7. Seven
SEVEN
Living at The Landings had its advantages.
There were multiple restaurants with good food, and everybody rode around in golf carts.
Bree had insisted on taking hers with her when selling, even though she and Brody went everywhere together.
She said she needed one “just in case.” It was Barbie pink, and she’d decked it out with decals, so I didn’t really want her golf cart anyway.
I would have taken Brody’s, though. It would have beaten shopping for one of my own.
Bree invited herself along when I picked out my ride. She knew a woman.
No, literally. Her golf cart saleswoman was a former resident of The Landings, and had helped Bree break HOA rules.
Apparently, it had been her life’s mission to drive the board nuts before getting divorced and moving.
She was more than happy to lend her expertise — she’d been on the board for a time — to Bree as a form of torture to the people she used to consider friends.
Bree had a lot of ideas about what my golf cart should look like. I shot them all down.
“Blue is boring,” she insisted as I pulled out a credit card to pay. My golf cart wouldn’t be ready for a few days, and then they would deliver it. I couldn’t believe how expensive golf carts were. Seeing how traffic zipped around the community, however, a golf cart was clearly the way to go.
“I happen to like blue,” I replied, shaking my head.
I liked her, but she was a lot. I had no idea how Brody put up with her.
He, of course, was head over heels. Between Bree and Bronte, he was in heaven.
He constantly walked around with a smile on his face.
It would have been disturbing if I didn’t know how happy he was.
Had I ever been that happy? I couldn’t think of a time.
I didn’t consider myself an unhappy person, but the sort of happiness he exuded was otherworldly.
It wasn’t just him, either. Nathan seemed just as happy, and everything I’d heard about Nathan — he’d been a notorious womanizer for years — made me think it would have been impossible for him to be as happy as he appeared to be.
Yet I never saw the man without a smile on his face.
“You at least need some decals,” Bree insisted. “I mean … blue is so boring without decals.” She did a shimmying dance over to the decal display. “Look. There’s a Klingon. You should totally get that one.” She didn’t look at me when she said it, but it was obvious she was fishing for information.
“I am not getting a Klingon. I hate science fiction.”
Bree turned, slowly, and narrowed her eyes. “Does your mother know that?”
“My mother doesn’t hold my entertainment choices against me.” I took the receipt, smiled at the saleswoman, then started toward the door. “I’m not getting decals.”
“Oh, I was wrong,” Bree said as she reluctantly followed. “Blue isn’t boring. You are.”
I stopped on the sidewalk outside the store and stared down at her. “You’re a pain in the ass,” I said finally. “Has anybody ever told you that?”
“Just everybody who has ever met me.”
“Even Brody?”
“Oh, Brody thought I was the biggest pain in his ass in the world when we met.”
“And then he fell in love a week later?”
“Oh, no.” Her smile slipped. “He hated me for years. There was this incident with coffee at a convention. He was convinced I was trying to ruin his life. It was a whole thing.”
I vaguely remembered the coffee story. “And how did you guys end up falling in love again?”
She shrugged. “Well, he almost hit me with his golf cart — I was on my scooter, which I love, but he won’t let me ride any longer because he says I’m going to end up a statistic — and we fought.
Then we kept running into each other.” Her smile was sloppy.
“Sometimes, when it’s meant to be, it just happens. ”
“Ah, well, I’ll have to take your word for it.
” I was eager to get rid of her so I could walk around downtown Savannah.
There hadn’t been a lot of time to explore yet.
“I’m going to stick down here and look around.
Thank you for coming with me.” Even though I could have shopped for a golf cart much faster without you.
I didn’t say the second part, but it was implied.
Bree didn’t take my very obvious verbal shooing personally.
“I’m doing some shopping myself. Buying clothes for a kid is difficult.
They grow out of them in a month at this age.
Brody and I have agreed to start buying a month’s worth of clothes, and that’s it.
There are outfits my mother and his father sent for the baby when she was a newborn that she never got to wear. ”
“I guess I never thought about it,” I mused. “That makes sense, though.” I smiled. “It was a pleasure spending time with you.” I turned to leave.
