Chapter 12
“I saw it coming a mile away. I didn’t want to, but there it was. It was like being stopped in traffic and watching a semi without brakes flying up behind me.”
“That’s a very scary comparison,” I told him.
“That’s how this feels,” Marc answered.
“It’s like I got flattened by a truck.”
Of course, I had gone through break-ups, too.
I figured that I’d been dumped at least fifteen to twenty times, and that was probably a severe undercount.
But I’d never felt like my cousin did right now, because I’d never loved any of those guys like he used to love Taygen.
No, he still felt that way—he continued to love her, which made this so much worse.
They weren’t splitting because someone cheated, or because someone had left the other person in a gas station bathroom and then driven away.
There hadn’t been any one, single incident, but he was telling me now that it just wasn’t going to work.
“What if you went to couples’ counseling?” I suggested.
“Yeah, we were going to do the premarital stuff, but we couldn’t agree on when and where.” He took off his hat and rubbed his head.
“We don’t agree on anything. I had a thought that kept running through my mind, like the headlines at the bottom of the screen on the news channel that Grandma McCourt used to watch. I was always asking myself, ‘If we’re starting like this, how are we going to finish?’”
“What was the answer?”
“You already know, Kayleigh,” he said.
“Taygen and I would have ended up divorced, and why would I go into a marriage if I expected that outcome?” Now he bent and touched the soil at the base of one of the fruit trees that Lara-Lee Woodson had planted around her farmhouse.
“We always fought so hard about the little stuff, like the color of my tie for the wedding.”
“And the shutters,” I recalled, and he nodded.
“What was going to happen when we had to deal with something big? How would we have kids? Or if one of us got really sick?” He shook his head.
“I was like a bulldog, and I don’t mean that in the cute way.”
I nodded.
“Not cute, but stubborn. Pigheaded. Obdurate.”
He eyed me but then nodded back.
“Why did I act like that? I love her so much but we were missing something.”
“What is it?”
“Communication? I don’t know, but we were like a plant with rotten roots,” he said, and tapped his hat on the fruit tree.
“We wouldn’t have been able to grow anything good together.”
That might have been true, based on how they’d been acting.
But I was still so sorry about this.
My party for Sir had apparently been more of a disaster than I’d realized, which I’d found out this Monday morning when I’d come into work and found Marc staring blankly at the office wall.
He had explained that when he and Taygen had left together, they’d taken a long drive and talked more than they had in weeks.
“We didn’t even argue,” he’d told me, his voice flat.
“Both of us acted like we’d spent the day doing conditioning drills, like we were exhausted. I was. I just felt so done.”
My heart had sunk when I’d heard those words.
“You were done?”
“Yeah,” he had answered.
“We broke up. I told her she could keep the shitty ring I gave her, to sell it or throw it out her car window if she wanted. I told her that I love her, but we were done.”
I’d given him some space after that, although his mother had been texting me constantly and I was hearing a lot from his sisters, too.
Everyone was worried.
One person who hadn’t been in touch with me was Taygen herself, and I hadn’t reached out to her yet, either.
I’d wanted to know what had happened and how Marc would feel about me talking to her, first. Then he’d given me a ride to the Woodson farmhouse this afternoon and I’d finally asked him how he was doing, and out had come the story about being flattened by the truck.
“Marc, I’m really impressed,” I told him now.
“Because I broke off my engagement?” He slowly stood, staring.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No, I mean it,” I insisted.
“You did the mature thing. You’ve had a lot of pressure on you, not just with work but from her and her family. From our family, too! It probably would have been easier to keep your head down and push aside any doubts you had, but you’re correct. Your relationship was going to fail if you didn’t fix your problems. This is so hard, but I think it was the right decision. But I’m also very sorry,” I added.
“Her family wants to kill me. They think it’s all my fault.”
“It isn’t.”
“No, it’s not totally me but I was so dumb. I love her so much, KayKay.”
He looked just the same as he had when he was a little boy, and I hugged him.
He let me for a moment before reminding me that we were on the jobsite and I had to let go.
“It’s Caleb’s jobsite,” I said.
“He doesn’t care if I hug you.”
“We’re professionals,” he said gruffly.
“Let’s go check on the new well.”
A crew was digging so there would be water in the house again and some work had begun inside that building, too.
Framers were currently shoring up the attic to prep for a new roof, a metal one that would last just about forever.
