Chapter Thirty-Two
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Something was burning. Smoke drifted into my nostrils seconds before the black clouds started billowing from the hood of my car.
I swore and pulled over. The tow truck took ninety minutes to arrive, and as I climbed into its cab, red-faced and sweat-soaked—it had been an entire month of feeling like a chicken roasting on a rotisserie—I tried not to get angry at the driver.
It wasn’t his fault the miserable heat had yet to break.
Nor was it his fault that I hadn’t had anything to read while I waited.
He drove us—my car and me—to the mechanic’s garage, where Harvey shook his head with smug disappointment. “I told you.”
“I know,” I snarled, and stomped off toward Macon’s while he fixed it.
It was a small blessing that I knew Macon would actually be at home on a Wednesday. He was taking his annual two weeks of vacation time to harvest and preserve his garden. I expected to find him elbows-deep in veg, so I was startled when his car drove past me.
The street was empty, so he stopped and backed up. He rolled down a window. “Were you coming to see me?” He looked startled, too, as he took in my bedraggled appearance. “Are you okay?”
Since he hadn’t taken the bait when I’d looked flushed and sexy at my store a few days earlier, it was hard to care that he was seeing me flushed and unsexy now. He’d been seeing me like this for months, anyway. I slid into the passenger seat. “My engine overheated again.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. And I have a load of tile in the car that I need to take to my contractor. Would you be able to drive me back to the mechanic and help me get it to my store?”
Another car appeared behind us, so Macon began to drive. “Uh, actually, this is a bad time. Can it wait an hour?”
It couldn’t—my contractor had started on the restroom and needed to see what tile I’d picked out, and he was texting me demands for updates—but it also could.
Because as peevish as I currently felt toward Macon, I was still asking for a favor, and he had never turned down one of my requests before.
He seemed to be anxious and irritated for a reason that had nothing to do with me. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
He glanced at me, hesitant.
“What?” I asked again.
His mouth tightened in a way that told me he was thinking. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to share it. As the ponderous silence dragged on, I turned my head toward the window—to give him privacy but also to hide my exasperation. I felt him look at me again.
His grip squeaked as it tightened on the steering wheel. “My mom just called.”
All of my attention turned back to him.
“Apparently, she hasn’t been paying her property taxes, and—for whatever fucking reason—the tax office in the courthouse closes at noon on Wednesdays. I could either drop you off back at the mechanic and then swing by when I’m done—”
He took a deep breath.
I waited for the or .
“—or you could come with me.”
It was understandable that he might feel embarrassed about his mom, but accompanying him to the tax office didn’t seem like a big deal. Despite my confusion, I softened my tone. “Yeah. Of course I’ll come. Thanks for helping me.”
He nodded but didn’t relax. Instead he grumbled, “I was in the middle of canning tomato sauce when she called. Now the flavor’s going to be off.”
“I guess… I’m glad it’s her ruining your morning and not me?”
This caught him off guard, and he almost laughed. “Oh, you’re ruining my morning, too. Because now I’m gonna get home even later. My sauce is fucked.”
Even with his dark tone, I knew he was teasing me. But I winced anyway.
“So what happened with your car?” he asked.
I told him and felt vindicated that the part he hated the most was the idea of being stranded without a paper book. I could have borrowed an ebook from the library, but I hated reading on my phone, so it had felt like a sign that I should reply to some emails instead.
Suddenly he pulled into a driveway. We were only a few streets over from his house, and the one before us reminded me a lot of Carla’s, modest and plain. The yard was also nondescript, but unlike Carla’s, the grass was mown and bushes were pruned. And that’s when I understood.
“ Oh . Is this your mom’s place? Is this where you grew up?”
“Yeah. Sorry, we have to stop here first.”
He turned off the car but made no move to exit.
“Would you like me to wait here?” I asked.
He shook his head with resolve, and then he looked at me. The intensity of his stare swallowed me whole. “No, I want you to come in. You should come in.”
My throat dried. “Okay.”
“You should know…”
I waited for him to finish, but his gaze broke away again.
“I know,” I said gently. Meaning: I’ve met her before. I know she’s unwell. I promise I will not judge her or you .
“It’ll be good for her to see a different face,” he said as we climbed out.
