Chapter 4 Our Mutual, Imaginary Katie
Our Mutual, Imaginary Katie
Lainey wasn’t sure who she expected to be knocking on her front door the next morning, but it certainly wasn’t Elliot Hodges.
She cracked open the door and squinted at the man on her porch, willing herself to wake up.
“Morning,” he said, dipping his head to meet her sleepy eyeline. He’d swapped the jacket for a beige crewneck sweatshirt with a bit of white T-shirt poking out the top. He was holding a box wrapped in gold-and-white striped paper. It looked neat, professional.
She peered down at her chest. Most of her pajamas existed somewhere in the clothing-to-upcycled-rags pipeline, and this particular threadbare number was about three washes away from meeting a pair of fabric shears. She preemptively folded her arms over her chest.
“It’s me,” he explained when she didn’t respond. “Elliot Hodges.”
“Jesus, Elliot. I remember you!”
“Sorry. I…” His sentence trailed off. “I think we got off on the wrong foot.” He lurked on her porch, like a vampire waiting to be invited in.
She wrapped her arms tighter. “Is that a human head?”
He sighed. “Do you think it’s a human head?”
She narrowed her eyes on the box. It was the completely wrong shape, but she wasn’t sure what else called for a hand delivery from her sworn enemy so early in the morning.
He lifted it up an inch. “It’s a gift. A peace offering. I’m calling for a ceasefire.”
The corners of her mouth lifted. “Ah, so it’s a white flag. You surrender.”
His eyelids fluttered shut with what could only be profound irritation. “Just open it.”
“Can I get dressed first?”
His eyes took in the length of her, and there it was—that flicker of interest—but in a second, it was gone.
“Sure.” He let out a roughened throat clear that inched up her spine and sent goose bumps down her arms. That simple sound from Elliot was as affecting as a physical touch would’ve been from anyone else. The truth of this realization annoyed her.
Before he could observe the way his reflexive vocalizations disrupted her nervous system, he took about ten paces back and waited patiently.
After she’d changed into a roomy sweater and jeans, she found him in her backyard, scowling at a ceramic planter she’d sculpted several years back, shaped as the bust of a man with flowers blooming from his skull.
Lainey might have been a debatably talented ceramicist, but she was an inarguably horrific gardener, and the flowers had wilted into what looked like a cautionary display of the effects of scalp leprosy.
“Like what you see?” She was joking. Obviously.
“I’m not sure.” He eyed the piece with more genuine consideration than she’d expected. “It’s certainly…provocative.”
His assessment was nearly a compliment. “Do I get to open the box now?”
He rolled his shoulders back. “Yes. Of course.” He offered her the package.
Lainey set the delicately wrapped gift onto Leprosy Skull, catching Elliot’s wince out of the corner of her eye.
The box indicated that the gift was from Pottery Barn, which wasn’t so much disappointing as it was confusing.
He hadn’t had time to have something delivered, and the nearest Pottery Barn was over an hour away.
He would’ve passed countless more appropriate stores to purchase a gift for someone he didn’t particularly like.
Nestled in crepe paper were a pair of silver candlesticks. Tiny grooves ran up the length of the holders, giving them the appearance of tree bark. Its intricate detailing glowed in the morning light. It was a shockingly good gift, considering how little he knew her.
“Did you drive all the way out to Oak Ridge for this?” she asked, still confused by the logistics. Oak Ridge was the northernmost suburb of the nearest actual city. The kind of city that had strip malls filled with med spas and restaurants that sold fifteen-dollar salads in compostable containers.
“I drove down there last night, looking for some sort of peace offering, and when I saw these, I thought of you.”
He saw something pretty in a store, and it had reminded him of her. But it was a peace offering. She didn’t need to feel any sort of way about it, and yet, she did.
“These are…surprisingly nice.”
He smiled. She hated herself for still liking that smile of his. The way it formed little creases around his eyes that made him look boyish and distinguished all at once. How it warmed her chest and left her limbs feeling weightless.
“It surprises you that I’m capable of being nice?” he asked, still with that stupid, perfect smile of his.
“Yes,” she responded, admiring the candlesticks at eye level. “And that you have a tiny shred of taste.”
He rolled his eyes, but there was no derision behind it. “I thought we could use a clean slate.”
“Okay…” she agreed, tentatively.