Then our cousin Dasia would lay out a whole system of heating and cooling, followed by insulation, followed by a million other things.
It was a big project made easier by the fact that the house was now totally empty.
Caleb had come over to clear out his old bedroom and he and I had also boxed what remained in his mother’s former room.
Everything was packed into the outbuilding that held my nana’s car.
“Still stinks,” he’d summed up that situation, which was sadly accurate.
Anyway, the house was empty and Marc’s work at the barn was slowly wrapping up.
Despite the problems at the beginning, I thought that it was turning out beautifully, and Caleb agreed.
He kept saying that it didn’t even feel like the same place, which was exactly what I wanted.
It would have been much, much better if the whole thing had—
I stopped walking.
“Marc, what’s going on?” I asked, pointing at the farmhouse, and he put his hat back on to block the sun so he could see.
“Lunch?” he suggested.
It was late in the day to break for that and still too early to leave, but the guys on the framing crew had emerged from the house.
They were now standing together in a huddle in the front yard.
They watched us as we approached.
“There’s something up there,” one of them called.
“An animal?” Marc asked.
“Bats?”
“No,” the guy said, and the crew looked at each other uneasily.
“I don’t know what it is. We don’t want to work in that attic.”
“If y’all are walking off the job, I need an explanation,,” my cousin told him, and they looked at each other again.
Obviously, walking off the job wasn’t something they wanted to do, and just as obviously, they also didn’t want to go back inside the farmhouse.
“There are mice in the walls,” I offered.
“You might behearing rodents.” And yes, that was disgusting, but was probably something they’d encountered before and it was no reason for them to be in the front yard, acting nervous.
“We’ll get someone out here next week.”
“It was talking,” one of the other men burst out.
“You’re hearing voices?” Marc asked him incredulously, but the guy shook his head like he hadn’t really meant that.
“You know how old houses are,” my cousin continued.
“There’s any number of things you could have heard. Come on, I’ll go up and look around with you.” They glanced at each other and then they did follow him back into the house.
Sir had been sticking next to me as we spoke to them.
“I’m not going in and you’re not either,” I told him, and he wagged his tail.
But I looked at Lara-Lee’s broken desk on the porch, under the dirty tarp.
I had told Caleb that I would help him with it, and I didn’t want him to see all those chocolate bar wrappers hidden inside and feel even worse about his mother.
He did so much for us.
As Sir and I went to get boxes out of the dumpster so I could sort the junk, I discussed some of what we owed to our other roommate.
“It’s not only how he lets us use his car. He runs with us, even though he could go a lot further and faster on his own. He didn’t mind stopping four times this morning when you went to the bathroom, even though one of those times was fake because you wanted to sniff something. You know that as well as I do.” The dog frisked along beside me in his giant, lumbering way, and he admitted nothing.
“He makes dinner, which is just for me, but he buys you special food that’s really expensive and he always gets you toys. There are a million and two little ways that he helps us and makes our lives better. So much better!”
Sir didn’t argue with that, and I knew he loved Caleb a lot.
He loved me, too, so he took his spot near my feet as I uncovered the desk.
The front door to the farmhouse was open but, as usual, I couldn’t hear anything inside there, and I hoped that Marc was doing ok in the attic and that he had convinced the crew to stay.
The desk was as messy and full as I remembered.
I started with the big drawers in the front, and I divided everything into the boxes: shred, recycle, keep, and trash.
Out of all the crap from the drawers, I only put her bank statements in the “keep” box in case Caleb might need them, and I got rid of everything else.
Next, I yanked up the slatted top, which still didn’t slide well.
I tossed out Lara-Lee’s piles of reminder notes with her cramped handwriting and the old tape on the top, and I added the various bills and invoices to the shred box.
Finally, I emptied the little drawers and slots at the back, angrily throwing her candy wrappers into the trash when I came across them.
“That was so mean of you, Lara-Lee,” I muttered under my breath.
I thought that Sir heard me, because he picked up his head, but then I realized he’d heard my cousin’s approach instead.
“I don’t know what got into those guys,” Marc said as he stepped out of the house.
“They’re grown men and they were acting like kids after hearing a ghost story.”
“They did seem scared,” I agreed, and dropped another load of crap into my sorting boxes.
“There’s not one damn thing up there except for dust and rodent droppings, so I think that Caleb was right about the mice.”
