Shake the Habit (Tennessee #1)

Chapter 1

“Self-love.” My aunt nodded.

“That’s the answer.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked her.

“I mean just what it sounds like. Self - love .” She nodded again.

“You have to get after it, Kayleigh. You don’t need anyone else! Pick a quiet time when you won’t be interrupted, and give yourself that pleasure.”

The rest of us glanced at each other and one of her daughters tried to interrupt, but stopping Aunt Amber was like trying to stop a train going at full speed.

“You have to work at it. Don’t give up!” she advised.

“If you keep trying, you’ll get there, and the rush of satisfaction is indescribable. It’s something every woman should experience.”

My Lord.

“Aunt Amber…” I didn’t know what to say, though, so my words just crumbled into silence.

This was the woman who had never been able to bring herself to utter the true names of human sex organs: “man parts” and “female area” were the terms she’d used.

She had no idea what she was saying right now.

“Every day, we should set aside some private time and treat ourselves to a session of self-love.” She nodded sagely.

“You could even look in a mirror as you do it, Kayleigh. It’s rejuvenating. You’ll feel like a new person afterwards.”

I looked over at my cousin Cassidy, who was staring hard at the ceiling.

Her lips were quivering, and she was also turning red.

“Sometimes I do it in the shower,” my aunt continued, and Cassidy ran out of the room.

Aunt Amber turned to her middle daughter.

“You know I’m right, Amory.” Then she frowned, her shiny, pink mouth turning down.

“Why are you laughing like a hyena?”

I also looked at my older cousin.

I had never seen a hyena before, but I doubted that they held their sides as tears poured from their eyes like what was happening to Amory.

Out of all my cousins in the kitchen with us, only Aunt Amber’s oldest daughter managed to hold it together.

She looked annoyed rather than stricken with hysteria.

“Mama, self-love?” she asked.

“You sound like you’re talking about something totally different. You’re trying to give yourself a rush of satisfaction in the shower…my word.”

Realization seemed to strike my aunt.

“I certainly didn’t mean that!” She looked horrified.

She often acted as if she had never heard of anything relating to male parts and female areas, but the woman had four children, and I’d seen her and my uncle Jed kissing next to their car this afternoon before they’d carried in the trifle she’d made for dessert.

“It’s ok,” I told her.

“I know you weren’t referring to that kind of self-love. You were talking about positive thinking. Right? More like affirmations rather than…touching.”

Her cheeks had flushed to a deeper shade than the blush she’d artfully applied.

She was so good at makeup.

“Affirmations!” she repeated.

“Exactly! That’s what you need, Kayleigh Lynn McCourt. You need to tell yourself, ‘I’m a worthwhile person, and I deserve happiness.’” She had lowered her pitch but upped her volume as she’d said it.

“That’s all true,” my cousin Aria agreed.

She was rubbing her own cheeks, probably because they hurt from laughing, but she nodded at the same time.

“You do deserve happiness, KayKay. I affirm that for sure!”

Aunt Amber wasn’t done.

“Don’t stop there. ‘Today will be a good day!’” she trumpeted in her Affirmation Voice.

“Today, I’ll find contentment in my job and happiness with my family. Today, I’ll find love!’ That’s what you should tell yourself, Kayleigh, and you repeat it until it comes true.”

I thought about what she’d said after I left the family celebration a few hours later, my passenger seat full of gifts and food containers, and my stomach full of rib roast, a whole lot of sides, and the trifle.

I also thought back to when I’d been a little girl, when my aunt Amber had dragged us around to pageants.

She had been successful on the circuit in her youth, but none of her three daughters, my cousin Cassidy, or I had what it took to scoop up the most important sashes.

We’d driven all around north Georgia, Alabama, and our home state of Tennessee anyway, because she didn’t have a lot of quit in her.

Those road trips in her minivan had given her plenty of time to coach us on how to perform and also to give us advice for the future.

“Cassidy, I want you to show me ‘confident yet shy.’ Aria, ‘happy and excited.’” She would glance in the rearview mirror to check our expressions as we tried to move our faces into the emotions she required.

“Hm…more happy, less excited. That’s not bad! Amory, spit out that gum. Not at your sister!”

My mom generally had to step in when there was fighting in the back seats, as there often was between Aunt Amber’s two oldest daughters.

“Now, girls, I want to talk to you about your education,” my aunt would say, or there might have been something about careful driving and alcohol avoidance.

She always offered a lot of tips about hair styling and at times, she’d just speak philosophically about our adulthood.

