12. Jacinthe
Jacinthe
“ C alice de criss ! Are you trying to kidnap me or something?”
Maddie’s fingertips dig into my arm as she drags me down the hall at Balsam Inn. She pounced on me like a ninja the second I walked in the front door.
“Yeah, basically,” she says in a cheerful voice.
“I know how to walk,” I remind her. “You don’t have to pull me around like that.”
“I have to make sure you don’t escape,” she tells me, chipper as ever.
I’m about to ask what the hell I’d be trying to escape from when we turn the corner into the kitchen. Natalie is standing beside the island, gripping the back of a chair that’s clearly meant for me.
Before I can start yelling for help, the door to the backyard opens, and our cook, Carolyne, comes inside with a dish towel slung over the shoulder of her Harley Davidson t-shirt and a bandana tying back her bleach blonde hair.
A faint smell of cigarette smoke slips inside the kitchen along with her.
“ ?a va, les filles ?” she asks in her raspy voice.
She’s somewhere in her fifties and looks more like she should be working at a biker bar than a cozy countryside B&B. You’d never guess she makes all the guests’ pancakes into cute little animal shapes and always shows up with hand-picked wildflowers to decorate the breakfast trays.
“Oh, sorry, Carolyne,” Natalie says in French. “I thought you were already gone for the day.”
Carolyne mimes waving a cigarette around. “Just having my last ciggie before I hit the road. Can I help you with anything?”
“No, no,” Natalie assures her. “We just needed somewhere to have a quick chat all together.”
Nothing good has ever come of anyone saying, ‘Let’s have a quick chat.’
I try to take a step back towards the hallway, but Maddie tightens her grip on my arm.
“Carolyne,” I whisper, “help. They’re gonna murder me.”
Carolyne chuckles and rolls her eyes. She’s known us since we were kids, so she also knows not to take me too seriously, which is really biting me in the ass now that I’m a real-life hostage.
“Have fun, girls,” she says. She flings her dish towel into a bin for laundry and then grabs her bag off a row of hooks on the wall. “See you tomorrow!”
As soon as she’s gone, Natalie taps the back of the chair.
“Sit.”
I don’t have a choice. Maddie nudges me forwards, and the two of them stare me down like prison guards until I plonk my ass in the seat.
Natalie strides over to the other side of the island and rests her elbows on the shiny linoleum.
“So,” she says, folding her hands together, “I’m sure you can guess what this is.”
I raise an eyebrow and look back and forth between the two of them. Maddie is leaning against the counter with her arms crossed over her fancy receptionist sweater dress.
“Uh, no,” I answer. “I have no idea what the hell this is.”
“It’s an intervention,” Maddie announces.
I blink, waiting for one of them to admit they’re pranking me, but they stay silent.
“What the hell do you think I need an intervention for?” I demand. “Do you think I even have time to drink or do drugs?”
I crack up as I imagine myself trying to fit in a doobie after work. These days, I can barely fit in dinner before I collapse on my bed.
“That’s the whole point,” Maddie says.
I squint at her. “You want me to do drugs?”
“No, we don’t want you to do drugs,” Natalie says with a sigh, like she’s explaining this to a kindergartner with particularly bad listening skills. “We’re concerned about your current lifestyle.”
“Oh.” I smirk and drop my voice to a stage whisper. “Did you guys find out I’m gay?”
I thought that one at least deserved a laugh, but they act like they didn’t even hear me.
“I mean,” Natalie plows on, “we’re concerned with how hard you’re working yourself, here and at the farm. You’re exhausted. Ever since we opened the inn, you’ve been piling on more and more tasks, and it’s not healthy. You were already overwhelmed before the inn, and?—”
“I’m not overwhelmed,” I cut in. “We have a new business. We all knew it was going to be crazy for a while. It’s only been a few weeks. It takes time to get things running smoothly.”
The collar of my shirt feels tight, and my skin is prickling with heat.
They know this. They have no right to act like I’m being stupid or unreasonable when we all agreed opening an inn would be like this.
“Besides,” I add, “I’m not the only one working long hours. You’re both here all day every day too. Maddie even quit her internship at the bank for this. I?—”
“Exactly,” Maddie interrupts, pushing off the counter so she can glower at me from across the island like Natalie. “I said no to a commitment that wasn’t going to work for me. Maybe you need to start doing the same.”
My jaw drops so fast I’m surprised it doesn’t snap.
“What would I say no to?” I demand. “Am I supposed to tell the horses I’ll only be keeping them alive five days a week instead of seven? Am I supposed to tell Maman she has to get herself home from her doctor’s appointments, even when her legs are hurting too much to drive?”
They have the decency to look a little uncomfortable now. Maddie drops her gaze to the top of the island, and Natalie shifts her weight from foot to foot while tugging on her sleeves.
“This is my life, okay? This is just how it’s got to be.”
Natalie presses her lips together in a tight line, her forehead wrinkling with an expression it takes me a moment to recognize.
Pain.
She really is cut up about this. They both are. The intervention might have felt ridiculous and reality TV-inspired at first, but now I realize they wouldn’t do something like this if they hadn’t been worried for a long time.
“I get that, okay?” Natalie says. I can hear the strain in her voice now. “You have more on your plate. You’ve had more on your plate than both of us, ever since…”
She doesn’t say it out loud, but she doesn’t have to. We’re all thinking the same thing, even if after all these years, the two of them have followed my lead in never mentioning him either.
I’ve had more on my plate since my dad left.
“But I’m not just going to sit here and watch my best friend run herself into the ground. You need help, Jass. You need to let people help you.”
