Chapter 4
“I don’t think it’s supposed to look like this,” I tell Joanna, stepping away from my easel to inspect my work.
She leans around her own masterpiece (literally, it looks like it could hang in a museum somewhere) to look at my sorry painting. Honestly, it looks as if Charlie painted that bowl of fruit. Not true—Charlie would have painted a better version. His attention to detail is impeccable.
Six weeks ago, when Joanna announced to me that she was going to be heading into retirement at the start of the new year, she decided that she needed to seek out a fun hobby that could help occupy her time when she was a lady of leisure. Not sure why she felt the need to drag me along on her hobby-seeking adventure, since I’ll be the one to absorb all the work she’ll be giving up, but I’ve been along for the ride ever since.
So far, we’ve taken up power yoga (and then set it right back down), built a raised vegetable garden and planted ten different types of green plants before Jo decided that she didn’t like being in the sun so much and wanted an indoor hobby, and took two improv classes before the guy who never stepped out of his pirate character told me my hair was beautiful and that he’d like to see what it would look like on one of his dolls at home.
Yeah.
So, when Jo suggested we take up painting in the comfort of her kitchen while we sip white wine and listen to music, I was all for it.
Joanna scrunches her nose and shakes her head. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but I think you might be gettin’ worse.” I love her accent. It’s thicker than mine because she’s from the deep South. Sweet home Alabama.
I give a short laugh. “No, don’t sugarcoat it for me. Be honest and tell me how you really feel, why don’t you?”
Jo flashes me a sassy grin. “Honey, you know I love you more than a stick of butter. I don’t need to lie to you about your artistic abilities to prove it.”
And I do know that she loves me, which is why her honesty never hurts. It’s why I’m laughing at her comment instead of silently brooding over it like I would if my mom would have made it. Because if Melony Jones said something like that, it would have been to show me exactly where I fell short in her eyes. Why I needed to either hire the best private tutor and spend countless hours a week perfecting my technique so she could hang the finished product above her mantel for her supper club to ooh and ahh over, or hide it away forever, and for heaven’s sake, never let anyone know I have flaws.
By contrast, Jo stands up and fluffs her messy topknot—seriously, I want her long, gorgeous white-gray hair—and tops off my glass of wine before telling me to paint a line down the center of my orange.
“Then it’ll look like a big round butt,” she says with a satisfied smirk. “And that, darlin’, will make you laugh every single time you look at it.”
I nearly spit my wine back into my cup. Drinks are never safe with Jo around. There’s no telling when she’ll say something that makes you shoot it out your nose.
“Where’s Gary tonight?” I ask later, after she and I have packed up our canvases and moved to the couch. Her painting is a masterpiece of bright, delectable fruit. Mine, a plump booty covered in an orange spray tan. I actually wouldn’t mind having this peach for an ass. “And why doesn’t he ever get dragged along on these hobby adventures?”
Gary is Joanna’s husband, and he is just as likable as she is. He’s a sixty-six-year-old journalist who can work from anywhere and loves his job more today than he did the day he started thirty years ago. Joanna and Gary Halstead are just the sort of people to make my mom and dad turn up their noses. Gracious me, do you mean he had to work for his money?
The Halsteads moved into the Charleston area about five years ago simply because they’d always wanted to live here. That was when Joanna founded Southern Service Paws. These people are as down to earth as the ground itself.
I aspire to have what Jo and Gary have—the kind of love where a man will still walk into a room and pinch my butt after forty years of marriage. And I know this from witnessing it a few too many times for my liking.
A mischievous glint enters Jo’s eyes, and she wags her eyebrows playfully. “Gary’s not invited because I don’t like to mix my hobbies. And he already participates in a very favorite pastime of mine.”
“Ew,” I say, dramatically shoving my face into one of her oversized throw pillows.
Suddenly, I’m thirteen, and she’s my mom telling me about the birds and the bees. Except the irony is that Mom never actually told me about the birds and the bees. She gave me a book and walked away, because Melony Jones doesn’t have personal conversations.
I remove my face from the pillow and toss it at Jo instead. “Gross. I don’t want to know about your nighttime hobbies with Gary!”
She catches the pillow, laughing. I know she takes great amusement in the fact that I turn red easier than if I were on the beach with no sunscreen, because she always, always, always takes her inappropriate jokes a step further.
“I never said they are nighttime hobbies. Honestly, Evie, where’s your creativity? Thinking like that is going to give you the most boring relationship on the planet one day.”
