Borrowing Trouble by Mae Wood Page A

with your mom.”
    “Don’t want to talk about my mom. Want to talk about how to handle my current situation.”
    “Pretty sure you know how to handle that. I’m going to guess you’ve got about twenty-five years of experience handling that.”
    “You need to at least help because this is all your fault. What are you wearing?”
    “Really?” I looked at my closed office door. “Fine. Navy pinstriped skirt suit that’s probably a few inches shorter than entirely appropriate and getting shorter by the second.”
    “Now you’re talking.” A rap on my door startled me back into the present and I smoothed my skirt back down my thighs.
    “Yes,” I called, tucking my phone under my chin. John pushed through the door. “Hey, I’ve got to go,” I told Trip. “Talk later.”
    “You are fucking ruining me. I mean that.”
    With a laugh I ended the call and gave John my attention. We talked business. All afternoon and evening I kept checking the status of my Scrabble game. No plays. Shit. I hope I didn’t push him too hard. Come on, Trip, play with me.
    All night I heard nothing. No evening phone call. No email forwarding a wacky news story. No snapshot of something he’d seen on an early morning ride. No complaining about some idiocy that happened in a meeting. No text. And no move on our Scrabble game.

Chapter Ten
     
     
    I pushed through the door of Joseph, the Memphis outpost of an ultra-exclusive Houston boutique, at noon on the nose.
    Here goes nothing .
    I was steeling myself for shopping and lunch with Bitsy. The world felt a little more right when I’d woken up to “apropos” laid on the virtual board and an accompanying voicemail about entertaining customers at a dinner that ran late, but one-on-one girl time with his mom meant I still felt off kilter.
    “Oh, Marisa!” exclaimed Bitsy, her brown eyes glittering with excitement. She enveloped me in a sincere embrace. “I’m so happy you were able to meet me. Come, let’s see what Josie had sent in for us.”
    Taking me by the hand, she led me through the cosmetics counters and past the shoe department to the back of the store. This woman knows how to dress . I admired her slim figure maneuver quickly though the store on tan ostrich stilettos.
    I’m totally going to steal those shoes . And the clean lines of that plum shift dress are amazing on her, especially with her bobbed hair. I wonder if she does prints or only wears solids? Maybe I should ditch prints and I could look this chic. Am I too old for the Anthropologie bohemian look outside of work hours? Is it time for me to bob my hair? Wait. This is Trip’s mother. I’m not going to turn into his mother.
    A woman clad in a smart red and black blazer greeted me with a warm handshake. “Hi, I’m Josie. So nice to meet you.”
    “Likewise.”
    “Mrs. Brannon told me all about you and the upcoming St. Jude event, but since we haven’t met before, I’ll confess, I was a little blind in ordering. I thought long for the event and mainly ordered gowns, but now that I see how tall and lean you are, maybe short? Your legs are fabulous.”
    I’m being sized up, literally, by a woman I don’t know. Yes, this is a totally normal Thursday lunch.
    “Oh, Marisa, you just have to trust Josie’s judgment. She never leads me astray. I was thinking bronze this year, but I’m in her hands.”
    “Can I get either of you a glass of wine?” offered Josie.
    “We are here on serious business, so of course!” replied Bitsy. Josie wandered off in search of the refreshments.
    Now I’m day drinking with his mom while looking at thousand dollar dresses. This cannot get stranger .
    “I asked Josie to set us up in the big dressing room.”
    Wait, now I’m changing in and out of dresses with his mother? I’m going to need two glasses of wine for this. And Trip is so going to owe me when he gets back from Pennsylvania.
    “Great,” I said with feigned happiness, taking the proffered glass of white wine from