Chapter 5
Bunny
Stunned was one way to describe how Rebecca “Bunny” Kaminski was feeling as she left the reading of her grandfather’s will.
She stormed out of the strip mall lawyer’s office across the slushy parking lot toward her Honda Civic with Tennessee plates,
astonishment and rage clouding her vision.
She’d driven all the way to Indiana because it was cheaper than flying and renting a car, and she was not about to ask her hateful extended family for help, but she didn’t have snow tires or all-wheel drive, so her car wasn’t handling
the sleety conditions of Michigan City. She had a new ding in the side from when she’d hydroplaned on her way here.
Why had she ever thought it was a good idea to come here in person during the Christmas holiday when there was a conference
call option?
Because you imagined you’d leave this meeting with the keys to Grandpa Max’s house, stupid!
Because she’d imagined herself walking through the slummy old Victorian in downtown Michigan City to take any last treasures she wanted before gliding into the local real estate agent’s office she’d already researched, tossing the keys on the woman’s desk, and saying, “Sell this, please, as quickly as possible.”
She did this a lot. Hoped for things to turn out great, only for things to go to shit. When would she learn? When would she
get her head out of her own butt and realize that things didn’t work out for her, that people weren’t—
Her phone dinged and she looked without thinking. Oh. The name on the screen was pretty much the last she ever expected to see. She stopped cold in the middle of the parking lot.
“Nathan Phelps as I live and breathe,” she murmured as a chilly gust blew her long blond extensions into her face. Her ex-fiancé—Phelps
to everyone else, Nathan to her. You’d think that after pulling what he’d pulled all those years ago, he would have retreated
in shame. But Nathan didn’t experience shame like normal people. If he’d apologize just once, maybe—
Heard your in town . . . New Years is on FYI
Bunny looked at the text and shook her head. He knew bad grammar was one of her pet peeves. She was a songwriter, for God’s sake. Language mattered. Undoubtedly, he was provoking her. She texted back,
You’re
Another ding. Followed by two more. Nathan liked to text in short sentences, which was also incredibly annoying, like someone
compulsively ringing the doorbell until you opened.
You’re what?
Hot?
Charming?
Three dots told her he wasn’t done yet. She waited, jiggling one foot. The dots persisted. Dear God, was he writing a novel?
A sting of sleet hit her right on the cheek. “What are you doing?” she chided herself out loud, brushing hair out of her face.
Getting sleeted on, apparently, because her ex-fiancé still made her want to shoot back. Thank God she hadn’t actually married him.
She dunked her phone back into her purse, even as she imagined herself going to the New Year’s party. Wearing something incredible
so Nathan could catch a view of what he’d missed out on, which was a lot. She didn’t have anything appropriate with her, but she could swing by the Lighthouse Place outlets . . . After all, she
was already in town . . .
No! Now was not the time to resurrect old feelings by the warm fires of the holidays, hers or Nathan’s. Not when her chance to finally make her life work had just crumbled in her hands.
The rage, momentarily pushed aside by the distraction of Nathaniel Shithead Phelps, slid back onto center stage.
She wasn’t greedy. That wasn’t it. It was money that had been promised. It wasn’t that she had been happy when they said Grandpa Max was going to be taken off life support, but also, Grandpa’s
money was supposed to be her ticket out of the bug-ridden rental apartment she and her kids were crammed into while she tried
to figure out her post-divorce life and what she was going to do career-wise, since her side hustles weren’t cutting it. This
morning’s reading of the will was supposed to be her miracle. A sign of favor from the universe. A divine being saying, Oh, hello, Bunny, I know I’ve ignored you most of your life, but you did spend your entire childhood in Sunday school and your
teenage years in youth group, and I never forget a face! You’ve tried pretty hard, haven’t you? And you know what, it’s Christmas, so . . . here you go!
