his pocket, he said, “What do you say, fiancée? Want to check out another venue? Or do you need more weird-flavored ice cream?”
“Is both an option?” Sam laughed.
“I think I can arrange for that.” Grant winked at her as he unlocked the car, and Sam was almost positive that if she hadn’t been holding so tightly to her heart, it might have floated away.
Chapter Fourteen
“No wonder the chaplains were so willing to share.”
Duke’s voice bounced off the sad beige walls and shook Sam out of her horror-induced stupor. When Dr. Franklin had said the space needed work, she’d thought he meant it needed paint or something. This room didn’t just need paint; it needed an act of God.
On one side of the room, decrepit-looking benches were piled high. Dust and spiderwebs that looked too costumey to be real hung off them. On the other side of the room was a series of scattered folding chairs, ancient desks, a tipped-over garbage bin, and one half-deflated BOSU ball. The one bright spot was a stained glass window depicting a peaceful garden scene, which was mysteriously mounted on a wall with no windows.
“The head of the chaplains and therapy services swore that the window works if we change the light bulb,” Grant said helpfully. Taking in Duke’s look of skepticism, he added, “I don’t think an imam would lie.”
“There is a first time for everything,” Theo said under his breath. Jehan snickered at the joke, which she quickly turned into a cough when Kaiya glared at her.
Turning her attention to Sam and Grant, Kaiya asked, “This is what we’ve got?”
“Yes,” Sam said, feeling disappointment set in. It wasn’t really the grand unveiling she had wanted to give Kaiya and the team. She had hoped to at least run down here and look at the room before everyone else, but of course, a doctor’s schedule was never that simple. Instead, she’d been called in to observe the birth of triplets, an experience that was great for her continued education but terrible for her preparation.
“And this is who is going to help us get the room together?” Kaiya sniffed at the stale air, then looked at the group of helpers Sam had cobbled together.
“That’s right.” Sam tried to sound upbeat. When she’d recruited everyone, it seemed like enough people; three players from her and Grant’s respective basketball teams, plus Duke, Jehan, and two other emergency doctors Jehan had managed to guilt into helping. Of course, now that she was taking the mess in, Sam wished she’d recruited the entire hospital basketball league.
Finally, Kaiya shrugged and said, “We’ll make it work.”
Next to her, Sam heard Grant’s audible sigh and looked over just in time to see his shoulders relax. After Kaiya had agreed to be part of the project, Sam had sent Grant literally everything she’d written. He hadn’t said much about her at the time, but given the way he was acting, Sam suspected she wasn’t the only one who was a little starstruck.
Nodding at Kaiya, Grant said, “All right. While Kaiya works on a new layout for the room, why don’t we get busy cleaning up? Theo, Raphael, and Kelly, would you all be up for carrying the benches and old furniture down to storage? Jehan and the emergency team, maybe you all could be in charge of clearing up the dust and dirt. And Duke, I’m sorry, but you are the tallest, and before we can get this room painted professionally, someone has to take the cobwebs off the walls.”
“Well, what are you and Sam gonna do?” Duke asked, frowning at the walls like they might bite him. Sam almost laughed. Grant had no way of knowing that he had literally just assigned the biggest neat freak in the entire hospital to lean up against dirt.
“We’re going to take on the most emotionally taxing job of all.” Grant half smiled and paused a beat for dramatic effect before saying, “Putting together IKEA furniture.”
“Woof. Good luck with that,” someone from the emergency team laughed.
“If you want to sit on the dirty floor and wonder where the hell I9 is, you’re welcome to join us.” Sam smiled sweetly at Duke while the rest of the room started to shuffle toward their assignments.
Duke looked down at the floor, then back at the walls before saying, “I’ll stay standing, thanks.”
For a moment, Sam and Grant watched Duke shuffle toward the wall in silence as if he were about to face a firing squad. Turning to look at Sam, Grant said, “Do you think he is gonna pass out before he gets to the wall, or . . .”