La, la, la, not listening.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good inappropriate joke. But from the first day I met Joanna and Gary, they became the parents I never had—meaning, the parents I wish my current parents were. Because of this, I absolutely do not want to hear about my surrogate parents’ bedroom endeavors.
I curl up in a ball in the corner of Jo’s massive couch and shut my eyes. This day has felt way too long, and now it’s catching up to me. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about the creativity in my relationship, because it’s starting to look like I’m going to die a lonely old maid. Just me and Charlie forever.”
I gaze longingly at Charlie curled up at my feet. There’s so much comfort in seeing him resting. If he is resting peacefully, it means I’m safe too—no danger of a seizure.
“He won’t live as long as you.”
My eyes fly up to Jo, and I take in her smiling face. If I had another pillow, I’d throw it at her.
She laughs. “I’m sorry! I was just trying to lighten your heavy mood.”
“By telling me my dog is going to die?!”
She shrugs. “My humor is dark.”
I shake my head in a mock reprimand and sink back into my corner. I wish my couch were this big and comfy, but that tiny love seat was hard enough to fit in my apartment.
“Joking aside, I have no idea how you’re still single, Evie. You’re gorgeous. Funny. Driven. Leggy.”
Epileptic.
“As it turns out, men don’t really like to approach a woman with a dog wearing a bright-blue vest with a patch sewn on it that says, Hi, I’m single, and occasionally I lose consciousness and convulse on the ground.”
I can see in Jo’s eyes that she wants to make a sarcastic joke about the patch reference, but she refrains and instead says, “I wish there were something I could say to make it better. But I know there isn’t.”
Reason number 12,345 why I love Jo. She’s been listening to people living with disabilities for the past five years of running Southern Service Paws, and she knows that sometimes people just need to talk and be heard—not fixed.
“Can we change the subject?” I ask, feeling a little too spent from this day to go down a deep, heartfelt tunnel.
“Sure.” She pulls her legs up onto the couch to mirror my position. “Tell me how your meeting went today.”
I groan. Maybe I should just go home. Apparently, there is no acceptable topic for me and my “I hate everything” mood tonight. “I wished him good luck trying to walk with his head up his ass.”
Jo’s mouth falls open, just as I suspected it would. “Gracious, girl! Why’d you say that?”
I screw up my face and then shove it into the collar of my T-shirt to hide. What I said to Mr. Broaden was so unprofessional and a drastic overreaction to what he said. Sure, he was a class-A jerk to me, but I shouldn’t have responded the way I did. I should have smiled politely, thanked him for his time, and then gone home and stuck a hundred pins in the voodoo doll I made of him. Instead, I cast a bad light on our company.
“Well, in my defense, he was rude to me first. But still, I shouldn’t have said what I did. And definitely not in front of his ten-year-old daughter.”
“All right, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to pop some popcorn, and then you’re going to start from the beginning.”
And that’s what I do. I tell her everything. Well, almost everything. I leave out the part about him being ridiculously hot and me replaying the scene in my head a hundred times, except changing the course our conversation took and ending it with us making out in the corner. She doesn’t need to know any of that.
When my monologue is finished, Jo laughs and tells me she would have done the same thing. But I don’t believe her, because she treats the company like it’s her baby. She’s helped train more than sixty dogs that have literally changed people’s lives—giving them freedom in ways that medicine couldn’t. She would never have let one stinging comment from an attractive guy undo her like it did me.
Jacob Broaden struck a nerve inside me. It still hurts.
Before I leave, Joanna and I discuss the plans I made that day for the fundraiser, and then I spend the rest of the night continuing to obsess over that five-minute conversation in the coffee shop. I teeter between being embarrassed of my actions or spitting angry that he would say something like that to me, because:
1)YES, I am hard up for money, and how dare he point that out.
2)Everyone knows that car salesmen are probably the most annoying humans ever, so I take great offense to that comparison.
3)He was right.
I was pushy and obnoxious. Not because I was afraid I would be fired if I didn’t meet my quota, but because something in me is validated every time I can do something positive in this organization. And that same little something whispers that just maybe one of these days, my parents will see the grand total of people I’ve helped and finally say, You know, Evie, I’m glad you took your own path in life. I’m proud of you!
I pop that dream bubble and move on.
Later that night, after Charlie and I are back in our own little corner of the world, we spend our time curled up on my tiny love seat, watching Friends reruns while I eat sherbet out of a mug. I think Charlie has a crush on Rachel, because any time she comes on the screen his ears perk up. Your ears never perk up for me like that anymore, buddy.
And then I realize that I’m jealous of the attention my dog is paying a fictional TV character, and I decide I really need to get a life. As if my mom can somehow sense that I am at an all-time low and could possibly be swayed into becoming her mini-me as she’s always dreamed, my phone pings.
