A small breath escaped her. “I want to. Mostly. I mean I do, but . . .” Her voice trailed off. She looked at Leese and softly said, “It’s Nana.”

Leese stared at her half sister, then flopped her head against the seat back. “Good Lord in the sky. Of course it is.”

“Nana?” I asked. “Is that your grandmother?”

“Not mine.” Leese gave me a thumbs-up. “Nana comes from her mother’s side. Lots of spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child parenting in that family.”

“She’s my grandma,” Mia said. “And she loves me. But she says if I move in with Josh without being married that she’ll never speak to me again.”

Leese, judging from her expression, seemed to think this would be a situation to be welcomed, not avoided, but Mia’s sad expression indicated she felt the opposite.

“You’re good at fixing things,” Mia said. “You helped my whole family after our dad was killed. Do you think you could help me this time, too? Help me and Josh?”

She gave me a long, sad look, her lower lip trembling. And there was only one answer I could give.

“I’ll do what I can.”

*   *   *

A few hours later, when Eddie, Julia, and I stopped at a lakeside park to eat our bookmobile-day lunch, I told them both about what I’d promised that morning.

Eddie, up on the dashboard, rolled over so that his back was to us. Julia’s response was a loud and long laugh. “Seriously?” she asked while wiping her eyes. “You’re going to go up against that termagant? I wish you luck. You’re going to need it.”

Someday I’d get used to living in a small town. That day, clearly, was not the current one. “You know her?”

“Natalie and Bob Conti live across the street from the house my parents bought after all us kids moved out. Well, just Natalie now, because Bob died years ago. My dad always said she henpecked him into an early grave. My mom always said that if he couldn’t stand up for himself, then he deserved what he got.”

I knew Julia’s parents had passed away, not too long ago, both in their early nineties, less than a year apart. They’d both had the blessing of sliding peacefully into a sleep from which they’d never woken, her mom on the back deck in the summer sunshine, her dad one night after a poker game with his friends. If I could pick, I’d take the deck. I was horrible at poker.

At some point, I realized Julia had been talking to me. “Sorry, what was that?”

She squinted at me over her baloney-and-cheese sandwich. “How, exactly, are you going to convince Natalie to do a one-eighty on her entire life’s outlook?”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

Julia snorted. “Not from me. I always did my best to stay away from her. Negativity just oozes out of that woman.”