“Sir hears the mice too, and he barks at them.” He huffed now, showing off, and Mark scratched his head.
“I bet they ran wild in the barn. The first time we were here, he was barking at that animal pen.”
“What pen? They never kept animals in the barn.”
“I mean the stall,” I explained.
“The little room on the right side in the back, where it was so dark.”
“That was the office,” he told me.
“That’s where we got this.” He thumped the top of the desk and because it wasn’t well-balanced on its three intact legs, it tilted and almost fell.
“Whoa, there! I’ll hold it up and you put the rock back under it.” I did and it was steadier.
“Caleb’s mother worked in the barn with a kerosene lamp,” he continued as I stood and brushed off my knees.
“There was no electricity until we ran it during the remodel.”
“She was sitting in the dark and the cold,” I noted, and he grimaced.
“What a weird woman. Damn!”
We had both jumped, because the wind had blown the front door shut again.
“I’ll tell you what, I don’t like being in this house either,” my cousin admitted.
“Don’t let the framers in on that, though.”
“I won’t. Stay for another minute and help me open this drawer.” The little one at the back of the desk, which had been hidden behind all her miscellaneous trash and papers, remained stuck.
But it was no match for Marc’s knife or his intransigence.
That was such a good word, but it made me sad when I thought of it.
I’d looked up all those synonyms for “stubborn” while I’d mediated an argument between him and Taygen.
I was so sorry how things had ended for them—or maybe, it didn’t have to be the end.
I still had hope.
Anyway, he had to cuss a lot and he almost cut off his finger, but he didn’t quit and finally, the drawer flew open.
It literally flew because he was pulling on it hard, and it landed on Sir who then barked his head off.
“Oh, my Lord! He’s hurt!” I said, going to my knees again.
“Tell me what’s wrong, Sir!”
That was when Caleb arrived, because he was picking us up here so we could ride home together.
“What happened?” he called as he got out, and he moved fast to join us.
As usual, he stayed calm and level-headed, and we quickly figured out that Sir was fine, just a little mad that he’d been disturbed.
Marc’s hands were still intact and so was his knife blade, and that was all good.
In fact, the only thing that had really suffered was the desk drawer.
“Don’t worry about it,” Caleb told me as I picked up the pieces and apologized.
The front, back, and two sides had come off.
“What was in there?”
“I think it was empty,” I answered, but we looked around the porch in case anything had flung out.
Then I tried to put the drawer back together and when I flipped it over, I saw something funny.
“This is why it was stuck,” I said.
I showed them the underside of the bottom piece, where someone had used yellowed tape to attach a blue cardboard envelope.
It seemed to be the same old tape that Lara-Lee Woodson had also used to hang all her to-do notes.
Caleb took the broken drawer from me, pulled off the envelope, and unsnapped the little metal fastener that held it closed.
“This looks like a safety deposit key,” he said as it slid out into his palm.
“It must be your mom’s,” I told him.
“What did she keep in her safety deposit box?”
“I have no idea.”
Marc took the key.
“It only has the name of the company that cut it, not the bank, but there’s a number here. That’s probably the number of the box.” He handed it back.
“This is exciting,” I pointed out.
“It’s a mystery.”
Caleb smiled in his usual way of hiding the expression behind his fist. “Don’t get too excited,” he warned.
“There was nothing about this in her will, so it’s probably empty.”
“Kayleigh always wanted to play Scooby Doo,” Marc informed him, and that was true.
My cousin had consistently claimed the role of Fred for himself.
Aria (the redhead) had been Daphne, and Cassidy (the smart one) had been Velma.
We’d used a stuffed animal for the dog and I’d been stuck as Shaggy.
Caleb, with his unusual childhood, wasn’t familiar with the cartoon, so we spent a while explaining and then acting out some famous scenes using Sir as the dog detective.
He was great and it was more fun than I’d ever had at the old farmhouse.
In the truck on the way home, though, I brought up the old key again.
“She probably kept the box at the same place where she did the rest of her banking,” I mentioned.
“What?”
“The key we found,” I reminded Caleb.
“Oh, wait.” I started scrabbling in the papers at my feet, the ones I’d designated as “keep.” “You have to pay to rent safety deposit boxes and the fee might show up on her bank statements.”
“How do you know?”
