I was in hell. It was my day-off at work and I was in hell. More specifically, I was in the heart of London with my mum, Joss, and Jo, perusing through the shops to find appropriate attire for this dinner with Baldie. Mum had decided earlier that Joss and Jo didn't own any clothes that were suitable for the posh restaurant that we were being forced to go to. I don't exactly know why my presence was mandatory. I guess Mum didn't think that she was capable of handling Joss and Jo by herself out in public but she was probably right, especially since they were both in horrible moods. Neither one of them liked the idea of our mum dated Baldie but Joss was the most unabashed about announcing that opinion to the world. Jo might have been a little more reserved about conveying her dislike of him but it wasn't unnoticeable. She just didn't try to set his toupee on fire like Joss did.

I couldn't blame them for not liking him. He made my skin crawl. It was something about his eyes that made me uneasy. They reminded me of Muggle paintings that seem to watch you relentlessly. It was like they're waiting for you to turn your back so that they can attack. I didn't want to make that comparison out-loud, though, or it might make Jo and Joss act worse around him. My objective was to get us all throughout the evening alive and I couldn't do that if I empowered their bad behavior.

"I don't see why we have to dress up for him," Joss complained after we reached the third shop. The first two shops had been unsuccessful and this one was bound to be too. Joss and Jo's opinion of fashion was vastly different than Mum's and none of them seemed to want to compromise.

"I don't see why I have to go," Jo retorted.

"Because you're part of this family, Josephine, and this is a family outing. And Jocelyn, it's not going to kill you to look presentable for one night of your life," our mother replied in a forced cheery tone, smiling maniacally at the other shoppers as if her grin would distract them from Joss and Jo's behavior.

"I don't see why," Joss informed her. "It's a ridiculous waste. The food is going to be awful, it's going to be stuffy, and it' going to be painful."

Mum managed to keep her delirious smile, "Because it's the first time that Archibald is meeting Valerie and the first time that he gets to spend any time with the rest of you. We need to make a good impression."

"More like a false impression," Jo scoffed.

She was right. This was a fake. It was like giving him false hope that his girlfriend's daughters were civilized, polite members of society. We weren't even part of his society. We were part of the Wizarding World. Everything about this dinner was going to be a lie. Mum was going to say I was a doctor (maybe a brain surgeon if she felt like bragging) and she'd say that Val was an important correspondent for a London Muggle paper and talk about how Jo and Joss attend some prestigious boarding school in another country. Everything about this dinner was going to be a lie and the lie that we often eat escargot at an overpriced restaurant is probably going to be one of the smallest ones.

"I'm going to go pick out a few dresses for you two. When I get back, I expect the both of you to be better behaved," Mum told them, breaking her creepy smile to give Joss and Jo pointed looks. The smile was back within a few milliseconds and she flounced off to check the racks for potential outfits.

Jo groaned unhappily, "Do we really have to do this?"

"Yes," I replied honestly.

"But what if I play sick?" she questioned hopefully.

I snorted, "Come on, Jo, you're smarter than that. Mum'd never believe it and even if she did, she'd still make you go. Val's coming all the way in from Romania and Mum's not going to be happy unless all four of us go. It's not going to be that bad."

Joss and Jo both gave me disbelieving looks. "What have you been smoking?" Joss demanded. "Of course it's going to be 'that bad'. This is dinner with Archibald Francis Loddington III." She spoke Baldie's full name with a high-pitched squeal, the same way that our mother spoke his name whenever she was trying to impress her mates.

"Your impression of Mum is getting kind of creepy," I informed her. "Alright fine. Let me rephrase. It's not going to be as bad as how miserable she's going to make your lives if you don't go. Our mother is the Queen of Grudges. She'd probably use this against you on her deathbed. It's just maybe three hours. You can burn the dress Mum buys you afterwards if it makes you feel better."

"I plan on it," Joss huffed, still not looking enthusiastic about the idea of going to dinner with the world's creepiest man.

"It's still going to be hell," Jo pointed out. "Even if it's only for a few hours. It's still going to be awful."

I nodded. I wasn't even going to try and lie about that. She was right. It was going to be painful. "Probably but still not as bad as Mum is going to be if we don't go. Even if you do come up with some excuse about why you can't go, she'll just reschedule. She'll reschedule and reschedule until we finally suffer through this thing. If we do this the first time then she's less likely to ruin your lives for the rest of the summer. You still live with her, remember?"

