Married with Benefits

Chapter 1 The Museum of Vintage Taxidermy and Other Curiosities

The Museum of Vintage Taxidermy and Other Curiosities

Lainey Davis had never considered herself a particularly principled person, but one belief she’d always held firm to was that she was much too smart to pay for parking.

Parking fees made sense in theory, especially in crowded cities where space was limited, but in Timber Creek, Wisconsin, a town of just under one thousand people in the wintertime—leaving plenty of room to double in size for three months every summer—the coin meters lining the main drag were a bit of a town joke.

The machines existed to scam tourists and penalize locals who lacked imagination.

Since Lainey was neither of those things, she was, on this miserably rainy day, sitting crisscross-applesauce in her coupe, rigging a quarter to a coffee stirrer with nail glue.

Through her rideshare app, she sent a third message to her passenger.

Lainey (Mercedes—9YKE29): Hi, Isaac, I’m downstairs.

Lainey (Mercedes—9YKE29): Still downstairs.

Lainey (Mercedes—9YKE29): Isaac, I’m serious. I don’t want to have to pay for parking.

Lainey (Mercedes—9YKE29): ISAAC SEGARRA, I WILL LITERALLY END YOUR LIFE IF YOU DON’T COME DOWNSTAIRS NOW.

Isaac: sry omw

That was seventeen minutes ago. From experience, Lainey suspected he’d fired that last message off just as he was stepping into the shower.

“I swear to god, if Isaac is the reason I get my fourth parking ticket this year, I can’t be held responsible for what I do to him,” Lainey mumbled to her best friend, Bree, through her earbud.

Her concentration was fixed on the end of the wooden stirrer.

The quarter had to balance just so or all would be lost.

“Four? Lainey, it’s only March.” Bree’s tone landed somewhere between disappointed and reluctantly impressed.

“Wait. He’s seriously been making you wait in the street for the last twenty-eight minutes?

” she demanded, her frustration shifting from Lainey’s quiet rebellion against the tyrannical bureaucracy governing local parking enforcement to her delinquent passenger.

Bree subscribed to the friendship philosophy that anyone who so much as slighted Lainey was an instant enemy—no questions asked.

Bree looked sweet and harmless but was absolutely lethal.

She was a high-voltage taser in the pocket of a Hill House Nap Dress: prim, breezy, but not to be messed with.

Lainey was resourceful in a pinch, but Bree was capable of anything.

She’d recently become pregnant, and despite her insistence that it was causing her to mellow, every old vendetta continued to simmer with renewed intensity.

Though Bree’s unfailing loyalty was always appreciated, something about the down-to-the-minute objection unsettled Lainey.

“How do you know how long I’ve been here?

” She whipped her head over her shoulder as though her friend might’ve materialized in her back seat.

The sudden movement sent the coin bouncing off Lainey’s legs and onto the floor of the car.

She could practically hear Bree’s shrug. “I watch you on Find My Friends.”

“I don’t like when you do that.”

“I like watching your dot move around the screen. Don’t make it something ugly. Stalking each other on Find My Friends is girlhood. It’s beautiful.”

Lainey sucked in a breath between her teeth, grateful there were no witnesses to her scouring the muddy weather mats for a quarter like a rat hunting for scraps.

Down the street, a parking attendant was making her way up the block of darkened shops and restaurants.

The town wouldn’t come out of hibernation for another two and a half months.

Her grandmother always loved the sleepy offseason, but Lainey disliked scuttling past shuttered storefronts like a cockroach.

“Why are you breathing like that? Are you stealing from the parking meter again?” Bree asked judgmentally. “If you want people to take you seriously, you have to start taking yourself seriously.”

“Who am I trying to impress? Isaac? He works at a Lovesac outlet and smells like the inside of an package. Long division is impressive to him.”

Time was running out as she hopped from her car and shoved her MacGyver-ed quarter into the meter, only to give it a quick yank back out by the coffee stirrer.

Rain slapped her head in large, aperiodic plops.

The quarter went in and came out again with another shove and another yank.

She delighted in the analog dial’s incremental ticks with each pull of the stick—the world’s most anticlimactic slot machine.

Lainey ran back into the dry sanctuary of the ancient—nay, vintage—avocado-green Mercedes she’d bought from her grandmother, a woman who’d mastered the art of living the life of a much wealthier woman while never having any money to speak of.

