Chapter 7
FOUR EGGS AND MY OWN FUNERAL
Cricket
Today is a good day.
I woke up.
Yes, I’m only thirty, so that shouldn’t be some miracle, but today, it feels like it is.
Ginny’s made me feel more welcome than I expected, and she’s shown me how to use the oven—apparently you have to turn the dials in the right order or it won’t start. She says it’s getting old, but we don’t kick things out just because they don’t fit society’s standards anymore.
And I love that.
Lavender’s utterly adorable in ways that only young kids can be, and she’s clearly over the trauma of seeing me naked yesterday.
Not that she seemed traumatized at all.
She’s in lightweight pink footie pajamas patterned with cats, neon green Crocs, and a backward baseball cap that’s two sizes too big for her but keeps her hair out of her face.
She also still has whiskers drawn on her cheeks.
Actually, I think they’re thicker today.
I drew a smiley face on my forehead once when I was about Lavender’s age, and I remember a lot of heavy sighs, lectures, and headbands that covered my forehead after that.
Mostly about how my sisters never did anything that bad.
There was a lot of your sisters never did this kind of thing when they were your age while I was growing up.
They’re ten and eleven years older than me. I was an unexpected surprise.
Sometimes clearly not a good one.
“Why do we have to wash our hands?” Lav asks me while she’s standing on tiptoes to reach the kitchen sink, where I’m squirting soap on her hands.
“To keep the germs out of the food.”
Yep.
I have got this.
The old Cricket is back. I just needed a kinda sorta decent night of sleep and time making new friends with people who are unbelievably kind.
I hope they’ll be my new friends. That we’ll stay in touch after I get over my newfound terror of showers and find a new job and get back to my real life.
Today, I’ll show them that I’m not actually too much.
That I’m a competent person who can get her shit together.
“Meow,” Lavender says.
“You’re right. Germs are like microscopic dragons. Some are good dragons, and some are bad dragons, but we want to keep all of the dragons out of the muffin mix.”
“Purrrrr.”
“Microscopic means so small that you can only see it with a microscope.”
“I know what micropospic means. I asked how there can be good dragons.”
I hand her a clean towel to wipe her hands, then pull a chair over to the counter by the mixer. “Here. You can stand on this so you can see everything.”
She’s tall for her age, but she’s also not tall enough to see inside the mixer bowl without help yet.
“That’s not an answer, Cricket,” she says.
I suck in my cheeks so I don’t smile at her sassitude. “Does your dad say that to you a lot?”
“No, Ms. Emerson does.”
“Who’s Ms. Emerson?”
“You answer my question, I’ll answer yours, lady. Meow.”
I rummage in the cabinets, easily locating flour and sugar and baking powder and salt. “It’ll take a while to explain the great dragon war of 1385, and I might forget I asked who Ms. Emerson was by then, and I’ll be sad to not know more about you.”
It’s pretty easy to guess she’ll be a teacher or a babysitter.
Lavender’s big hazel eyes get even bigger. “There was a dragon war?” she whispers reverently.
“It was something. That’s when the dragons got split into good dragons and bad dragons.
The good dragons wanted to use their fire-breathing powers to help heat people’s homes and cook their food, but the bad dragons wanted to burn it all down.
They thought their fire gave them power to rule the earth. ”
“Did the bad dragons murder all of the good dragons?” The way her eyes get even wider—am I crossing a line?
Will she have nightmares about dragon murder?
Crap.
“Ginny?” I call.
She disappeared into an office through a different door off the kitchen that she says is a repurposed butler’s pantry to catch up on email that she missed yesterday while she was helping watch Lavender.
She does contract marketing work for small companies, and I think that means she spends time on social media as well as email.
That’ll still take me a while. And given my degree and all of my experience is in journalism and content creation, finding a new job that doesn’t involve the internet will likely be impossible.
But I can’t be jobless forever. And surely there are some offline options that I can find.
“Measuring cups are in the corner cabinet to the right of the sink,” Ginny calls back. “Measuring spoons in the drawer by the fridge. Keep talking. I want to know how the good dragons made it out alive.”