“You have to come first,” she told us firmly.

“You have to get your own house in order before you can invite anyone else in.”

Well, we already knew that.

My mother and my aunts would have been mortified if they’d had company over with a messy kitchen or with dirty clothes scattered around.

Aria and I looked at each other and nodded when we’d heard those words, and Cassidy had whispered, “I’ll always straighten up before guests come.” The three of us were almost exactly the same age, and we had stuck together.

“That’s not what I mean,” Aunt Amber said, and all the moms had laughed.

“I mean, you need to be happy with yourself before you get involved in a relationship. Get your own life together, first. No man wants a woman with…” She’d made a little face.

“Issues.”

“I’m going to say that I have throw-up issues to make them stay away. I don’t want a man,” Amory had whispered, and she’d also fake-gagged and her mother had spotted that in the mirror.

It had started yet another argument over proper behavior and triggered questions about if Mory had practiced her song enough for the talent portion.

The answer to that was always “no,” but my older cousin hadn’t ever cared.

Out of the five of us, she’d been the least invested in the outcomes of any of our pageant stuff, and she hadn’t minded standing up to her mother.

She still didn’t, but one thing had changed: now, Amory definitely wanted a man.

She had him in the form of the husband that she loved very much.

And me? No, no man.

Another difference was that I hadn’t liked to cross Aunt Amber back then and I still didn’t today.

Unlike Amory, I’d also loved to sing in front of the audience of parents and judges.

That had been my talent, too, and I’d cared about it a lot, practicing tons.

When Aunt Amber had preached from the driver’s seat of her minivan, I’d mostly thought about my upcoming performance.

Now, as I drove on the empty roads toward my apartment, her words came back to me.

Get your house in order.

That was what I’d need to do so I could be content, so I could find—

“Shit!” A dog, a big, black dog, had stepped out of a shadow and right into the road in front of my car.

I swerved and my tires skidded.

It was cold today and there was some ice from the light snow that we’d gotten the night before.

There was enough that I slid for longer than I should have as I yanked the wheel.

I went over the edge of the shoulder, and there was a terrible thump from the front of my car.

I turned off the engine and sat frozen in horror.

I had hit that dog! My Lord, the poor thing.

I had injured an animal and I couldn’t leave it to suffer.

Shaking my head and with my hand over my mouth, I opened the driver’s side door—

And there it was, standing next to my car.

It wagged its tail happily and nosed at my dress, which was actually my cousin Cassidy’s that I had borrowed a few months before.

“You’re all right!” I said, thrilled.

My heart began to slow into its normal rhythm.

But I got out and tried to feel him (her?) over, to check for any injuries, because there might have been something wrong that wasn’t obvious to my eyes.

The dog took it as a game and skipped away backwards, sneezing and wagging its short tail when I didn’t follow.

“Let’s go!” he seemed to tell me.

I’d spotted man parts, and he was definitely a he.

“Come here and let me see if you have a collar,” I told him, but he continued to do his backwards shuffle on the shoulder, a funny, lumbering movement for such a big guy.

We were in the country, much farther out than where I lived, because my cousin Aria had hosted us this year.

It wasn’t totally unusual to see dogs around here that looked like strays, but they might well have wandered off from someone’s farm and would happily return when they were done terrifying drivers like me.

“Come here. You, sir, yes, you!” I told him.

I walked forward but he seemed to shake his head and he sneezed again as he kept reversing.

He only sat down when I stopped my own approach.

I snapped my fingers and patted my thigh, but he wiggled his butt and stayed put.

After all that movement, I had to think that he was ok.

“I’m sorry that I scared you,” I told him.

“I’m glad you’re not hurt. Merry Christmas.” He stood up and I saw his tail wag again, and he made a funny noise that was something between a whine and a bark that started low and ended high.

I smiled at him, feeling happier than I had for most of the day.

It had actually been a little tough for me, but it wasn’t like I hated the holidays.

In fact, I’d always loved Christmas and I usually enjoyed being with my family.

There were a million and two of us McCourts, and I got along with almost all of them.

But today had been hard.

Christmas Eve had been hard, so had Thanksgiving, and also all the other celebrations spanning the last couple of years.

If I got together with my cousins on New Year’s, that would be even worse and I didn’t plan on it.

I’d set off this morning determined that things would be fine, that I wouldn’t end up being sad.

I wouldn’t feel…lost. The problem was, I still hadn’t figured out how to behave because now, I wasn’t the party girl, the one always ready to have a good time.

The parties hadn’t changed, but I had.

