Chapter Thirty-Six
THIRTY-SIX
Annie
Five months later…
“She simply does not sleep,” Bridget complains, her voice on the verge of breaking. “The pediatrician says it’s okay, that she’s healthy and growing and all that. But I just worry so much that I’m doing something wrong and—”
“You are doing great,” I assure her. “Maeve just inherited her aunt Annie’s tendencies toward both occasional streaks of insomnia and constantly frustrating you, is all.”
My sister lets out a sound that I think is a laugh, though as sleep-deprived as she is, it comes out as more of a quiet hum.
I spent some time at her house on Long Island in the days immediately after she gave birth, mostly doing dishes and laundry and politely ignoring her whenever she’d spontaneously burst into postpartum hormone-induced tears.
Then our parents were there for a week after I left.
But now it’s just Bridget and Eduardo and I think the idea of being alone with Maeve is freaking them both out a bit.
I’m sure I would be freaked out too if I had to keep a tiny, brand-new human alive while also trying to take care of my own still-healing body while exhausted.
“I can come stay for another week or two,” I offer.
It will put me behind schedule in getting my new shop up and running before the tourists start flooding into town for the summer, but Bridget is my sister, and Maeve is my niece, and they are slightly more important to me than my business goals. Slightly.
It felt not only natural but imperative to throw myself into making this dream of mine a reality without any further delay.
I mentally organized everything I’d need to do during my drive back home to keep from crying the entire three hours.
Before even going to my apartment, I stopped at my dad’s friend’s real estate office and asked about local storefronts for rent.
Everything moved relatively quickly from there, and now I’m on schedule to open in just a couple weeks.
But I can and will adjust for Bridget and Maeve if I need to.
Still, I have to admit my relief outweighs my disappointment when she says, “No. It’s fine. I know you’re busy with the store. Besides, women have been doing this forever, and often under much more challenging conditions. I’ve got this.”
“You do.” I nod to myself in approval at the recitation of what has become her personal maxim over the last few weeks as I unbox another taxidermy squirrel Beau sent for me to sell on consignment.
This one is supposed to be Tippi Hedren in The Birds, complete with attacking crows, and it’s absurd enough that I’m pretty sure it’s going to sell instantly.
Hell, I’m almost tempted to purchase it myself.
“Thanks, Annie,” Bridget says softly. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
“Probably a jig, since you’d get all of Mom and Dad’s money when they die instead of having to split it fifty-fifty.”
She lets out that tired laugh again. “Woo-hoo, a whole two hundred dollars all to myself.”
“Now go hand that beautiful baby off to Ed for a while and take a freaking nap,” I order. “I’ll call you later tonight and if you haven’t slept at least three hours total by then, I’m gonna come up there and kick your ass.”
“I’d like to see you try,” she retorts.
“Pshh. Yeah, okay. I know you’re still wearing those weird mesh diapers,” I taunt.
“Yeah, which will make it even more embarrassing when I destroy you.”
“Mhm. Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
After I open the next box, full of soap from a goat farm in Maryland that’s gotten a bit internet famous lately thanks to the hot tattooed farmer in their social media posts, I pause to enjoy the way the afternoon sun sneaks in through the beveled glass panes of the double wooden doors, creating rainbows along the parquet floors.
It was the first thing I noticed when I came to check out the space, but one of so many things that made me fall in love with it.
Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I remember that this is really happening.
And all I had to do was spend a few weeks chasing a goose around Baltimore with a man that made me feel, however briefly, like I was enough.
That feeling might not have stuck around in a romantic sense, but professionally at least I am still convinced.
So there’s that. We’ll see how this little business venture goes for the first few months, and then I’ll decide if it was worth the heartbreak I had to go through to find the determination to go through with it or not.
The bell on the front door chimes while I’m searching for the box cutter I put down somewhere and promptly forgot about.
I assume the visitor is my nail tech’s teenage son, who I’ve hired to help me get the shop set up and running.
“Hey, can you toss me that roll of tape on the counter?” I ask without looking up.
“Sure,” says a voice that definitely is not Caden’s squeaky tenor. Instead, it’s a voice I would recognize anywhere, because I still hear it most nights in my dreams.