“My nana kept her jewelry in the bank, her engagement ring and a pair of diamond earrings my grandpa had given her. When she died, my mom and I went with the key to get them out and we were allowed to because…I don’t remember exactly, but it was something about us being the next of kin. That would be you, too.” I ran my finger down the page of debits and credits.
“Don’t get too excited about this,” Caleb warned again.
“My mother wasn’t the type to value nice jewelry. If there had been family pieces, she would have sold them rather than safeguarding them in a bank.”
He hadn’t known about the candy bars, though.
Those weren’t on the same scale as diamonds, but it showed that the woman could keep secrets.
“She didn’t care about her house,” I noted.
“She wasn’t even interested in ersatz jewelry, and she didn’t have nice clothes.” That was definitely true, because I’d helped Caleb to clean out her closet.
There was hardly anything that was in good-enough shape to donate.
“She didn’t have a nice car. No offense.” I patted the dashboard of the old truck.
“She hardly spent any money, as far as the bank statements show.”
“She paid for me to go to high school. I thought I was on scholarship but I found out that she paid the full tuition.”
“But she didn’t buy the uniform you had to wear,” I noted, and he nodded.
“She didn’t give you money to go to college, either.”
“She’s hard to explain. She certainly didn’t care about the same things that you and I do, like eating well. We used to get sick a few times a year and I’m sure it was either from rotten food or something in the water. According to the guys digging the new well, the former one was contaminated by runoff from the chicken coop and probably also from the old septic system.”
I gagged and remembered washing my hands in that water.
They’d have gotten cleaner if I’d rubbed them in the dirt.
“She cared a lot about her plants,” Caleb continued.
“She cared a lot about her orchard.”
“It doesn’t look very healthy to me. My dad might be able to do something,” I suggested.
“I should get an arborist to come out, somebody who knows about fruit trees. In the years before her death, it seems like she had slowed down a lot compared to when I was a kid. Back then, she spent hours in the orchard and in the barn.”
“Doing what? What would need that much time?” I asked.
“She was working on developing new plants, I think. She never talked about it.”
I remembered all the invoices for grafting tape and fertilizer, and what Aunt Paula had said about Lara-Lee’s botany experiments in high school.
Then I made myself stop thinking about Aunt Paula, because it was still too soon.
I was still too mad at her.
She’d done as I’d asked and hadn’t been trying to contact me, but I figured that she was still trying to get information via Caleb.
He and I had spent a lazy Sunday in the back yard together, not working on much except a little weeding but during that time, I’d watched him check his phone a bunch and frown at it behind his fist as he responded.
“My mother was almost obsessed by her trees,” he continued now.
“That was how I knew something was really, really wrong with her. I had called and mentioned something about mulching and she didn’t understand me. I flew home that weekend.”
Because that was the kind of person he was: he dropped what he was doing to help the woman who’d told him at age eighteen that there was no room for him in her life anymore.
My mom had been right, and Lara-Lee Woodson was a witch who hadn’t deserved her son.
I shook my head and scrutinized the bank statement.
“There it is.” I finally tapped my nail on one of the sheets of paper.
I’d painted Sir’s and my own for his party, and they looked great.
“I found an entry for an automatic debit for a safety deposit box rental. It’s at the same bank where she had the checking account with so much money in it.”
“I gave a lot of that away,” he mentioned.
“What?”
“I didn’t want her money,” Caleb explained.
“I gave it to a few different charities in the area.Most went to establish a scholarship in her name for girls interested in science at her former high school.”
“That was very generous of you,” I said.
“Very! But what about the cost of all these renovations?” I’d been feeling better about that because I’d thought he was using his inheritance to pay for it all.
“I’m doing ok,” he answered, but then glanced over at me, around Sir’s Olympic swimming pool-sized head.
“You don’t need to worry about me running out of money.”
Fine, but I was going to insist that he take rent from me.
“I’m not going to accept any rent,” he told me next, and my jaw dropped when I looked back at him.
He saw and started to laugh.
“It was obvious what you were going to say.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Read your mind?”
“No, why do you cover up your face?” I demonstrated how he laughed with his fist over his mouth.
“I feel like I don’t get to see you smile enough.”
He dropped his hand.
“It’s just habit.”
That was what he’d told me before, too.
“But why would that be a habit?”
“I didn’t want people to see me looking happy. Or see me getting upset, or angry,” he added after a second.