It made me self-conscious about my appearance.
My hair was in two disheveled braids, so as we headed to the front door, I hurriedly undid them, smoothed everything out, and rebraided them.
Macon unlocked the door using a key from his own ring but hollered before entering.
“Mom? I’ve brought someone. We’re coming in. ”
The house was stuffy, not much cooler than outside.
Teetering stacks of shipping boxes and crumpled packaging were everywhere.
Hardly any floor was visible underneath it.
Macon glanced at me, trying to gauge my reaction.
I flashed him an encouraging smile. His mother appeared on the other side of the cardboard and made her way toward us through the chaos, which took some effort.
“Do you remember my friend Ingrid from the library? The one who’s been helping with my house?”
I hadn’t considered that he might have talked about me with her, but it did make sense that she’d seen all the new work. I liked knowing that I’d made it into their conversations.
“Of course I remember.” She had a big smile, and she was dressed neatly, which I’ll admit I hadn’t been expecting.
“Hi, Ms. Nowakowski. It’s nice to see you again. Sorry to barge in on you like this.”
“Please, call me Lynn.” Her voice was friendly though somewhat frail.
Since the last time I’d seen her, it was as if she’d transitioned from a young senior citizen to an elderly one.
Macon had told me that she’d been older when she had him, but she also seemed much older than my parents.
“And I don’t mind, as long as you excuse the mess. It doesn’t normally look like this.”
Wondering what on earth she’d been ordering, I nodded and kept smiling.
Macon glanced at me again, visibly uncomfortable.
“Look at you,” she said, taking me in. She had his same coloring, but her features were nothing like his, which made me wonder about his dad.
Macon knew his father, but only barely. He’d dated Macon’s mother briefly and hadn’t been interested in raising their child.
Because of that, Macon was equally, hostilely uninterested in him. “You’re as pretty as I remember.”
I glowed, immeasurably happy to receive a compliment from his mother.
“It’s nice that you’ve been helping him,” she continued. “He’s been showing me photos. It looks so much better than it used to. It needed a woman’s touch—that’s what I’ve been telling him ever since Dani moved out.”
Macon looked like a pained teenager silently pleading for his mom to shut up.
Meanwhile, I tried to conceal my surprise that she hadn’t seen our work in person.
I knew her agoraphobia had been worsening as she aged, narrowing the areas she was willing to visit.
It was why she had stopped coming to the library and running her own errands; most locations were now outside of her radius.
But I had assumed Macon’s house was still a safe space.
It had never occurred to me that the reason why he always delivered his meals to her was that she was no longer able to come to him.
“It’s been a fun project,” I said. “I’ve been enjoying it.”
“And now you’re opening a bookstore?”
Again, I was surprised and pleased that she knew. I answered her questions for another minute, and then she invited me in farther to sit and have a glass of iced tea.
“Mom, we have to go.” Macon had started rooting around on the console table beside us, which was covered with junk mail. “Where are the letters?”
“They’re in the basket,” she said with matching impatience.
“What basket?”
“The one underneath the table.”
He removed a teetering stack of empty shipping boxes from on top of a decorative basket and tossed them onto another pile across the foyer. They landed with a bang that made his mother wince. When he looked inside the basket, he seemed stunned. “What is this?”
The basket was stuffed with unopened envelopes.
“That’s where I put the important mail, for safekeeping.”
“Mom. You can’t ignore these. You have to open them, or at least tell me so I can go through them. I thought everything important was on your coffee table.”
“Well, I keep it there now because the basket is full. That’s how I found the new letter.”
“I need it. Where did you put it?” He was already heading toward what I assumed was the living room, but he glanced back at me. “Would you mind looking through that for anything from the tax department?”
“Of course.” I began flipping through the mail—financial institutions wanting her to sign up for new credit cards and charities wanting her to donate money, but also letters from insurance companies and her bank and a variety of bills. Some of it was stamped overdue.
Macon returned quickly with the necessary letter in hand.
“How about we borrow this and I sort through it on the way there, since we’re in a hurry?” I said. I wanted him to examine its contents, but I also didn’t want to embarrass Lynn.
“That’s a good idea. Mom, I’ll bring this back later, okay?”