“Hide it in a really good spot. She’s been getting sloppy lately,” Dad called on his way downstairs.
As hard as I tried to ignore the bugs inside the glass vial, I couldn’t help looking. While you might think bedbugs are microscopic, allow me to educate you: They are not. Bedbugs aren’t just visible to the human eye; you could go mano a mano with one as it plunged its outstretched pincers into a particularly succulent patch of your skin. So that flimsy silk cloth, cut from one of Mom’s discarded scarves and clamped on top of the vial with a metal ring? That insubstantial barrier made me nervous, but Auggie needed to be able to sniff out their pheromones.
“Um, Dad, these are the dead ones,” I called, frowning, as I trotted down the staircase. Dad usually kept a decoy vial to test Auggie, since she was only rewarded for finding live bedbugs. This was the second time in a week Dad had made that mistake.
He dug into his fanny pack for the right vial, shaking his head as we swapped. He said, “Old age.”
I gripped the container tight because the worst thing I could do now was drop it. Do that, and bedbugs would infiltrate our home like an underground spy cell, lurking, lurking, lurking before attacking. Once entrenched, they were a pain to eradicate, even with a bedbug-sniffing dog.
While Mom took Auggie outside, I scouted the living room for a tough hiding place. Torrid romance novels—Mom’s version of Prozac—teetered precariously next to her armchair, a sign that she was under extreme pressure at work. I swear, she must have been stressed when she was pregnant. That was the only logical explanation for how she’d managed to persuade Dad to name us after her favorite characters: Ash and Max for the twins, Shana for me. Always the lifesaver, Dad had insisted on altering the spellings of our names in case word ever leaked out about their steamy origins.
My gaze landed on the bulbous floor lamp that Mom had found at a recent garage sale. If I unscrewed the thick base, there might be room for the vial.…
“Okay, ready!” I called as I widened the front door, then retreated to the kitchen. Auggie darted into the living room, nose to the floor, with Mom holding her leash. In one minute flat, she parked herself in front of the lamp, head cocked to the side: That’s the best you can do?
Training done, Mom sang out Dad’s name—“Gregor!”—en route to the kitchen, where the table was already set with a neat stack of unopened bills and a platter of cookies for their biweekly budgeting ritual. Five years ago, on her fiftieth birthday, Mom had let her hair go silvery gray—why fight it? she had told her longtime hairdresser. But because her blue eyes sparkle as they did now, Mom is often mistaken for being years younger. “Guess what time it is?”
“Oh, baby!” Dad immediately drew to her side from where he was stretching in the hallway and planted a kiss on her lips.
“Dad! Shower!” I protested, waving my hand in front of my nose. “Mom, how can you stand it?”
Dad dropped his arm around Mom’s shoulders and answered, “True love.”
“Speaking of which…” Mom said a bit too casually. “Brian’s mother called last night.”
“You’re kidding.” I stopped midstride from going to the sink to get Dad and myself water. “About what?”
Mom’s mouth pursed. “To discuss her ‘concern’ and ‘dismay’ over your ‘pathology’ of abruptly ending relationships.”
“This,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself, “is a nightmare.”
“Just for the record,” Dad said, grabbing a cookie before Mom moved the platter out of his reach, “we’d be more ‘concerned’ and ‘dismayed’ if you stayed with that mama’s boy.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Mom crowed, proud of their riff on my love life. “Sine qua non, honey!”
“I’m so glad you find my life amusing,” I told them as I helped myself to a glass of water.
And my friends think my parents are cool? Really, Mom ought to have those Latin words tattooed on her ankle. It’s her sweet nothing to Dad and cautionary tale to my brothers and me to hold out for that one necessary condition, that absolutely essential quality that we couldn’t live without in a person. Without that sine qua non, says Mom, every relationship is doomed to fail, no matter how smart the girl is, how good looking the guy, how much attraction there might be in the beginning.
Dad’s phone rang, and I plucked the cookie out of his hand as he walked past me toward the porch to take the call.
“So, honey,” Mom said when we were alone in the kitchen, casting me a sidelong glance, “maybe you should spend some time thinking about your sine qua non?”
“Mom.”
“Or take a break from boys for a little while.”
“Mom.”
“A no-boy diet for a couple of months. Really, you should consider it.”