“You, too.” I thought that was all she was going to say and patted myself on the back for getting away unscathed. She wasn’t done, though. “One day, I want to hear the story about your mother slapping the crap out of Wylie’s mother.”
I froze, debating my options, then turned to look at her over my shoulder. “I don’t know what happened to cause that. My mother doesn’t talk about it.” I’d already told her this, but obviously she hadn’t been listening.
“So you’ve already said.” She smirked. “The thing is, there’s no way you don’t know something about that situation.”
“Ask Wylie.” I turned away again, this time determined that I was going to keep going.
“Wylie says she doesn’t know either. I don’t believe you guys.”
“You’re a suspicious soul. Maybe that says more about you than us.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just know I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”
I wasn’t worried. Nobody who had come before her had managed. She wouldn’t either.
SAVANNAH WAS A TOURIST TOWN to its very core.
There was a shop for everything, including rocks — was there a shortage of rocks I wasn’t aware of?
— and pirate trinkets. There was a different coffee shop every block, restaurants with various themes, and even something called The Olfactory Company, which I couldn’t stop myself from entering.
The collection of items inside had tickled me.
From the antique picture frames to the old-fashioned shaving kit to the naked statues that were meant for a shelf, not a yard.
Briefly, I considered buying Bree one to soften the blow when I took down the yard statue, but the woman behind the counter kept giving me suspicious looks when I tried to touch them.
The collection of Mardi Gras masks caught my attention — I’d always loved those — but the only things I bought were a few prisms for in front of the windows.
They’d been one of my favorite things to collect when I was a kid.
I had no idea what happened to the collection — it had been lost throughout the years — but having a few in the new house felt like good luck to me.
Once I left, I looked for a coffee shop. I was in dire need of caffeine. I found Savannah Coffee Roasters a few blocks away and immediately liked the atmosphere. The brick interior was pleasing to the eye, and the first sip of my latte told me that I’d made the right choice.
When I turned to leave, however, I saw what I’d missed upon entry. Wylie was in the corner, her tablet in front of her, and she seemed to be engrossed in whatever she was doing. Given how fast her fingers were moving over her keyboard, I had to think she was writing.
My first instinct was to flee. If she hadn’t seen me come in, she likely wouldn’t see me leave. Of course, she picked that exact moment to lift her chin, as if she sensed somebody watching her, and her gaze immediately found me.
My chest tightened, and I knew that I didn’t have a choice but to acknowledge her presence. We’d talked things out. We were fine with one another. People who were fine with one another didn’t flee coffee shops to avoid one another.
So, instead, I pasted a friendly smile on my face — at least I hoped it was friendly — and headed to her table. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Her response was soft. “I didn’t know you hung around here. I can go.” She moved to pack up her stuff, but I stopped her.
“It’s fine, Wylie.” It wasn’t fine, though.
For some reason — and I would have to think on why later — her being so uncomfortable around me was like a knife to the gut.
I didn’t want to hang out with her or anything.
I didn’t want her to run whenever she saw me, either. We had to find a happy medium here.
With that in mind, I sat in one of the open chairs at her table, without invitation. “The odds of us ending up in the same coffee shop here are long given how many of them there are. It was an accident, and I don’t expect you to leave.”
“Okay.” She shrugged and managed a smile that caused a small uptick in my heart rate. “What are you doing in these parts? I thought you lived over in bougie central with Bree and Brody.”
“Oh, I do.” I smirked at the term. She was right. The Landings was bougie as hell. That didn’t bother me, though. “I had to come to town to buy a golf cart. Once I was finished, I decided to take advantage of where I was and look around.”
“A golf cart?” She looked confused.
“Everybody in The Landings drives golf carts. It’s weird and somehow cool at the same time.” I lifted one shoulder in a “what are you going to do” gesture. “At first I wasn’t going to do it, but driving around when everybody else is on a golf cart is a little dangerous.”
“I guess I knew about the golf cart thing,” she said. “Bella told me about it. Nathan used to live at The Landings.”
This was something we could talk about, and it was safe, so I jumped at the bone she was throwing. “I didn’t realize that, I guess. I thought they lived in Bella’s apartment together.”