23. Mine #2
Katie, my self-appointed BFF, doesn’t knock, she just clomps up my stairs and into my home in her wedges like she paid for them with a share of my apartment. Her bottle of rosé tells me she has suspicions.
“Dollie told Stanley who told Marley who told me about Grace,” she announces.
“Of course.”
“Stanley hinted to Marley who told me that she thought you and Cole were…bumping gennies.” She winks.
“And I may have run wild with my own theories there. Sorry in advance. But tell me, does he have the moves we all think he does? There’s a pool going that says he’s packing and knows how to use it. ”
I groan to hide my horrid blush. “Who the hell calls sex bumping gennies?”
“So…you did.”
I glare harder.
“What? I even brought the good rosé for this. The one with the French label I can’t pronounce. It’s a double whammy of a celebration.”
“Katie.” I drag out her name to six syllables.
“Hold that thought. I’ll pour, then we’ll talk.”
“Katie.” This time I get my shit together.
She stops and looks at me, and for a woman who introduced herself to me six weeks ago by telling me that Cole rates a jalapeno at best on her emotional availability scale, Katie is, I’m learning, absolutely fluent in reading rooms.
She sets the bottle on my counter, caps it, and puts it in my fridge as though that’s where it will live now.
“Okay,” she says cautiously. “Not today. Got it.”
“I’m sorry, I just—” I just what? Since when do I care about hurting the feelings of a friendship I didn’t get a say in?
“Don’t apologize, honey. I showed up at your house with wine and an agenda. I’m a whole lotta personality. You’re allowed to have feelings about that.”
I truly am the world’s most miserable excuse for a friend ever. “Katie, it’s not—”
“The wine’s in your fridge. When you’re ready, it’ll be there.
If it takes you a week,” she pauses and taps her chin.
“Well, if it takes you a week to drink it, I’ll bring back some fresh stuff because gross.
But the wine will be there for you, and so will I.
” She pats my arm with a hand that has way too many rings on it.
“Now, I’m going to go bother someone who has the bandwidth for me today. Maybe Stanley. Stanley loves me.”
“Everyone loves you, Katie.”
She pauses, and looks over her shoulder at me, almost like she’s hiding a part of herself now.
“No, sweetheart. Not everyone. But the ones who count do.”
She clomps back down my stairs in her wedges, and that lump in my throat punches me for being a dick.
What the fuck is happening to me here at The Haven?
I stand and watch her teeter down Cole’s driveway.
That’s when it hits me. Katie Rodriguez—who I met six weeks ago and mostly tolerate—read me better in ninety seconds than Grace ever did in our years-long supposed friendship.
I can’t file this away in any of my usual places.
I don’t actually know where to put it at all.
Unable to sit still, I walk through The Haven only to land in front of Bea’s house.
I’m not sure what I’m doing here, but she sits in her wicker rocker on her screened in porch, smiling as though she knew I’d come.
She doesn’t even say hello. She simply stares at the empty chair next to her and waits for me to decide.
Eventually I do, and she nods, once, succinctly.
“You look different today,” she says.
Great. She’s heard about Cole’s prowess too.
“I used his shower and he didn’t have conditioner and I’m still wearing his T-shirt under my sweater.”
Now why the fuck did I just blurt all that out? I scowl in her direction. Bea’s mouth twitches. It’s not really a smile. It’s the upper-middle-class equivalent of one though. “That’s not what I meant.”
I grunt in response.
She simply raises a brow because she expects real words.
“I know,” I mumble.
“Do you want to tell me what I meant?”
“No.”
“Okay.” This damn woman just…waits.
I can wait a long freaking time for petty revenge, but this is different. This is loaded and too heavy to hold.
She waits so long that I’ve checked my phone twice, watched a bumblebee knock itself into the window screen three separate times, and counted the rings on Bea’s fingers twice. She has four. Bea’s patient the way ancient trees are patient. I have no way to win this waiting contest.
“Grace got caught,” I blurt. “In a lie. About me.”
“I heard.” I expect her to ask me how I feel about that, but she doesn’t. She simply sits quietly.
“I almost posted a response.” My words are a near whisper as they leave my lips.
“And?”
I shrug. “I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” A small group of butterflies land on her hydrangeas. They’re almost playful. Then I turn my head to study Bea, who is still doing her freaking ancient tree thing, so I drop my gaze to my hands.
“Because I don’t want Cole to know that I…that I enjoy it.”
There it is. My deepest, ugliest truth, and I’m spilling my secrets to a woman who harbors so many I’m surprised her head doesn’t explode.
“You enjoy hurting people?”
“What?” I gasp. “No, I enjoy getting even. Sticking up for myself.”
She hums quietly, like she’s considering my words. “Sticking up for yourself and getting even are two different things. One happens in the moment, and one happens with lots of planning and hate.”
“I don’t—I’m not a hateful person.” I shake my head. “I don’t want to be a hateful person,” I amend. “I don’t want to become my mother.”
Now that I’ve said this big, terrible, horrible thing, I wait for the panic to come, but it’s suspiciously absent. Instead, what I’m feeling is…relief, and relief makes me suspicious because it’s not, historically, something I can trust.
“I’m going to ask you something,” Bea says. “And I want you to know that the answer doesn’t have to be for me. You can say it and leave it here and I will never ask about it again, or you can think about it and take it with you.”
Now I’m fucking nervous. “Okay.”
“Do you often throw things away?”
I close my eyes.
She asked me this on my first day here.
Do you often throw things away, or only when someone you love betrays you?
I’ve thought about that question more times in the last six weeks than I’ve thought about my own mother. Strange that my mother is all I can think about now.
“I was fourteen.” My voice betrays me, speaking words I don’t say out loud. “When she told us she had colon cancer.”
Bea doesn’t move, but she does hand me a travel-sized tissue pack that she might’ve pulled from her bra.
“For three years, everyone kept telling her to fight. Hold on. Don’t give up.
I said it too. I said it every day, even when I didn’t mean it.
I said it when I was so tired of saying it that I could feel the words getting bitter in my mouth.
I said it at the kitchen table, the oncology appointments, and when she stopped being able to sit up on her own.
I said it when my father would come by, pushing her to sign various documents.
I said it in hospice, when the nurse asked me if I wanted a minute, but my brain was screaming something else underneath it. ”
“What was your brain screaming, Juniper?”
“You know what it was screaming.” Bitterness slithers around every word.
“I do. But I’d like you to say it.”
I glare at her.