1064: Give Me Just one Night

“Too pretty?” Tansy asked. “It is maybe too fancy for watching the countdown on TV with friends on New Year’s Eve?” She made a face that put her mother on alert.

“Maybe I should cancel. Maybe I shouldn’t have invited Enid and Theresa to spend New Year’s at grandpa’s. Not that I really invited them. And it’s not like it’s even a party, I’m dog-sitting because grandpa thinks I’m better at soothing Walter over fireworks than he is. They’re probably going to be bored. I didn’t even really invite them, it’s just Theresa was like that sounds like a good idea, can I bring my dog Daphne over, she freaks over fireworks, too, maybe she’ll feel security in numbers. I couldn’t be just like well, no, I don’t want you there, it would have been rude. So I said okay. Then she said she would ask Enid to come, too, since we couldn’t leave her alone on such an epic night. And I just, I…”

“Tans,” Justine took her daughter by her bare shoulders. “I think you can relax. Like you said it’s not some big party, it’s just you and two friends, not socializing with a ton of people you don’t know. Those two girls don’t want you feeling uncomfortable any more than you do. They won’t press you to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about. And if you’re still concerned that they might be a couple, that you might have to see Enid close with someone else, if they were a couple, I don’t imagine their New Year’s plans would include you, do you?”

Hope sat on her bed with an old fashioned piece of paper and a pencil in hand, writing out her New Year’s resolutions for the year. At only ten years old, she’d never actually made resolutions before, but a couple days earlier the morning show her mom watches had done this whole story about how resolutions were a useful way to make changes for the good in your life.

The thing was, Hope kept erasing then re-adding two of the resolutions, not sure whether they were for the good or not. The same old problem.

If only Lucy weren’t so distant from her parents maybe she’d understand her own behavior better. Even before her youthful pregnancy had proven the last straw for them, they hadn’t been close to her. Lucy felt as if she never really had known them.

So Lucy didn’t know if she’d inherited this indecisiveness from them and had in turn passed such a curse on to her own daughter or if it were a trait completely unique to her own overactive thought process.

Waffling seemed like a fairly terrible way to spend New Year’s Eve but it wasn’t like she had other plans and if she had they would have gone miserably with Lucy seemingly unable to get out of her own head and-

The doorbell rang. For a split second she felt happy for the company assuming Xavier had decided to stop by, but then Lucy remembered the drama he had going on with his ex and started to worry that this visit might be about her friend’s heartbreak which in no way would be a happy distraction from her own issues.

She was half right when she opened the door. It wasn’t by any means a happy distraction. It was her daughter’s father. Lucy crossed her arms. “Why can’t I get through a single holiday without someone dropping by and throwing my head into a tailspin. I mean, I can’t imagine an out of nowhere visit from you having any other affect.”

Episode 1065: Aura