Then he added more, too.
“My mother didn’t like it and she used to get annoyed. I remember reading a book that I thought was funny and she told me that if she heard me laugh one more time, she’d put it in the burn barrel.”
Witch.
“I like to hear you laugh,” I said.
“I would like to see all those emotions, if you don’t mind showing them now.”
“I’ll see about shaking the habit,” he said.
Then he reached around Sir to put that same hand on my shoulder.
The dog leaned against him, resting all his heavy weight against Caleb’s side.
“He thinks that I wanted to cuddle,” he noted and laughed, but he didn’t cover it with his knuckles this time.
“Sir, come over here,” I ordered, and he listened.
Caleb came to my bedroom door later that night.
“This is the book I was talking about earlier,” he said.
“It’s the one that made me laugh.”
“ Cold Comfort Farm ,” I read from the cover.
“It’s funny?”
“At the time, I thought it was hilarious, but remember that I didn’t have a gaming system, computer, phone, or anything else that most kids use to amuse themselves.”
“That was how I amused myself.” Also, with drugs, alcohol, and boys.
“Kayleigh?”
“I was just thinking how much I missed by acting like an idiot,” I said.
“I missed a lot, too.”
But that was due to his mother’s poor choices, not his own.
“We could read it together,” I suggested, and he started to put his hand up to his mouth, but he lowered it, looked at me, and smiled.
It was so nice to see.
“So we just lay there and read, and I like that book. It is funny,” I explained the next morning.
Caleb and I had driven down to work together, so we’d drive back, too, and I was already looking forward to seeing him in…
I checked the time on my laptop.
It was only seven hours and thirty-eight minutes away.
I could wait that long, if I texted with him a bit.
“First you’re a dog owner, and now you’re a reader,” Cassidy said, and since she spoke through the speaker on my phone, Sir looked up and puffed out a breath that made his beard flare.
He knew the word “dog” meant him, not any of those other four-legged creatures.
“I’m expanding my horizons,” I told her.
I was glad that we were talking normally and she wasn’t mad about how I’d ruined her homecoming over the weekend, and she also wasn’t mad about how I’d woken her up this morning because I’d forgotten how much earlier it was on the West Coast, their latest tour stop.
Our talk soon moved to Marc, because Cass had heard from Aria, who’d heard from her mom, who’d heard from Marc’s mother, that Taygen’s family was going crazy.
“Apparently they had already put down some non-refundable deposits on wedding stuff,” Cass said.
“Marc will pay them back.” I quickly checked the app to see the balance in his personal bank account, and saw that things were fine.
“He can pay them back,” I echoed with more confidence.
“They’re telling everyone that he was too wild for her, that they never liked him or his family.”
“All million and two of us? That’s a lot of hate,” I said, but then remembered Taygen talking about their guest list. “She did say something about not inviting everyone to the wedding.”
“I understand her issue with that. So many McCourts,” Cassidy sighed.
Our grandfather had been one of ten siblings, so there really were a million and two.
Literally.
“Some people ran away to Hawaii to hide from all of them,” I reminded her.
“Some people had a wonderful wedding, with all her favorite relatives,” she said firmly, but then hesitated.
“KayKay, you keep apologizing to me, but I’m sorry, too.”
“For what?”
“I was thinking about how we watched you at my wedding and I was thinking back to last summer, when we went to Chattanooga to see Jack perform at the club. You must have known I was keeping track of you then, too. It must feel like you’re living in a police state.”
“You took care of me for years,” I said.
“You dragged me out of bars, put me in the shower, and set me up with glasses of water so I wouldn’t get hungover.”
“That never worked.”
“We were friends but you had to babysit me,” I told her.
“You shouldn’t have been in that position. I forced you to take care of me.”
“I was thinking more that I enabled you. It was because I love you so much, and that’s why I’m watching you now. But I’m going to try to stop because I do trust you. I do,” she repeated, and I wondered who she was trying to convince.
Me, or herself?
“I’m going to be perfect,” I told her.
“Not just clean and sober, but perfect in every way. I’ll be a hundred percent responsible at all times, and no one will ever have to doubt me.” I nodded as I thought about it.
“Rather than me being the family joke for being such a jerk, I’ll be the family standard for good behavior. I’ll be able to babysit for you and you’ll never have to worry. I’ll never make anyone worry, not ever.”