“Exactly.” He adjusted his glasses. “I never should’ve gotten lawyers involved in the first place. They just want to rack up billable hours and make this all so messy. There’s gotta be a way for us to work this out so we both get what we want.”
The metaphorical olive branch in her hands rotted into a pile of hot garbage. Disappointment deflated in her belly. No, it was worse than disappointment. It was embarrassment. She was embarrassed that she’d let her guard down and thought for a moment that these candlesticks were a real gesture.
She gave herself a single second to feel it all, but she refused to let show her personal humiliation at having failed to detect such an obvious attempt at manipulation.
“The way I see it, it’s pretty simple,” he continued.
“Oh yeah?” Lainey asked, tilting her chin up at him.
“I know you have ‘squatter’s rights.’ I get that.
” There was unquestionable contempt in his voice when he said “squatter.” Evidently, he couldn’t help it.
It was simply how the word sounded coming out of his mouth.
“But I don’t know how I’m supposed to raise money for all of the repairs for the Shore Thing without renting out Forest’s Bridge.
I’d offer you a percentage, of course. Something reasonable that would leave me with enough funds to renovate the other cabins—”
“I’m gonna stop you right there.”
Lainey almost laughed at the “offer” to accept a “percentage” of a place she owned outright.
It was funny. Did he think she was that dense?
Did he think she’d be so impressed that he drove seventy-five minutes for a pair of silver candlesticks that she’d, what?
Give up her home? Lainey considered her options—laugh, cry, scream, cry again—and settled on none of the above.
“You know,” she said, oh so casually. Casual was key for situations like these. “I need to pick up a rider headed back to the Groff Retreat. Can you tag along and tell me what you had in mind?”
He radiated excitement. “Absolutely. I have a presentation deck on my phone, but I can read the slides to you on the way.”
···
She drove, and he droned on and on about profit shares and lease agreements and property variances.
As Lainey did her best impression of an interested party while feeling every precious minute of her time on this earth tick by, Elliot didn’t seem to notice how much time was passing or where they were headed until she pulled into the parking lot of the very Pottery Barn he’d visited yesterday.
“Is your passenger shopping?” he asked. There was still no air of suspicion in his voice.
She shook her head. “Just need to run a quick errand.”
Lainey shut off the engine and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Elliot hesitated but then followed her out through the driver’s side. He’d apparently accepted her car’s quirks, or at least was no longer fazed by them.
The scent of cream linen and store credit card debt nearly overtook her as they walked into the store.
Lainey scanned the sales floor. At the front counter were two employees: one was a smartly dressed man with light brown skin and a neatly trimmed beard, and the other was an older white woman with silver hair and oversized black frames.
For her purposes, neither was quite right.
Her eyes darted past the farmhouse dining tables and landed on a brunette woman with olive skin who was about her age.
She was wearing a bow in her hair and doing her absolute damnedest to make Taylor Swift merch double as business casual work attire.
Lainey grabbed Elliot’s arm, beelining for her new friend. “Be cool, and I might consider your ‘offer,’ ” she muttered under her breath. She took a deep inhale. When she was face-to-face with her target, Lainey let her posture soften into a mirror of the woman in front of her.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Lainey said to the stranger, her tone obscenely peppy. The woman straightened to attention like a spooked horse. “I was just telling Elliot that I thought it was you. Oh my god, how long has it been?”
Lainey turned to Elliot, who was completely red-faced, looking like a man who’d suddenly discovered he was inside a Pottery Barn without his pants.
“This girl right here. Don’t even try to put on the ten-minute ‘All Too Well’ around this one.
Every word. She knows every word! I swear.
You’ve met Elliot, right?” Lainey turned back to the sales clerk and watched her face vacillate between bewilderment at the strange woman in front of her and embarrassment that perhaps Lainey was in fact a genuine friend she’d inadvertently deleted from her memory.
“Umm, I’m not…” The saleswoman looked over her shoulder as though searching for the person Lainey was actually talking to, because it couldn’t possibly be her.
“You know what, I didn’t bring him to that thing.” Lainey imbued “thing” with vague meaning, as though this “thing” might be anything but also something precisely identifiable.
“Oh my god, you’re never gonna believe this.” Lainey leaned forward giddily. “You remember Katie?”
“Uh, yeah…?” The bow-haired woman nodded slowly, because as a woman in her mid- to late twenties, she definitely knew a Katie, if not their shared Katie, who, again, didn’t exist. “I think so.”