I wince at how much she sounds like all the friends and relatives who’ve told me the exact same thing. That’s what they all said after my dad left for good and Maman turned into a ghost for the better part of a year, wandering around the house without really seeing anything in front of her.
Everyone was wrong, though. We didn’t need help. We didn’t need more people making promises they wouldn’t keep.
We needed to handle it ourselves, and we did.
I roll my shoulders back, shaking off the memories, and focus on reassuring Natalie instead.
“I told you, things will calm down in a few months. I?—”
“You’re not going to last a few months!”
Her shout echoes through the kitchen. I jolt with shock, my spine knocking against the wooden back of the chair. Even Maddie jerks away in alarm.
“If you keep going like this,” Natalie says, her voice cracking, “you’re going to get sick or hurt or run your fucking truck off the road.”
Her eyes are haunted, like she’s already at the scene of the accident in her mind.
I jump to my feet and pull her into a hug. She stays stiff in my arms, but at least she doesn’t push me away.
“I know you are worried,” I say, holding her tighter even though her poofy hair is practically suffocating me now. “And I appreciate that.”
I take a deep breath as I prepare to do something I might regret.
These past few weeks, Maddie and Natalie haven’t even been able to hear Tess’s name without wagging their eyebrows at me or asking how my ‘crush’ is doing. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve just stopped mentioning her at all.
I’d rather stick with that plan, but if I want to avoid sending Natalie into a nervous breakdown, it seems like I don’t have a choice.
“Just so you know, I do have help now.”
Natalie breaks out of my grasp, and I let my arms drop back to my sides.
“Huh?” she says, a flicker of hope in her eyes, like I’ve just announced I’m doing some experimental treatment for a rare disease.
I guess the disease would be my personality.
“You do?” she urges. “Who?”
I chew on my lip for a moment and then dive straight into the deep end.
“Tess is helping me at the farm.”
Maddie scoots in closer. “She is?”
My shoulders tense as I brace for some dumb question like when Tess and I are planning on getting married.
“Yeah, she helps with the morning barn chores,” I say through a clenched jaw. “It’s helping me get more sleep. She does a lot, to be honest. She even picked Maman up from an appointment when I got tied up here the other day.”
The two of them are staring at me like I just dropped a bomb in the middle of the kitchen floor.
“I mean, we’re not making her our servant,” I explain, since it does sound kind of bad when I say it all out loud.
“We do stuff for her too. Maman keeps an eye on Shel when Tess has to work late, and we let them use the horses whenever they want. It’s…
nice to have them around. Both of them. Things have gotten a lot better since they moved in. ”
There’s no way they’re not going to have a maudit field day with all that information. I’ll be hearing about it for the rest of the month.
Natalie takes a step back, propping her hip against the counter. She smoothes a few stray hairs off her forehead while a slow grin spreads over her face. My muscles clench even tighter as I brace for a punch line, but there’s nothing mocking or smug about her expression.
She sighs, and I realize what the smile is: relief.
“I had no idea they were such a big part of your life now,” she says. “That’s great news. That sounds really good for all of you.”
Maddie gives my shoulder a nudge. “I agree. You know, you could have made this a much shorter intervention if you’d just said that in the first place.”
I scowl. “Well, that’s because you both keep making fun of me for having a crush on Tess.”
Maddie starts to open her mouth, but I hold up a finger to silence her.
“Which I do not ,” I add, giving the island a smack for emphasis. “Maybe I would tell you more about it if you laid off, hein ?”
I whirl around to give Natalie some stink eye too. The grin slips off her face.
“We will lay off,” Maddie tells me. “I’m sorry we took the jokes too far.”
“I’m sorry too. We were out of line,” Natalie says. “I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to us.”
She starts to lift her arms out towards me but then glues them back to her sides, like she’s not sure I’ll want a hug.
I throw myself at her anyway.
“ ?a va, ?a va . I accept your apology.” I squeeze my arms around her and pat her on the back just a little too hard, since she did kidnap me and all. “As long as you don’t make me sit in the Chair of Shame again.”
They agree, and we move onto discussing some of the preparations for our big Thanksgiving meal at the inn, since we’re all gathered here now anyway.
“Should we review the guest list?” Maddie asks. She’s pulled out the tablet we use for coordinating most of the tasks that keep the inn running and is typing away at one of her many spreadsheets.
I was planning on sneaking Tess in as one of the many party crashers I’m sure will show up this weekend, but now that I’ve made peace with my friends, I should probably make sure Tess will actually have a place to sit.
“Well, since I know you won’t make fun of me now, I will tell you that Tess is coming.”
Maddie looks up from the screen.
“Oh, she’s not taking Shel back home for the long weekend?” Natalie asks. “I just assumed they wouldn’t be here.”
“Shel will be with her dad, so I thought Tess might want to come, and she does.”
I feel the tension creeping back into my shoulders as I wait to see if our truce will last, but Natalie just gives me that same relieved smile from before.
“That’s great! I’m excited to have her here.”
“Yeah. Me too. I’d love to get to know her better,” Maddie says, her fingers already click-clacking across the screen again.
I let myself breathe again while Maddie rattles off a few more check-list items for the weekend. I should be paying attention, but instead, my mind is already zooming ahead to Thanksgiving.
I wonder if Tess and I will sit next to each other. I wonder what she’ll think of her first holiday in La Cloche.
I wonder what she’ll be wearing.
My stomach does a weird flip, and I decide it’s just because I had too much coffee this morning.
It definitely has nothing to do with Tess.