“KayKay, that’s way too much pressure. Who could be that perfect? Every single one of us has made mistakes and acted stupid. I have so many times and I know that I will again, and you’ll probably be the one to tell me, too. I would never expect you to be perfect, and I would be happy to have you babysit. I’ll definitely be calling you for help.”
“Really?” My throat got that thick feeling, and tears were coming.
“Really?” I repeated.
“Jack and I were going to ask you to be the baby’s godmother.”
That did it.
I started to bawl and that set Sir howling, which made Cassidy laugh, but I heard her sniffling, too.
“My word! What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“He gets upset when I do. No, Sir, I’m actually happy,” I tried to tell him, but he never did as well with verbal explanations.
“You and Aria have always been like my sisters and I’m so glad that we’re all settling down near each other. Next thing will be you and Caleb—not that I’m putting any pressure on you,” she quickly added.
“You should go as slow as you want to.”
“No,” I said immediately.
“No, please don’t say things like that. Don’t even think them.”
“What? What things? Like you and Caleb being together?”
“We’re not,” I told her.
“KayKay, you live together!”
“I live in his house because I got evicted and he generously offered it to me. He lives there because his other place is full of mice but less full of modern conveniences, like heat and running water.”
“Ugh,” Cass said, which did sum up the farmhouse.
“It’s going to be renovated soon enough, and then he’ll probably move back there.” I thought about that and felt the same thickness in my throat.
“He has a dream of making it the way his mom wanted it, like he can show her that he’s worthwhile.”
“Why wouldn’t he be worthwhile?” She sounded indignant.
“He is!” I assured her.
“The way his mother treated him is the dumbest thing in the world, even dumber than when our cousin David was trying to promote that line of fashion accessories made from weed. Caleb was the perfect son. Anyone would have been thrilled to have him as her child. I could only dream of having children like that! Not that I will.”
“I don’t think it’s true that your sins come back to you when you have kids,” she reassured me.
“No, I won’t be having any children. I won’t be getting married, either, or even getting into a relationship.”
“What are you talking about?” Cassidy asked.
“Why?”
This was something that I’d given a lot of thought over the last few months.
“I decided that it’s for the best,” I told her.
“At Christmas, you were saying that you hoped you’d find a guy. That was what led Aunt Amber to give us that terrible talk about self-love when we all thought she meant…”
“I remember,” I said.
I would never forget the look on my aunt’s face when she’d realized what she had been saying.
“But then, I got Sir and I met Caleb.”
“I would think you’d be even more sure about your future now, settling down with them.”
“No,” I repeated.
“It made me realize that I wasn’t taking things seriously enough. I was talking about getting married just like I did when I was fifteen years old, how I’d draw hearts around our initials and plan the song for our first dance, and that was as far as I got. But it’s serious business!” I told my cousin, in case she wasn’t aware.
“Look at Marc and Taygen. They got swept up in flowers and rings and now they’re both miserable.”
“And her dad wants to kill him,” Cass added.
“But you don’t have to act like that. Why couldn’t you meet someone, fall in love, and take your time? I thought that was what you were doing with Caleb.”
“I would never marry him,” I answered.
That was that.
“Why?” she asked again.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing, Cassidy Jolene, and how dare you!”
“My word, you sound just like Aunt Amber,” she marveled.
“How dare you say that, either!” I spat, even angrier.
“I don’t know why you’re holding back,” my cousin told me.
“It’s obvious that you want him.”
“That’s what Aunt Paula said, too.” I sighed.
“But you know how I am with guys.”
“You mean how you acted with your previous boyfriends?”
Like an idiot.
That was what she meant: I’d always acted like an idiot.
“KayKay, it doesn’t have to be the same. You changed everything else! You’re a new person,” she said.
“You really think I’ve changed?”
“In a lot of ways,” she answered.
“But I was wrong that you’re totally new, because you’re also still the same girl we always loved, the same fun, sweet, exciting KayKay. Now you added even more good things, and there’s no reason that Caleb wouldn’t love you just as much as the rest of us do. Why does it have to end with him riding off with the carnival or leaving you in Georgia at a gas station? He doesn’t seem like the type, and you’re not that type anymore, either.”
“You know what? I think I’m pretty lucky to have you as my friend.”
“I’ll remind you of that the next time you sound like Aunt Amber,” Cass answered, and we ended the call with laughter.