Her ex-husband, Elliott the Ex as she liked to call him, was a vindictive piece of work, and had called Child Protective Services
on her because the apartment she’d signed for in a panic was too small for Bunny plus two kids. And, fine, it was a bit infested with roaches—flying roaches, mind you, and by the way, why a good Creator would choose to endow cockroaches with wings was just, I mean, it really
cast doubt on everything they taught you in Sunday school—but the point was . . . actually she’d lost the point. But the other
point was, Bunny needed money now, to make this problem go away. And not just that, but to buy her some space, some time.
She had to hustle so hard, she barely had a minute to sit down with her guitar. It had been years since she’d even dusted
it off, since she’d felt inspired, and she wasn’t young anymore . . . She knew she had talent, she’d always known it, but between the kids and the bills . . . This money could have bought her that time,
damn it! Could have enabled her to finally write the best-selling country song she knew was in her, if she could just make space for the miracle of inspiration. She’d paid her heartbreak dues. She finally had
the chops to write the song she never could have written ten years ago—
A loud honking made Bunny yelp.
“Watch where you’re going!” she shouted at the car creeping behind her. She moved and it sped around her, sending slush up
on her knee-high boots.
“Asshole!” she shouted, jabbing her middle finger in their direction.
This was not how Bunny had pictured her life.
Not at all. She’d gone to college for fashion merchandising.
Paid her way by selling sex toys at small parties, since gigging with her original songs only ever paid for beer money.
Graduated. Got engaged to her high school sweetheart, Nathan.
Moved to Nashville to follow her musical dreams. Weathered Nathan’s betrayal.
Got over him. Moped and drank for a week, then started half a dozen side hustles—selling on eBay, selling essential oils, trying to resurrect her sex toy business, and even selling Mary Kay makeup to little old church ladies, of which Nashville had many.
She started dating Elliott, who at the time she’d thought was a hunk.
Unfortunately, she’d been too fixated on the impressive width of his chest and shoulders to notice his head was multiple sizes too small for his body, and too in-lust to realize that Elliott’s proportion of shoulders to head corresponded exactly with his ratio of ego to empathy.
Anyway, two weeks after meeting Hunk of Burning Narcissism Elliott, she realized she was pregnant, and not from Elliott.
Thankfully, modern medicine came to the rescue and Elliott was none the wiser.
He proposed. They got married at a cute little chapel and she sang herself down the aisle with her guitar strapped around her.
It had been a song she’d written for Nathan, originally, but it was a great song, it felt good to repurpose it for Elliott, and she could just imagine Shania Twain crooning it on the radio: I’ll love you forever, no matter what comes . . .
They had their first kid. And their second. And then Elliott had to go and fuck some little twentysomething named Mandy whose body had never been put through the ravages of childbirth.
Elliott literally cited “reverse body dysmorphia” as a reason for leaving Bunny. “What the hell does that mean?” she’d shouted,
and she almost never shouted. “It means . . . you don’t look like you used to!” he shouted back.
His pinhead just couldn’t process it all, she thought vindictively. And if his head was too small to lead the way, other things
must. Like his dick.
“God,” Bunny groaned as she reached her car, tilting her head to the cold distinctly non-Tennessee sky. Where had things gone
so wrong?
She reached for the door handle, but the damn thing wouldn’t open. It was supposed to unlock itself when the key was nearby, but as she pulled and pulled, the stupid door remained stubbornly shut.
“Fuck,” she said, surprising herself by starting to cry as she fumbled in her purse with frozen fingers for her keys to manually
unlock it. Everything was in the way of her finding them. She threw her gloves onto the ground, then yanked the keys out from
the bottom of her bag, sending multiple receipts and a tube of lipstick flying. She hadn’t deserved to be left by Nathan,
who didn’t even have a college degree, who had no ambition. She hadn’t deserved to be left by Elliott the Ex because of the
purple stretch marks he claimed filled him with quote, unquote, “dysmorphia,” even as he apologized and told her how guilty he felt, as if she was supposed to comfort him!
