Chapter 9
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I awake to the sound of a slamming door and the rattling of twenty-five Jesuses in their frames.
“Mother fucker .” Hollis smacks his palms down on the low dresser.
My forearm swipes over my eyes, urging them to open wider. The lids feel swollen and achy from last night’s tears. My head is throbbing. “And good morning to you.”
“Ah, sorry.”
I sit up against the wooden headboard. The way Hollis’s gray T-shirt stretches over his back in this position highlights the definition of his shoulders. Not that I’m checking him out or anything. Just, you know, taking in my surroundings—getting my bearings.
“Bad news, I take it?”
“Rental car place is out of cars,” he says.
“How can— I mean, it made sense at the airport with everyone clamoring for one, but why wouldn’t they have any here?”
Hollis straightens and walks toward me, then turns and walks the other way.
He’s pacing. I did not have him pegged as a pacer.
“Because of the flight shitshow yesterday, they shipped all their cars to Charlotte Douglas to meet demand there. I checked this morning, and planes are finally in the air again. But like, hundreds of flights were canceled, so there are thousands of stranded passengers. Impossible to rebook them all immediately. People are still trying to find other ways to get where they’re going. ”
“Maybe someone will return a car today?” I venture.
“Not according to any of the reservations in their system, no.”
“Next town over?”
His frown does the impossible and droops further. “This was the next town over, Millicent.”
“The next town over from the next town over then. Maybe they have a larger rental car place, one that’s more central, and—”
“Called them. Same deal.”
“Well,” I say. “Shit.”
“Shit indeed.” Hollis throws himself backward onto the end of the bed and lets out a sigh as he stares up at the ceiling fan.
“Okay. So what now?” I ask.
“I guess we’ll wait. Chip will have the car ready in a few more days. I don’t see what other choice we have right now.”
I shake my head. “No, no. There’s got to be some other way. What if we get a ride to a train station, or a bus station, or... I don’t know. But we have to do something. I have to get to Key West before—”
“Yes, I’m aware.” His voice is too loud and too harsh.
But he must remember last night and his promise to be less of a jerk, because he sounds penitent when he speaks again.
“I know this is important to you. But this isn’t exactly DC.
You can’t just hail a taxi. I mean, I checked Lyft when I thought I’d need to go pick up the rental car and it basically laughed at me. ”
It’s not that I doubt Hollis. I’m sure he’s done his best to find a solution to our problem. But maybe there are avenues he hasn’t explored, ones we haven’t thought of yet. “I’ll figure something out,” I declare.
“Oh, great,” he says. “I’m sure your solution is going to involve us hitchhiking or sneaking onto a cargo ship or something.”
“That’s absurd. We’re not even near a large enough body of water to find a cargo ship. And that scene where Pee-wee gets a ride from Large Marge really messed me up as a kid, so definitely no hitchhiking.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“In Pee-wee’s Big Adventure , when— Oh right. You haven’t seen that movie. A lot of things about me would make more sense if you’d seen it.”
“I seriously doubt that,” he grumbles.
“Hey,” I say, and nudge his leg with my foot from under the covers. “Thanks for trying.”
“Yeah, well, lotta good it did. At least Connie and Bud said we can stay another few nights if we need.” Hollis gets up from the bed and pulls something that looks like a ball of napkins from his hoodie pocket.
“Breakfast ended fifteen minutes ago,” he says, laying whatever it is on the dresser.
“But I brought you this.” The napkins fall away to reveal a lemon poppyseed muffin, the glaze drizzled on top glistening in the sunlight pouring in through the thin lace curtains.
“Thanks,” I say, practically falling out of the bed when I try to get up. Maybe I should suggest to Connie she get one of those tiny staircases they make for elderly dogs to put beside this skyscraper of a mattress.
When I emerge from the en suite showered and dressed, Hollis is scribbling away in his notebook.
Seeing him totally absorbed is fascinating; the way his eyes look at the page with single-minded focus and his pen moves with the speed and precision of an Olympic ice skater.
As I break apart the muffin over the trash can and pop pieces into my mouth—Connie is a truly gifted baker—I wonder if that’s what Hollis would be like in bed.
Focused and precise, I mean. Not gifted.
Except that too. Might explain why he’s getting nudes on the reg, and from multiple lady friends.