I can make a few guesses how she knew what I wanted to ask without saying it in front of Lavender, but however she got there, I’m glad to know I’m not crossing lines.
She’d tell me if I was, wouldn’t she?
Or am I being set up—
Stop it, Cricket.
I move across the kitchen to get the measuring cups. “The good dragons found a grumpy old dragon-slayer—”
“Was it a girl or a boy?”
“A girl. She was grumpy because she fought better than the boys, but the boys always took credit for—” Shit. I probably shouldn’t poison her brain against boys just yet.
Especially with her being raised by a single dad.
“Boys always do that,” Lavender announces.
“Tell it like it is, Lav,” Ginny calls.
“Except my daddy. He only takes credit when he replaces toilets and helps naked ladies in the shower.”
There’s a choking noise from the office. “So many naked ladies in the shower, Lav?”
“No, just Cricket. My daddy doesn’t know any other ladies.”
“Am I a lady?” Ginny asks.
“No.”
“What makes a lady?” I ask Lavender.
“They have hairs on their vaginas.”
If Lav were five years older, I’d think she was trolling me.
“So the dragon slayer, Cricket?” Ginny says.
I fumble through opening three wrong drawers before I find the measuring spoons exactly where Ginny told me they’d be.
It happened, accept it, move on, I order myself.
“The dragon slayer wanted to kill the dragons at first, because she assumed all dragons were bad dragons,” I say, my voice getting stronger as I get back into the story, “but when the good dragons showed her their scars from where the bad dragons hurt them, and then the way they could blow fire so softly that it could light only a candle and not set the whole house on fire, she understood. Do you know how to measure flour and sugar?”
“What did the dragon slayer do?” Lav asks.
I measure the dry ingredients myself, tossing them into the mixing bowl. “She went out and found all of the other lady dragon slayers who’d been rejected from the dragon slayer army, and they teamed up with the good dragons to defeat the bad dragons and save the whole entire universe.”
“Wow,” Lavender whispers.
No meowing.
I hope I’m not ruining something that Heath loves. Kids’ phases are so cute, and my experience with my own nieces and nephews tells me that the phases are always much too short.
“Sometimes the heroes we need aren’t what we expect,” I tell her while I head across the kitchen to grab the milk and eggs.
“I want to be a dragon slayer.”
“You can be anything you want to be.”
“Agreed,” Ginny calls.
I grab the cardboard carton of eggs and the milk and pull them both out of the side-by-side fridge, but something’s suddenly wrong.
Crack.
Plop.
Crack.
What—are you for fucking real right now?
“No!” I shriek.
The egg carton.
The egg carton is broken on the bottom and all of the eggs are falling out.
Instinct has me dropping the milk so I can thrust my hand under the egg carton and catch the falling eggs, but the jug shoots off its lid as it, too, hits the floor, sending a spray of milk straight up in the air and coating me while I try to shove the eggs back in the fridge and catch the falling eggs at the same time.
All I succeed in doing is banging my hand against one of the shelves in the fridge.
“No!” Lavender shrieks, her voice an echo of mine.
“Cricket?” Ginny calls, her voice closer.
“Don’t—” I start, then I freeze.
What are words?
“Eggs!” I bark. “Milk! Floor!”
“The wha—aaaaaaaahhhh!”
There’s a slap and a different kind of crack on the other side of the open fridge door, followed by a low moan.
Lavender’s eyes have gone round in horror instead of fascination.
I can’t breathe, while Ginny, on the other hand, is breathing loud and ragged.
I think I’m crying again.
“Motherfu—under,” Ginny gasps from the floor.
I shuffle backward in the milk and broken eggs until I can close the fridge door, and then I look at what I’ve done now.
“I’m okay,” Ginny says as soon as she makes eye contact with me. She’s on her back, one of her legs sticking out to the side, wheezing. “I’m okay.”
The wince and the pain in her voice—I broke her.
Now I’m breaking other people.
The back door clicks shut, and Heath strolls in from the laundry room.
