“Because Lauren earned it,” Mom said.
“How?”
Mom looked at me over the top of her magazine. “By not asking questions like that.”
When I turned fourteen, I got a sheet cake from Stop & Shop and a gift card to a bookstore. Mom forgot to put my name on the cake. It just said Happy Birthday! in blue icing.
Paige laughed so hard she choked on her soda.
“Maybe they ran out of letters,” she said.
The only person who ever made me feel like I mattered back then was Grandpa Arthur.
He was my mother’s father. He’d started a machine shop in New Britain when he was twenty-four, with a loan from his uncle and one used lathe. By the time he was sixty, Whitfield Precision had two hundred employees and made parts for airplanes. When he sold it, he sold it for a lot of money. I didn’t know how much back then. I just knew he drove a twenty-year-old Buick and wore the same three cardigans in rotation.
