May Moon's Book of Choices

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May Moon’s book of choices
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someone who can get the job done. That’s you.”
Margaret Moon rolled her eyes. “You mean you need
someone too dumb to say NO to a tough assignment,”
she said.
“Same thing.”
She laughed. At least he was being honest.
“You accept the assignment? Good. I’ll send you full
details in an email.”
As she lowered the phone handset, Margaret Moon
felt like a bus driver who had just been diverted onto a
route with danger signals all over it.
* * *
That night, she broke the news to her daughter.
“We’re moving house,” she said. “We’re going to a
new town.”
“Yippee,” saidMay, a spirited child with a big appetite
for adventure.
Her mother decided that encouraging positive
expectations would probably be a bad thing at this
stage. “Well, it may not be a ‘yippee’ thing, to be
honest. The place we’re heading for may, er, take a bit
of adjusting to.”
“Oh,” saidMay, puzzled. “Are you saying we’removing
to, like, a HORRIBLE place? Why would we want to
move somewhere bad?”
Mrs. Moon sat down next to her daughter. “No, I’m
not saying that it’s a bad place. It’s just that—well, it
doesn’t have a reputation as a fun spot. We’re going to
have to cheer it up a bit ourselves, I think.”
May refused to be satisfied with this answer. She
remembered the last time her mother tried to cover up
something—and a few days later, they were in a panic,
packing to leave town.
“Okay, what happened? Did you do something
wrong?”