"But not for very much longer! I'm going to graduate after this year!" Joss reminded me.

"But even then you're still not going to be able to afford to move out right away," I informed her. "You don't get paid for training and you don't even know if you'll get in. You're going to have to live with her until training's over if not longer. Besides, Jo has to live with her for a lot longer than that so try to be a little bit compassionate for her. You know that if Mum's mad at one of us then she tends to take it out on all of us and that's not fair to Jo. Trust me; it's not worth avoiding this."

"We could just try to wait it out until him and Mum break up," Jo suggested hopefully.

I scoffed, "They're not going to break up anytime soon."

"You don't know that!" Jo reminded me. "They could not even last the week! You're not a Seer! You can't tell the future!"

"No, I'm not," I admitted. "But I don't need the Sight to know that this relationship isn't going to disappear anytime soon. He's obsessed with her and she likes bragging about him. He meets all of her standards. He's a rich, boring Muggle. He's not going to go bankrupt anytime soon, he isn't likely to leave her for a younger woman, and he's not a wizard. Trust me; the only way that we're going to be rid of him is if he dies. And don't get any idea, Jocelyn!" I added after seeing the inspired glint in Joss' eyes.

"We could try to break them up," Jo proposed. "We could try to drive him off."

I snorted again, shaking my head, "Mum's more likely to give you up than she is to give him up. We just need to get through this dinner and hope that it makes Mum act a little less ridiculous, okay? It's really the only option we have."

"Fine but I'm not eating snails or fish eggs," Jo allowed unhappily.

"And I'm not going to let him get through this dinner unscathed," Joss added. "If we have to suffer then so does he."

I rolled my eyes, knowing that this was the best I was going to get. "Fine. If you don't use magic against him then I'll try to run interference with Mum and make her go a little easier on you. And if the food is awful then I guess Val and I can take you out for chips after Mum goes to bed."

Joss gave me a dubious look, "Why are you cool with this? You'd usually lecture us until you were blue in the face."

"Because sometimes we have to unite against a common enemy. I might not condone the way that you treat him but I don't like him either and I know that Mum dating is hard for you," I told them. "We're all going to need to stick together if we want to survive this whole disaster."

And the dinner was a disaster. We were late to the restaurant because Joss and Mum had a disagreement over the amount of makeup she thought was acceptable. He was waiting for us at too small of a table, wearing a tweed suit. Apparently he didn't remember that Mum had four daughters instead of two. He also made the mistake of ordering for us, which resulted in our table being filled with plates of caviar, escargot, lamb, veal, and lobster. None of my sisters or I were relatively impressed and I was going to have to make good on my promise to take Jo and Joss for chips after all. I hated seafood and the idea of eating fish eggs or snails. Plus, whenever I saw lamb or veal all I saw was cute little baby lambs and cows being taken away from their mothers and slaughtered. To say the least, I stuck to the salad.

If being late, having Baldie forget that there were four of us, and having to pretend to be interested in disgusting snob food was bad then what happened next was worse. Much, much worse. Mum got a glass of wine and started talking. Or I should probably say "lying". The more she drank, the more contradictory her story got. I thought that she would have refrained from drinking while she tried to impress Baldie but apparently not.

"My daughter Josephine is going to become a Prime Minister," she drunkenly informed the table. "She's so pretty that she could probably be a movie star though! A movie star! She's too smart to waste her brains on that though! She's going to be the first woman in space!"

"Mum, there's already been women who've gone into space," Joss pointed out, smirking at our mother's drunkenness. She was using this distraction to get away with shooting her peas into Baldie's water glass while he tried to keep Mum from falling out of her chair.

"But not to Mars! No, no, Venus! Women should go to Venus!" our mother made a dramatic gesture with her hand, knocking Val's glass of water onto the floor.

I didn't know if I should be ducking under the table to save myself the embarrassment of being seen with her or if I should be trying to take her home so that she couldn't humiliate any of us anymore. "Mum, you should stick to water," I told her, trading her glass of brandy with my untouched water.

"And my Emma! Isn't she just a darling? You'd never think that she couldn't get a husband by looking at her! It must be that she's so smart that she intimidates blokes. I mean, she was the first person to successfully perform open heart surgery after all!" she lied vibrantly, ignoring that waitress was scrambling to clean up the mess she'd made with Val's water.