I had, for real. Right?

When I walked back to my car, I saw that it had definitely changed as well.

It tilted in a way that didn’t look right, and I tilted my head at the same angle and frowned.

Why did it lean like that?

I bent to get a closer look, and a big body nudged against the back of my knees and almost knocked me over.

I squealed in surprise, and the dog made his funny noise back at me.

“Now you want to come?” I asked him.

“What’s wrong with my car?”

The thumping noise hadn’t been me striking the dog, thank goodness.

Unfortunately, it had been my tire blowing out, not just flat but totally destroyed, a real mess.

I stared at it and immediately took out my phone to text my dad or my mom, one of my uncles or aunts, or some of my cousins.

My father was one of six brothers, so there were a lot of those.

I scrolled through the names and realized that I really didn’t want to see them again today.

Anyway, I knew how to change a tire.

My dad had taught me before I even got close to the age of getting my permit, just like he’d taught me how to replace all the bulbs, put in washer fluid, check my oil, et cetera.

I could work on this myself, and get in touch with them if I needed backup.

I got out the jack and the big dog sat next to me as I fitted it into position.

Then I popped off the hubcap, started to loosen the lug nuts, and cranked up the car.

He seemed to be studying what I was doing, like he was learning.

“It’s harder by myself,” I commented.

“I can do it, but it’s cold out here.” I stopped to blow on my hands before I went to the back to get the spare, and the dog followed me.

And when I opened the rear door to the cargo space?

Unfortunately, he misinterpreted that action as an invitation.

He jumped into my car, turned around, and lay down with a big, exhaled huff.

“What? No. No, sir,” I told him.

“No, sir. You get out of there. No, sir!”

He blinked and his brown eyes closed.

“No, sir,” I told him again.

I reached to pull him out, but he didn’t have a collar and I stopped with my arm extended.

I didn’t want to grab him—my cousin Aria had been bitten pretty badly by a dog, a stray that she’d tried to befriend.

I’d never been nervous around them myself, but that incident was now on my mind.

“You can’t be in my car!” I announced, my voice stern and firm.

He couldn’t have cared less about my firmness.

Was he asleep already?

Ok, we’d do this the hard way, then.

I opened the side door and tried to push him out from behind, but he was heavy.

And dirty and smelly, I thought, as I sniffed my hand and frowned.

I hadn’t climbed all the way into the back seat since my car was balanced on the jack, so it was hard to get enough leverage to really shove.

He was also really big, and that extra weight couldn’t have been good for the jack either.

What if the car fell?

“Don’t let that happen,” my dad had said, but I wasn’t sure what would go wrong if it did.

And now I would have to call for help, I realized, and I imagined my relatives still at the family party getting the news.

They would laugh so hard when they heard about the dog in my car, and if I had heard this story about one of them, I would have laughed, too.

I started to smile as I looked at him asleep there, but then that faded.

My family would also think that this type of situation was pretty typical for me.

“Kayleigh needs help again,” they would say to themselves.

“She got herself into more trouble that she can’t fix on her own. She’s the same as she ever was.”

I didn’t want to be that girl.

“Come out of there!” I ordered the dog.

“Now!” One of his hairy brows twitched, but he didn’t open his eyes.

I took my phone back out of my coat pocket and looked at it, still hesitating.

But then I turned to look behind me, because another car had come down this road, an old pickup that slowed and pulled off onto the shoulder.

A man got out. “Are you having trouble?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s this dog’s fault.”

“What?” He walked over and looked into the cargo area of my hatchback.

“Your dog is sick?”

“This is a stray, I think. He started to walk into the road and I swerved so I wouldn’t hit him, and I blew out my tire. Then when I was trying to change it, he got into my car and now he’s on top of where the spare is kept. He won’t come out,” I explained.

“I don’t think he’s sick, just asleep.”

The man looked at the dog and smiled.

Then he started to laugh quietly.

He held up his fist and chuckled behind his knuckles.

“I know it’s funny,” I said.

“If I were you, I’d laugh a lot harder.”

“It’s a predicament,” he agreed, and cleared his throat.

He walked closer to my car.

“Get on out of there,” he told the dog.

It blinked, stood, shook, and hopped down, back onto the shoulder with us.

The car wobbled but it didn’t fall.

“There you go,” the man said to me, and he looked at the animal and added, “That’s a good boy.” The dog wagged its tail and leaned against him.

“You’re friendly. What’s your name?” He inhaled and shook his head.

“He tangled with a skunk,” he mentioned.

I had noticed that, too.