He looks at Lavender, then at me, and then the man’s in motion, making a beeline to Ginny.
“Don’t slip!” I shriek.
Lavender bursts into tears.
I’m coated in milk and need to take a goddamn fucking shower again.
But Ginny—
Ginny’s doing a slow breath with her eyes closed.
And Heath—
Heath’s dropped his coffee and is straight-faced and professional and, if I can read people’s emotions at all, ready to strangle me.
“The egg carton rotted on the bottom,” I whisper while he kneels next to Ginny, right in the eggy, milky mess all over the beautiful black-and-white mosaic floor.
“What happened?” he asks her.
Mabel runs into the kitchen in black silky pajamas. I shriek at her to slow down too, and she does, going slower to reach Lavender and pick her up in a hug.
“Just slipped,” Ginny says. “Caught myself. Startled. I’m okay.”
“Where aren’t you okay?” he asks her.
She winces as she reaches for her foot. “Cricket, it’s not your fault.”
“I break everything,” I whisper.
“The eggs fell all over everywhere,” Lavender sobs.
“Maybe they were bad dragon eggs and this is a good thing,” Ginny says.
Heath looks at her, then at me, and oh fuck.
His eye looks awful.
Half swollen shut.
Because of me.
I punched him.
Ginny’s moving her foot like she hurt something in it when she fell.
I ruined a rug while trying to save ashes.
The kitchen in the mother-in-law house exploded as soon as I got here.
And now I’m breaking eggs and people too.
I’m the problem.
I am always the problem.
If you’d just be more like your sisters, Cricket, you wouldn’t be such a disaster.
I heard it over and over again as a kid.
Not the you wouldn’t be such a disaster part, but the you should be more like your perfect, overachieving sisters part.
I’m not perfect.
Not like my sisters.
Not like my parents want me to be.
And now I’ve hurt Ginny.
“I—I’m sorry,” I sob as I back up out of the mess. “I—I’ll clean it up.”
“I’ve got it, hon,” Samantha says softly behind me.
“They—they just fell. I didn’t even drop the carton. They fell out of the bottom.”
“Need to get that compressor checked again,” Olivia, the tallest of all of us with kind brown eyes but a no-nonsense attitude, murmurs to Mabel.
Samantha wades through the mess and slips an arm around me in a side hug that I don’t deserve, her green hair spikier than it was when we met.
“Come with me, hon. We’ll get you some tea and some clean clothes.
I can wash your hair in the sink if you’d like me to.
Used to do it for my nieces all the time. ”
“Ginny?” I whisper.
“It’s not your fault, Cricket,” she says. “Just irritated an old injury. I’ll be fine.”
“Oh my god, your teeth?”
“No. No, basketball injury from a time I tried to keep up with my brother.”
“Your ankle again?” Heath says.
“Just tweaked,” she assures him. “A day off of it, and it’ll be fine. Otherwise, I was just startled.”
“I’ll get the fridge checked,” Mabel says.
“Who’s having a bridge deck, and why are we playing cards this early in the morning?” Pip asks as she joins us in the kitchen.
Elizabeth, a sixty-ish lady with pink tips to her platinum hair who went viral for crashing a drag show next door to her daughter’s wedding, and Dori, the twenty-something who’s still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life after a messy viral breakup, are both in the hallway too.
Everyone’s here.
All we need is the cat, and they will have all witnessed my clumsiness.
All in their pajamas and robes, because not only have I made a disaster of the kitchen, I woke everyone in the house doing it.
“I’m not usually like this,” I babble to Samantha.
“We know, hon. We know.” She squeezes me tighter. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“We’ve got the kitchen, Cricket,” Mabel says.
Lavender’s stopped crying, but she’s still letting Mabel hold her like she’s not too big to be held anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I think—I think I should be alone right now.”
“Let me walk you,” Samantha says.
Because I’m a menace.
I can’t be trusted to walk myself anywhere alone.
I don’t know what I did wrong, but I know my life is broken.
I’m broken.
And I don’t know how to fix me.