It was a quality she hadn’t passed down to her granddaughter—though she had cut Lainey a deal on the purchase price.

“Finally.” Through the window, she could make out a figure ambling down the stairs of the building. Between both the Brewers cap and the hoodie, she probably wouldn’t have recognized him if not for his identifiable gait. Isaac moved with the ease of water lapping against a shore.

“He’s coming. I’ll have to talk to you later.”

“Tell him he has to tip. Be assertive. You’re worth it!” her friend instructed.

“Talk later.” Lainey punched the end call button as Isaac knocked on the passenger window.

“Still broken,” she yelled, gesturing to the passenger door. She stepped out of the car and into the rain once again.

Scooting past her into the driver’s seat, he lumbered over the center console and plunked into the passenger side.

She eyed his hand. “Why are two of your fingers taped together?”

He shrugged. “I can’t do a cartwheel.”

“I can’t unpack that with you right now.

” Lainey tapped her phone’s screen to start the ride, only to have more notifications pop up in its place.

“Dude, you seriously picked the ‘shared ride’ option? It’s sending me to pick up someone else now.

” No person of sound mind enjoyed being the second hostage in a shared ride, and although her forty-five-year-old coupe technically had a back seat, it was best reserved for children and especially forgiving friends.

He lowered his hood, exposing his warm brown skin and the wide, goofy smile she was convinced was permanently fixed to his face.

“I like meeting new people,” he replied.

Then he plugged his phone into the charger cable running from the cigarette lighter, because apparently thrusting his rideshare driver into an involuntary social experiment in human suffering for upward of twelve miles required no explanation.

Without responding, Lainey glanced at her mirrors, reversed out of the spot, and drove off in the direction of the next ride. Forty-four minutes were left on the meter. What a waste of perfectly good nail glue.

···

The second rider on the route requested a pickup from the alley door of Norman’s Coffee and Meats Shop.

Most businesses in Timber Creek could be categorized as either “for us” or “for them,” with “them” being tourists seeking a woodsy lakeside respite.

Businesses directed toward year-round residents tended to stay afloat by catering to two distinct yet curiously overlapping customer bases within the local economy.

Timber Creek Golf Course and Country Club. Them.

Curly’s Motorcycles and Exotic Pets. Us.

Caribou Coffee. Them, and sometimes us.

But Norman’s Coffee and Meats Shop was solidly an “us” spot, so Lainey was surprised to see a complete stranger in an expensive-looking olive-colored rain jacket jogging up to her car.

“Sorry, the passenger door is broken,” she yelled to the man through the downpour. “You have to climb into the back through the driver’s side.”

He nodded, but once at the door, he seemed to debate whether to follow her instructions. “Does it fold down?”

She shook her head. “ ’Fraid not.”

“I don’t want to get your seat wet.”

“Just me, then?” she asked, as she stood in the rain beside her car.

Her voice was dry, but her hair was soaked and her teeth were chattering.

He looked down at her, his eyes taking stock of her shivering frame.

Or at least she assumed they were. She couldn’t quite make out his eyes under his foggy, rain-splattered glasses.

With his hood covering his face, he was all lips, stubbly jaw, and not much else.

They were handsome, though, those two elements.

He reminded her of a portrait by René Magritte that obscured the face of his subject as a statement on hidden identities.

Or maybe it was a statement on memory. She couldn’t recall.

“Sorry. Let me just…” He grabbed the headrest and stretched his leg onto the console, pulling himself up and over in one smooth movement.

“Perfect. You made that look easy!” Lainey had on the voice she used for visitors. Friendly and jovial, with a little extra something on her a’s and o’s to give the out-of-town folks something to marvel over. You should’ve heard the way this girl said “bag”!

The man did his level best to stuff his long legs into the back seat.

Once he was settled into the only position that didn’t make him look like a giant bursting from a doll house, he lowered his hood to reveal brown hair with a gentle wave.

Lainey wasn’t sure whether he wore it that way intentionally or if it had curled up in the rain in a fit of rebellion.

He wiped the water off his thin, wire-framed glasses with his jacket.

“Hey! Just getting into town?” Isaac greeted the man as though he were the cohost to her rideshare cocktail party. “Tough time of year to visit, huh?”

Olive Rain Jacket Guy’s eyes darted between her and Isaac as his torso sunk deeper into the back seat. Lainey’s attention drifted to her phone to verify whether her passenger had requested a silent ride.