Chapter 4 #2
I close my eyes and count to ten. “It’s not you. Lav and I—we’re grateful that you’ve let us stay here.”
“Planning on leaving?”
“No.”
I don’t want to leave.
This place is our home. Lav’s happy here. Even if I try to not take advantage of the extra help often, it’s as comforting as it is guilt-inducing to know that Mabel and Ginny and the rest of the crew are here if I do need help.
They’re my friends who’ve seen me at my lowest.
The people I know I can count on.
“I just—we’ve needed some time to find a new normal now that everything’s settled,” I tell Mabel.
She studies me, then nods. “Then let us help you while you’re in temporary need, if you don’t mind.
And help us out a little too. Please. The apartment has industrial locks on the doors at both ends of the stairs and a separate entrance, and Cricket doesn’t strike me as the type to blare rock music at three a.m. You won’t even know she’s there. ”
I stifle an urge to tell her she can move in instead.
That’s not how it works here.
And I don’t need to talk out all the details about how any one of the other women taking the efficiency apartment under my house would mean Cricket would be obviously staying in a room with someone else’s stuff.
Mabel’s right.
This is the best solution for everyone.
Mabel glances inside, then lowers her voice. “Is this about having anyone in your house, or is this specifically about you having an issue with Cricket?”
“I don’t have an issue with anyone.” That lie slides off my tongue about as easily as the first lie did.
“Everything about this”—she waves a hand as if she’s capturing my aura—“says that there’s something wrong. If you’re mad about your eye, be mad at me. I was the breakdown in communication.”
“It’s not about my eye or about the kitchen.”
“Then what’s the issue?”
Well, Mabel, I don’t like the smell of the soap she uses and I don’t like the general vibe she gives off and I don’t like that my daughter’s seen her naked. “It would be uncomfortable for her. After this morning.”
Mabel snorts in amusement. “I’m pretty sure she’ll be barricading the door of any bedroom she uses, which I’d expect you’d expect too, so don’t even try that excuse with me.”
I huff out another breath and wish I had my own glass of wine.
Or whiskey.
Straight vodka.
All three at once.
None of which I’ll be having because I can’t let my guard down for even a second, or else Lavender will disappear into the vineyard or one of the buildings and I’ll get that sick feeling in my stomach like my in-laws will find out and try to take her from me again.
“Is this because you saw her naked and you’re uncomfortable?” Mabel asks.
“I’ve seen literally hundreds of women naked.”
Including Pip.
She doesn’t like to wear clothes if she can help it, though she at least generally wears underwear or short skirts or shorts.
Maybe that’s my issue.
Maybe it’s because she’s the first woman who’s not a wrinkled prune that I’ve seen naked in years.
Mabel’s eyes suddenly go round.
“What?” I say on a sigh.
“Do you mean you saw hundreds of women naked when you were an EMT, or did you actually mean like, you’ve seen hundreds of naked women on internet porn?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t do internet porn.”
I drop my voice to a hiss. “I don’t do internet porn.”
“I wouldn’t judge you if you did. I just want to know if you’re one of the creepers playing Cricket’s video on repeat since you don’t need to pay a subscription fee to get free beaver.”
“Stop talking.”
She looks back inside the house again. “Do not tell Cricket this, but someone took the video where she had her wardrobe malfunction and flashed her goodies on a livestream, fed it through AI to animate her vulva and labia and make them sing and dance to seventies’ disco songs, and started a Cheeky Beaver channel with it.
I’m working on getting it taken down before she finds out, but it’s proving to be a bitch. ”
I open my mouth.
Close it again.
Then take the rest of Mabel’s wine and down it.
Except it’s not wine, and the startling flavor of pomegranate juice makes me choke.
Mabel leaps up and pounds me on the back.
“Daddy?” Lav calls from inside through the open window. I hope we’ve been quiet enough in this discussion.
“Mabel told a bad joke,” I wheeze. “I’m okay.”
“We’re drawing walruses!” she calls back.
“Who’s drawing uteruses?” Pip’s distinct old-lady-who-used-to-smoke-a-pack-a-day voice drifts out the window too.
“Walruses, Aunt Pip.” Lav giggles, then holds up her stuffed walrus that my parents sent her as a random gift from their travels last year. “Like this one!”
“Oh. Walruses. They have uteruses too, you know.”
“Is she dressed now?” I mutter.
“She’s wearing her hot pink miniskirt and sunglasses. Otherwise, no.”
I clear my throat twice. “Lav, dinnertime.”
“I wanna stay with Ginny and Elizabeth and Aunt Pip,” Lavender whines.
It’s a small miracle that she’s not meowing.
I know I’ll miss it when she stops entirely, and I can roll with it most days, but today is not most days. “Okay, but if you do, I’m going to walk Fluffy by myself.”
“No!” my daughter shrieks, as expected, since she loves walking the cat.
Something rattles, then I hear a thump, and then—
“No!” Ginny shrieks too.
“I got it!” a familiar-but-unfamiliar voice yells.
“Cricket, no!” Elizabeth cries.
I lunge for the door.
Mabel does too, and we trip over each other, but I manage to get through it first and around the corner of the foyer into the sitting room.