I slowly raise my head and find Callahan Leitner standing there by the door, looking as handsome as he did that first time I saw him on my television, a look on his face that reads as tentative, uncertain. Nervous.
“Still want me to toss it, or…?” he asks, holding up the roll of masking tape.
I slowly shake my head. “I’ll come to you.”
I wend my way through the towers of cardboard boxes between us—boxes that were full of possibilities a moment ago but now feel like obstacles to overcome in order to get to where I’m desperate to be—until I arrive there, in front of him.
It takes all of my strength not to lean in, bury my nose into his jacket. Can’t get ahead of myself, though. First I need to ask…“What are you doing here?” It comes out softly, full of wonder, and I’m glad he doesn’t seem to read any hostility into it.
“Well, I heard from Beau’s contact at the American Museum of Natural History yesterday. And I thought you might like to know what good ol’ Jeff Carney discovered about our stuffed friend.”
“Oh. Sure.” I somehow doubt he traveled all this way just to give me an update on the goose situation, but I do admit, I’ve been curious.
I wanted to search for an answer to how it all wound up, but every time I started to type the terms into the search bar on my phone late at night, I thought about the possibility of seeing Cal’s face staring back at me from a news article and lost my nerve.
“Apparently, the man who claimed credit for the specimen actually stole it from one of the first female ornithologists at the Smithsonian. Her name was Dr. Ora Belmont Worthy. She’s been best remembered for her work on hummingbirds.
A professor at NYU specializing in women in the biological sciences around the turn of the century saw a press release the museum put out about the goose’s return and remembered reading about a very similar goose in Worthy’s field notes in the course of her research for her next book.
She contacted Natural History and the Smithsonian and, after some archival digging, they were able to confirm that it was actually Worthy who discovered the goose, and that Ledford—the guy who’d taken credit for the find—shot it and claimed it as his own as a way to keep her from getting the recognition for it. ”
“Wow. That’s shitty,” I say.
“Silver lining to all of this, though, is that now Worthy will finally get the credit she deserved, however belatedly. The museums’ records have been updated to reflect that she’s the one who found it.”
“That’s good.”
“It is,” Cal agrees. “Also, once they figured out the connection to Worthy, I did some cursory digging of my own and discovered she married twice. The second time was to an illustrator named John Morse.”
I stare blankly, wondering if this name is supposed to mean something to me.
“Morse’s great-niece was Nicole’s mom’s aunt,” he explains.
“So there’s a family connection, which I guess sort of explains the why, but I still don’t understand how. Who stole the goose? Why did they give it to the aunt?”
“That’s all still a mystery. Doubt we’ll ever know the whole story.”
Cal and I stare at each other for a long moment. He looks like he wants to say more. I want him to as well.
At last his lips part and he says, “I have been on fifty-two dates in the last four months.”
My eyebrows shoot up. Okay. Well. I was absolutely not expecting him to say that.
“In the letter you left me,” he explains, “you said I needed to do more ‘shopping around’ before I could say for certain you were what I wanted.”
“So you decided to approach it like Supermarket Sweep?”
He straightens the collar of his coat. “It was Mindy’s idea, actually.”
“As in coffee shop Mindy?”
“After you left, she noticed I was looking a bit rougher than usual and begrudgingly asked if I was okay, so I told her what had happened. Well, most of it. Not about the goose. Anyway, she offered to help me out, as long as I agreed to schedule all of my dates at the coffee shop, in full view of the register, on days when she was working. She said it was to help coach me, but I’m pretty sure she just thought it would be funny to watch. ”
“And was it?” I ask, my stomach gurgling with anxious anticipation. “Funny, I mean.”
“A few, maybe. But my entire job is about making conversation with strangers, so I didn’t flounder nearly as much as she probably expected.
After Mindy helped me set up profalls—sorry, profiles—on a few apps, I kept an open mind and said yes to meeting up with anyone who didn’t immediately send up red flags.
And I mean anyone. I figured if this was about understanding all of my options, I couldn’t limit myself.
Lots of side tables out there, remember. Had to consider them all.”
Is it possible Cal came here to tell me that I was right? That he was mistaken about his feelings for me, which he’s realized now that he’s fallen in love with someone else he met over the course of his dating spree? “And?” I ask.