Finally in the car, she leaned her head on the steering wheel, her hair cascading around her face. Grandpa Max’s house had
gone to her bitch of a cousin Sonia, who had three kids from different dads and then went and “repented” and joined the Pentecostal
church. Grandpa’s money had gone to her second cousin Adam Dunders, who was the most boring person Bunny had ever met, which
is probably why he was perfectly content to attend the boring Presbyterian church full of people as devastatingly boring as
him. He’d save the money, Bunny was convinced, not because he was financially conscientious, but because he had no better
ideas of what to do with it.
Bunny had been left only one thing. A note, sealed in an envelope, and even though Sonia and Adam had clearly wanted her to
open it in front of them—they were just as surprised as she was about the inheritance—she wasn’t about to give them the pleasure.
Lifting her head from the steering wheel, she slid a long nail through the envelope and pulled out the paper inside.
She unfolded it against the steering wheel, immediately starting to cry again at the sight of her grandpa’s handwriting.
He had loved her, he really had. And she had loved him.
Story of my life, she thought. People love me, and they still betray me.
It did make her wonder . . . was it something about her?
No! You couldn’t think like that. The problem was them. She was not internalizing the assholery. She wiped a stray tear off her
cheek and focused on the letter.
Dear Rebecca, it began.
I know this likely comes as a shock to you. It pains me to go back on our little agreement, as I always intended for you to
be my sole heir. Allow me to explain myself in my own words. When your friend called me, at first I could hardly believe my
ears . . .
She could barely make out the rest through her tears, but she forged her way through, each sentence more unbelievable than
the last.
“What?” she said out loud, then blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and read it again, her lips moving silently.
. . . you were raised to believe in the sanctity of life, and I was heartbroken to be told that you had gone so far astray . . .
Reading the letter was like looking through a shifting kaleidoscope. It was all the same pieces in the little tube, but you
turned it, and they made a completely new shape.
. . . I pray every night, dear Rebecca, that you will come to a place of repentance and return to the values of your childhood . . .
Fiery chills traveled up her neck, spreading over her scalp. So this was about . . . her abortion? Her abortion that she had kept a complete fucking secret?
Well . . . not a complete secret. She had told one person.
She folded the letter with trembling hands.
She was seething. Seething. Well, everything had been explained, in Grandpa Max’s own hand. There was no more mystery as to why he’d chosen to cut her
off. And if she was mad before, it was nothing compared to how she felt now. Explosive. Nuclear.
The one thing Grandpa Max hadn’t spelled out was the identity of this “friend” of hers. But that wasn’t rocket science. William
Bernanke was the one she’d called in those horrible minutes after the pink line appeared on the stick.
Technically Will was Nathan’s friend, but over the years, he’d become Bunny’s friend too. He was a Christian, sure, and a
hell of a lot more conservative than Bunny, but she’d never felt judged by him. They had different opinions, but Will was
safe. Or so she’d thought.
Her phone dinged again.
With cold fingers, as sleet launched itself furiously against the windshield, Bunny pulled it out. Nathan had texted six or
seven more times.
Handsome?
Sexy?
Your hearts desire?
And on and on. Did he have nothing better to do than stroke his own ego via texting his ex—
Wait . . .
New Year’s party. Tonight. Bunny’s heart pounded uncomfortably. She hated confrontation. Hated it. But what she hated more
was getting screwed out of forty thousand dollars and a prime piece of Michigan City real estate that, although slightly in
shambles, was practically historical.
She made a grimacing smile.
Will would be at New Year’s.
She started the engine. Maybe she and Will hadn’t been super close in the past few years. But to imagine him stabbing her in the back without her knowledge during the most vulnerable time in her life . . .
Damn it. She had tried to be Nice Bunny. Loving Bunny. Accepting Bunny. But she kept getting screwed over. First by Nathan. Then by Elliott. Now by Grandpa Max and Will.
Maybe nice was weak. She’d lost out on money. Money she needed, money she was owed. Maybe it was time to serve up some revenge
pie, let Will get a taste of what he deserved.
She still had time to make it to the outlet mall for a dress, if she hurried.
She texted quickly.
Give me the deets for tonight, I’d love to stop by!!