Not that he’s not attractive enough for women to want him.
Like, clearly I want him plenty and— Damn, I really need to cut this out.
I clear my throat, and croak out, “What’re you working on? ”
“Something new,” he says without looking up. “I think it has more promise than what I was stuck on.”
“Oh, that’s good. What’s it about?”
“A small redhead who asks too many questions and gets deserted at an extremely religious bed-and-breakfast.”
“Sounds boring,” I say. “I’m going to see if there’s a coffee shop or something nearby. Put out some feelers in case anyone in town can help us somehow. Wanna come?”
“No. Going to stay here and write. I need to get this on paper before I forget it.”
“Writer’s block gone, I take it?”
“It wasn’t a block. It was a—”
“Minor clog. Yes, I remember. Guess you unclogged yourself then, huh? Didn’t need Yeva to...” I make a fist and gesture how I imagine one would clear a pipe. But by the way Hollis’s eyebrows raise, I’m pretty sure it looks like I’m miming something quite different.
He clears his throat. “Yeva’s pretty open-minded, but I don’t think she’d be up for that.”
“I’ll leave you to it. The writing, not the...” I repeat the gesture. Why.
But he’s not looking at me now anyway, his pen busy skating over the page again.
I slide my backpack’s straps over my shoulders and leave the room. Hollis is completely absorbed in what he’s writing, so I don’t want to interrupt by saying goodbye. Besides, I’m fairly certain that if he even notices my lack of farewell he’s not going to dwell on it.
At the bottom of the stairs, I cross paths with a deeply tanned bald man with a pink, triangular scar on his forehead. “Oh, hello. You must be Millicent,” he says.
“My friends call me Millie,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Bud, Connie’s other half. So sorry to hear what happened to y’all last night. Those deer have been a real menace lately. And I know your husband ran into—oh, pardon the expression—some disappointment with the rental car company this mornin’.”
It’s so difficult not to correct him. Every part of me wants to blurt out, “He’s not my husband.
He’s just a friend. I think. It’s all very new.
” But Hollis is clearly more familiar with the type of people who have a room filled with Jesus paint-by-numbers than I am, and now that we might be here awhile, I really don’t want to risk getting kicked out of Gadsley Manor and having to stay at the horrible motel.
Except a lie by omission is still a lie, and Hollis was right before: I am a terrible liar.
Thankfully, Bud saves me by marching the conversation forward. “Though all said, suppose it worked out all right. Least now you’ll be in town for the festivities.”
“Festivities?”
“Oh, guess it was too dark when you arrived to see the banners. This weekend is our Broccoli Festival.”
“Broccoli... Festival?”
“The Alston farm just outside of town is the largest broccoli producer in the state. Been around for near a hundred years. They had a bad crop a few years back, so we did some events to raise money for them. Keep them from havin’ to sell.
People came from all ’round the area, and it was such a good time that we decided to make it an annual celebration.
Each year it gets bigger and bigger. The parade is tomorrow at noon, and then later in the day we have the pie-eatin’ contest, live music, vendors of all sorts, fireworks. It’s a great time.”
“Wait,” I say. “ Broccoli pie?”
Bud sticks out his tongue. “Blech. No. Normal pie, normal. Apple usually, I think. Gosh.” He shivers dramatically.
“Boy, I don’t think most people could stomach a bite of a broccoli pie, much less eat a contest’s worth of ’em.
Guess it would be okay if it were quiche, though.
I could probably eat my weight in that.” His laugh is deep and boisterous, which I was not expecting from such a short, slender man.
I clear my mind of the broccoli pie image and replace it with apple.
Based on what I’ve seen of his food preferences so far, I would bet a lot of money that Hollis is a fan of apple pie.
My brain can picture the scene as vividly as if I were watching it unfold in front of me: him sitting at a long table on a stage in front of an eager crowd, a starting pistol cracking into the air.
(Do they use those for pie-eating contests?
Doesn’t matter, they will at this one.) I’m sitting in the front row to cheer him on, and he gives me a look that says imagine if this pie were you .
Then he takes it in his hands, and licks over the lattice crust without breaking eye contact, and he’s already lagging extremely behind the other contestants, but he doesn’t care, because he knows just how easy it is for me to imagine his tongue is caressing my lattice crust and—
“Millicent?”