Page 72 of A Home for Harmony

“I’m sure he and I will work it out just fine,” Erica said. A phone rang. “That’s you. It’s upstairs.”

“It can wait,” she said.

“It might be important,” Erica said.

“It hardly ever is, but I’ll go check.”

She ran up the stairs and grabbed her phone, saw it was her mother and sent it to voicemail, then stuck her phone in her back pocket.

“Guess it wasn’t important,” Erica said when Harmony returned to finish her lunch.

“Nope,” she said happily. “Just Mom.”

When Erica’s phone beeped on the counter, her sister looked down. “Now she wants me.”

“At least it’s a text and not a call,” she said.

Erica picked up the phone. “She wants me to call her. She says it’s important.”

“Do you think it is?” Harmony asked. “You just talked to her a few days ago to tell her about the engagement.”

“I don’t know,” Erica said. “But I’m not taking the chance.”

“If it was medical related, she’d call Theo first,” she said.

“You’re right,” Erica said. “If I don’t call now while I’ve got the chance, she’ll blow my phone up and drive me nuts. I rather get it over with.”

Her sister hit a button and then she heard her mother’s voice loudly almost yelling in Erica’s ear. “Oh, thank God you called me back right away,” her mother said.

“What’s going on, Mom?”

Her mother normally didn’t talk this loudly so that Harmony could hear it. “I’m trying to reach your sister. Is she there? She always ignores me.”

Harmony nodded her head yes. “She’s eating lunch with me. Her phone is upstairs. Here, you can talk to her on mine.”

She grabbed the phone from her sister. “Hi, Mom. I’m sorry. I came down to get lunch. What’s going on?”

“I wanted to let you know that someone sent a package here for you.”

“For me?” she asked. “What was it?”

“It’s a box full of different things. None of it really goes together and there is a card inside that is wishing you happy holidays. It looks like it’s from some business. I don’t know how they got my address.”

The tension returned in her shoulders. “What is the name of the business?”

“It’s letters and numbers. Like a symbol or something.”

She rolled her eyes. “Take a picture of it and send it right now so I can see it.” She waited for her mother to do that and then recognized it. “That’s from a company that I did some sponsorships for in college.”

They’d had her address back then.

“Guess they want you to do some more,” her mother said. “Really, Harmony? This stuff looks like junk. I can’t believe you’re lowering yourself to pushing some plastic knickknacks.”

“If you can ship it to me, I’ll take care of it,” she said. “I probably won’t do anything.”

She didn’t know why they didn’t reach out to her online but wouldn’t worry too much about it now.

“When are you going to get an actual job?” her mother asked.