"I thought that you said she was a neurosurgeon?" Baldie pointed out. I nearly snorted when he said that. If it'd taken him this long to realize that my mother was drunk and lying through her teeth then he was a bigger moron than I thought.

"And Valerie!" Mum gushed, grasping Val's hand so abruptly that Val nearly jumped out of her seat. "Oh she's such a good girl, even if she did leave so far away from home! She still loves her mummy!"

"Erm yeah, of course I do," Val awkwardly patted her hand.

"She's very important you know," she informed Baldie. "She single-handedly brought the downfall of communism in Russia!"

"Mum, Val works in Eastern Europe, not Russia," Joss snickered.

Jo abruptly got to her feet, "I'm going to the loo."

"Oh, pet, do you want me to go with you?" Mum looked up at her with wide eyed sincerity.

"I'm not a baby!" Jo snapped. "I can go to the bloody bathroom all by my bloody self!" She stomped dramatically across the restaurant, brushing aside the waiters and waitresses in her way.

"Well someone's obviously having her 'time of the month'," Mum commented in a sing-song voice.

I wanted to comment on how Jo's behavior was brought on by the stress of her mother embarrassing her in public and the frustration of having to be there against her will, but I decided against it. Mum's mood could easily swing when she was drinking and I didn't want to risk making her turn into a nasty drunk. "Mum, we should probably go soon," I decided to tell her. "I have a shift at the hospital in a few hours."

"You work too much," she told me, reaching across the table to painfully pinch my cheeks. "You know, it wouldn't kill you to cut back a little. It'd give you a little more time to find a husband. I mean, you're not getting any younger and this is the peak season for you to go husband-hunting!"

I wanted to start bashing my head on the table. I swear, alcohol, Baldie, and getting her children married off must be the only things that she thought about.

"I have a nephew about your age that you might be interested in," Baldie offered. "I could make a call if you like."

Joss and Val both tried to hide their snickers behind their napkins, probably finding the idea of me dating someone in Baldie's family hysterical. "No thank you," I managed to tell him as politely as I could. I turned to my giggling sisters, giving them the most potent Look of Death that I could manage. That shut them up pretty quick.

"You should give it a try, Emma," Mum tried to persuade me. "You don't meet any blokes except the ones that you work with."

"And what's wrong with the blokes that I work with?" I retorted, my irritation at practically being called an old maid beginning to seep through.

"They're weird." Weird was Mum's code word for anything magical. She'd sometimes call it 'unnatural' but usually it was 'weird'.

Jo returned back to the table not a minute too soon. "We're going," I announced quickly before she had a chance to take her seat.

"But we haven't even got dessert yet," Mum complained.

"Yes, Mum, but I have to get to the hospital," I replied touchily, getting to my feet. Val and Joss quickly stood, eager to leave almost as much as I was. "Potential husbands find working girls so much more attractive than the unemployed."

The entire table went silent. This was a jab at Mum and everyone, except Baldie, seemed to know it. I didn't ever say these kinds of things to her but I was more than a little fed up with her prodding about my lack of a husband. She didn't exactly have a husband either and it wasn't anymore my fault that I was single than it was her fault that she was a widow.

"Come on, Mum, let's go," Val spoke up, rushing to help Mum to her feet. "It was very nice to meet you, Archibald."

"Erm yes, of course," Baldie nodded so vigorously that his toupee nearly went flying off his head. "Do you need my help getting her to the car?"

"No, we're fine," she assured him with a tight smile. "I'm sure she'll call in the morning. Let's go, girls."

She didn't need to tell us twice. Jo grabbed Mum's free arm and she and Val managed to drag her out of the restaurant with Joss and I trailing behind them.

"So it is true," Joss commented while the others forced Mum into our car. "You really are my sister."

I snorted, "Was there ever a doubt?"

"No, I guess not," she admitted. "I just always worried that Mum'd eaten your soul or something."

I rolled my eyes, "Mum doesn't eat souls. She just sort of leeches on them sometimes."

She grinned, "You know, you're not so bad all the time."

"Thanks?" I replied unsurely. What did she mean by 'not so bad'? I didn't think that I wanted to know.

Val returned from putting our mother in the backseat. "Mum says she's not speaking to you," she informed me.

Mum not speaking to me? That sounded almost like a reward than a punishment. Maybe then I'd get to go more than twenty four hours without her complaining about my lack of a husband or how she wanted grandchildren in the near future. Dear Merlin, I hoped so at least. I might have loved her but I really didn't like her sometimes.