Ovenshine

2.

Though she's been mulling over Dr. Clover's new assignment since she got it, it's nearly ten hours later and Indy has made zero progress.

When you scrape it free of all the flowery embellishments on the rubric and all the buzz words (formatting, word count, citations) bolded for emphasis as if their eyes wouldn't go straight to them anyway, it's a project she's done a million times before. It's little more than a simple research paper, and she knows some of the others have already picked some random cold case off the first page of the search results and decided to run with it. Not that Indy blames them. It's certainly the easiest way.

She just isn't very good at doing things the easy way.

Now, she waits just inside the dimly lit vestibule of a noisy bar and grille, a leather bench underneath her, a window—frigid as a sheet of ice, as if it absorbed the cool night beyond it—behind her. The sizzle of flames in the kitchen somewhere fill her ears, as does the merriment of mingling voices, coworkers and friends gathering after a long day at work, clinking glasses and yelling about whatever sports game was playing on the tiny televisions above the bar.

The hostess shoots Indy the third pitiful look she has in the past twenty minutes. Thus, for the third time, Indy wishes there was a polite, non-insane way to say that she isn't being stood up; her mom is just always like this.

The door swings open; Indy shudders involuntarily. Despite the fact it's just a casual weekday dinner, to "catch up," as she put it, Antoinette Helaire has dressed like she'll be heading to the red carpet immediately after the check's been paid. Bundled in a peacoat and high-heeled boots, her lips painted over red, she exhales and loosens her scarf from around her neck and grins when she sees Indy.

"Indy!" she says, always squealing like she hasn't seen her in weeks, like Indy didn't choose a school that was barely an hour away from her family. "There you are. How've you been? Have you been eating well? And this hair. I keep telling you, you need to do something with it."

Indy sighs, enduring her mother's onslaught of kisses. Absentmindedly, she tugs on one of her tightly-wound curls; it stretches about to the length of her shoulder before it springs right back into place. "Sometimes I let Sylvia test styles out on me, but isn't it fine like this too?"

Antoinette makes a face. Indy knows this face: she wants to say something else, and she will, but she'll save it for later. "Sure, of course. Sorry I was late, by the way. The Mitchells were having some friends over and I just wanted to pop in and say hi before I drove down."

Indy was hoping to get out of the night without discussing Percy at all, but of course she wouldn't be so lucky.

Indy nods at the hostess, who flashes a relieved smile and picks up two menus, ushering the pair back into the darkness of the restaurant. They get a booth against the window; the spire atop Proudley's library shines a dim gold in the distant night.

"Which reminds me," Antoinette says, wrestling her coat from her shoulders and laying it on the seat beside her. "They said they haven't heard from Percy in a while; he won't even answer Harvey's calls. Everything okay with him?"

The menu's very much what she expected. Burgers, an assortment of fried things, soups heavy with cheese and cream and a vegetable or two to make it healthy. Nevertheless, it's suddenly very interesting. Much more interesting than this conversation. "Percy? Yeah. Sure. Mm."

"Are you two fighting again?"

"We're not fighting," Indy says. She replays it in her head, and her voice sounds too combative. She softens it. "We don't—fight. We're just busy people, Mom. I didn't know going to the same college meant I had to keep track of him all the time."