MOM: Tyler told your dad that he asked you out again for this weekend and you turned him down. When are you going to start taking your life seriously and claim the future you’re destined for?
EVIE: What a little tattletale.
Remember the name of my dad’s law firm: Jones and Murray Law? Well, Tyler owns the Murray part of that title. He is two years older than me and the son of my dad’s best friend (who used to own the company before he decided to retire a few months ago and handed the company down to Tyler). The law firm has been in the hands of our families for the past three generations. This match between Tyler and me has been in the making since our great-grandfathers shook hands on opening day of the firm.
Only families as delusional as Tyler’s and mine would expect their children to marry in order to ensure that a business and all its money stays in the proper hands. I think the plan is for us to marry so I can immediately birth a son who they will both leave the entirety of the company to since my dad was never given a son. And not that I’d ever want that damn law firm anyway, but there’s no way my dad would ever hand it over to me. He and my mom are of the mindset that a woman’s only job is to look pretty, birth babies to take over her husband’s empire, and help him close business deals by fluttering her lashes and making his colleagues the best old-fashioned on the planet.
The sad part is, I almost agreed to this life that I never fit in because I felt like I didn’t have any other options. I was scared to live alone with epilepsy, and since I didn’t have any men busting down my door to marry me (thank goodness), my only option was to agree to my parents’ plan for my future.
That is, until I met Joanna and she gave me Charlie. Suddenly, a bright new future rolled out in front of me. One all sparkly and new, where I could live independently and work for my own living doing something I actually enjoyed. And most importantly, one where I didn’t have to marry Tyler Murray.
I left home three years ago and moved into my Thumbelina apartment because it was all I could afford, but I didn’t care one bit that it was tiny. It was all mine. My parents immediately cut me off in hopes that I’d starve and come running back to them wearing the patent-leather heels Mom has been polishing for me since I was in her womb.
I’d rather eat dirt.
To make sure I didn’t have to do either of those things, I found a part-time job where I could work remotely from home, basically importing data for a healthcare company, and the rest of my week was spent working side by side with Jo, molding adorable little puppies into dogs that save lives. It was a monumental day when she told me I could move from volunteer into a paid employee position in the company.
MOM: Evelyn Grace, why do you insist on being so childish? You are twenty-five years old. It’s time you started acting your age and thinking about your future.
I’m twenty-six, but whatever.
EVIE: Because I like Froot Loops better than the grown-up cereals. Say hi to Tattletale Tyler for me.
I know she won’t like that. Mom hates when I make jokes, especially during a conversation that she thinks should be life-changing for me.
Several minutes go by, and I turn off the TV and brush my teeth before climbing into my full-sized bed. My phone pings again. I groan and roll over to grab it off my bedside table, pulling Charlie in a little closer for the moral support I need before reading whatever biting comment my mom has texted me.
But when I unlock the screen, I’m confused to see a number I don’t recognize.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Hi, Miss Jones. This is Jacob Broaden. I have no doubt that I am the last person in the world you want to be hearing from right now, but I was hoping we could talk.
I squeal and drop my phone like it’s suddenly morphed into a hot coal. Jacob Broaden is texting me? Do I want him to be texting me?
Yes. No. Yes. No.
What could he possibly want to talk about? After our encounter this morning, I doubt he’s wanting to shoot the breeze.
EVIE: Why? Are you in the market for a used car?
UNKNOWN NUMBER: I see what you did there, and I deserve it. That’s actually why I was hoping to apologize in person. What do you say? Will you meet me at Hudson Roasters tomorrow at 9am and help me pull my head out of my ass?
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Was that joke gross?
EVIE: Very.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: I immediately regretted it. Will you meet me?
I’m biting my lip and smiling down at my phone like a fool. Charlie rolls his eyes at me again.
One minute ago, I hated Jacob Broaden and was contemplating adding a pin to a very special spot on his voodoo doll. Now I’m daydreaming of that corner in the coffee shop again. Which is exactly why I should decline his offer and suggest he meet with Joanna instead of me if he is considering getting a service dog from our company.
It makes sense. I mean, my body is breaking out in a flush just remembering his steely blue eyes. But then again, I have firsthand experience with the same disability as his daughter. Who better to advise him than little ol’ me? Plus, it would be nice to hear an apology.
For no reason other than I’m a saint and only have the child’s heart in mind, I pick up my phone and text him back.
EVIE: I’ll meet you. But please try not to bite my head off this time.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Where would the fun be in promising that?