I guffaw, nearly spitting out my eggs. “Are you kidding? You know I just got my heart and life and really nice apartment situation massively shattered, right?”

“I mean,” Mom starts, “I wouldn’t really say just.”

I stare at her incredulously. “It’s only been three months.”

My parents shrug in unison. Baba speaks up next. “We just thought, knowing you . . . you’d be ready to get out there again.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m probably never going to be ready.” But even to me, the words sound more like a bratty teenage declaration than anything with real meaning behind it.

I ignore that thought.

“How about we go out to dinner tonight? My treat,” I say.

“Oh, we’d love to,” Mom says.

“But we have tickets to see Tom Jones at the community center,” Baba finishes.

“We might be able to call in a favor and snag an extra ticket. Want to come?” Mom asks.

They are looking at me expectantly. What’s my alternative? Curl up under a blanket and scroll through four hundred cable channels like an anthropologist discovering the life habits of a bygone species?

On second thought, that does sound tempting....

But then I catch the expectant look in my mom’s eyes, smile, and say, “Sure. I’d love that.”

* * *

The favor they call in is from their friend Meredith and, judging by the way Meredith keeps shoving her phone in front of me, set to her daughter’s Facebook profile, I get the feeling that the favor might actually involve me more than I thought.

This feeling is fully corroborated during intermission.

Meredith has left me to “look after her phone” while she goes to the bathroom. Which leaves my mom with the perfect opening.

“Angie lives in New York too,” she says in a way that I’m sure she thinks is casual.

I have to stifle a laugh. “You don’t say.”

There’s a pregnant pause while she studies the smiling redhead that is Meredith’s full-size screensaver and then says, as if she just came up with this conclusion, “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

I hand the phone over without looking at it. “Here. I think you should be in charge of Meredith’s phone.”

“Maybe you could just friend request her,” Mom says. She’s never been long on subtlety. “I know she wants kids, soon, too—just like you.”

“Mom. I already told you. I’m not ready to date anyone.”

“How do you know if you don’t try?” she asks.

I look over at Baba in a futile bid for some backup but, as per usual, he’s just there to bolster Mom’s argument like an overeager assistant DA. “We’ve met her. She’s very nice.”

“I’m glad,” I say. “For Meredith. And Angie. And you guys if you had to spend time with her. But the answer is no. I need a break from romance, okay?”