There’s pandemonium inside. Set against the backdrop of the European-style décor and furniture in here, Elizabeth dashes for a prone figure half under the coffee table, and Pip leaps onto a chair, yelling, “Is it a spider?” while Lavender stares at me with wide, guilty eyes that always smack me square in the chest.
Hard as patience is sometimes, I don’t want her to feel guilty about doing normal kid stuff.
She feels guilty enough about things that aren’t her fault.
The one thing she remembers about my in-laws is that they once said that it was her fault Mommy got breast cancer, and it’s been a journey.
She hides her anxiety beneath her chaos, and her shame beneath bravado, and I don’t know how to fix either one.
“You okay?” I ask her as Ginny dashes in from the hallway with a towel and Elizabeth squats next to Cricket, who’s on her stomach on the floor, crawling under the coffee table, with—motherfucker, are you serious right now?
With blood all over her back.
I pick Lav up and shove her at Mabel, ignoring Pip, who’s now standing buck naked by the marble fireplace and asking me why I’m all wet.
“Move,” I order Elizabeth. “What cut her? Where’s the blood coming from?”
“I caught the urn,” Cricket says on a gasp.
“I didn’t mean to hit it with Rusty,” Lav says.
Rusty.
Pip’s taxidermy squirrel that Lav’s obsessed with.
“We know, honey,” Ginny murmurs.
“It’s not—” Elizabeth starts, but I’m already grabbing the ridiculously gaudy urn that holds Dean Makepeace’s ashes to set it aside and pushing Cricket’s shirt up to inspect her wound.
“It’s not blood.” Ginny smacks my hand, and I tumble back on my own ass as I realize the same thing she’s saying.
It’s not blood.
Fucking swollen eyeball.
Fucking day.
I know the difference between blood and—and whatever this is.
“It’s cherry pomegranate juice,” Elizabeth says. “Hi, by the way. You must be Heath. I’m Elizabeth.”
“It’s blood!” Lavender cries. “Cricket, a dragon speared you with its tail and now you’re bleeeeeeediiiiiiing! You’re dyyyyyyyyiiiiiiing! Help, help, where’s the good knight to save you?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, forgetting about my black eye again, which I instantly regret again, while Ginny and Elizabeth help Cricket from under the table.
“What’s a flagron and why does it have a snail?” Pip asks.
Lav giggles. “Dragon and tail, Aunt Pip.”
“Oh. That makes more sense. Who’s hungry? I’m gonna go fry some chicken.”
“Put clothes on,” Mabel orders.
Pip snorts. “Maybe I want to burn the other nipple off. Ever think of that?”
“There are less painful ways to get rid of your other nipple.”
“Eh? Somebody wants an otter tipple?”
Mabel doesn’t make a sound, but I can hear her staring Pip down.
Pip cackles.
And I tune them all out, because I have an injured woman in front of me who hit her head and—if I’m not mistaken—tweaked her back this morning, now pulling whatever move she needed to pull to save an urn from crashing onto the pink and green rug.
Cricket’s wincing and looking a little dazed as she gets fully upright.
“Did you hit your head again?” I ask her.
She makes brief eye contact with me before grabbing a second rag from Ginny and attacking the juice on her other side, like the rug won’t need professional cleaning.
I add bring in the carpet cleaner to my mental task list.
Just have a feeling Mabel will want to try to clean the rug herself before paying a professional.
“I’m fine.” Cricket’s face is aimed in my direction, but her eyes are staring somewhere over my shoulder.
“Did you see her dive?” Elizabeth asks. “She could’ve been sliding into second.”
“I did a lifestyle piece once on women in baseball and learned how,” Cricket mumbles.
“I want to know!” Lavender says. “I want to know how to slide into second!”
“Who’s biting into a lemon?” Pip calls.
I look at Mabel.
She lifts her brows at me like she’s saying you won’t have as far to go when Cricket needs patched up.
And I know.
I know I don’t have a choice about letting Cricket stay in the apartment under my house.
These women took me and my family in when my wife was overwhelmed because half of the internet thought she was faking her illness for sympathy, or that she was selling snake oil with her health advice, or at least not practicing what she preached if she claimed to be eating healthy and exercising and still got cancer before her thirty-fifth birthday.
Truth was, she got the shitty end of the gene pool stick.
And even the people who were on Team Ava, as they called it, didn’t help. Their arguments with the trolls made it worse.
She was the most fought-over person on the internet for weeks. Someone leaked our address, and we had to hire security, and then flee entirely after protestors and supporters started clashing on our front lawn.
But these women here?
These women with their commune at a closed-up winery in a little slice of heaven on earth?
They have compassion in spades.
They made Ava’s last months the best they could be, then supported Lav and me through my massive legal war with my in-laws when they tried to take my daughter from me, and they’re family.
Even when we keep our distance so that I don’t overstay my welcome or ask for more than I give or cause more trouble than we solve or so that I, as the lone dude, don’t accidentally make any of the women here uncomfortable, these ladies are my family.
I will never not owe them for what they did.
So yes.
Fine.
Cricket will move into the basement apartment in the house that I rent here.
And in the meantime, I’m getting the plumbing and flooring in the mother-in-law cabin fixed as fast as fucking possible.
And knocking on doors everywhere I go.