Francesca looked at Katie. They both rolled their eyes.

Finally Katie turned to the tiny woman still holding her arm. “Grammy M,” Katie said, her voice warm with affection. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m grand. The sun feels good on these old bones. I’ve no complaints a’tall.”

“You’re not so old,” Katie reminded her. “Besides, I’m counting on you living forever.”

Mary-Margaret O’Shea had been born in Ireland and married at seventeen to a young man she’d only met twice. Less than two weeks after the wedding he’d taken her away from home and family, bringing her across the ocean to a great new land. They’d eventually settled in California.

Grammy M squeezed her hand. “I’m plannin’ on it, darlin’.”

“So,” Katie’s mother said, expectantly. “If you’re not interested in the sous chef, does that mean you have someone special in your life?”

Katie looked at Francesca, who stuck her finger down her throat and silently gagged.

Katie knew she had two choices. She could tell the truth-that she wasn’t seeing anyone and that she was perfectly okay with that. Only no one would believe her. Instead her grandmothers and mother would fuss and chide and torture her for the entire weekend. They would bring up names of men who had never married (and once they reached forty without tying the knot, how couldn’t there be something wrong with them?), men who were recently divorced, even men who were thinking about divorce. They would talk about her growing old alone, about the odds of finding a man after she turned thirty. They would try to love her into submitting to the family credo of “marry young and have many babies.”

Or she could lie.

While she generally tried to tell the truth, desperate times and all that.