Chapter 11 #2
Something beyond Ginny going viral for trying to stop her ex and former best friend from getting married. She went running up the aisle in the church, tripped, and knocked out her front teeth on the edge of a wooden pew.
At least a half dozen wedding guests captured different angles of the moment on video and posted it to the internet.
Ginny’s been here ever since.
Still moving slower since the thing with the eggs the day after I got here.
And anytime I start to apologize again, she tells me to knock it off, that things happen, and this is far from the worst she’s ever had.
Mabel leans forward in one of the wingback chairs and settles her elbows on her knees.
“It has to be fine. Hosting events is the only way we’re keeping our doors open unless I can convince Aunt Pip to let us sell whatever’s still good of the stock.
And this is exactly the crowd we want—the kind that likes privacy as much as we do.
It’s a test run to show off what we can do. ”
More looks are exchanged around the room.
“If you have something to say, say it,” Mabel says. “We don’t have time to creep around this.”
“Two months might not be enough time to get everything spruced up around here,” Olivia says.
“The gardens are overgrown. The house needs a coat of paint. The mother-in-law house is in need of some modernizations if we’re going to host people here, even after we get the plumbing and the kitchen floor fixed. ”
“Between Heath, the plumber, and me, we can have most of that taken care of in the next two or three weeks. Paint’s expensive, but we can handle that too, especially with Dori here. She likes painting. And Cricket’s been tackling the gardens on her own, so we can ask her—”
“I’ll do it!” I burst into the room. “I want to help. Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
Olivia drops her coffee and mutters a soft shit.
Ginny startles in her chair and kicks the cat, who moves faster than I’ve ever seen, yowling while she leaps onto the coffee table and knocks over a vase of flowers.
Samantha gapes at me.
Mabel suppresses a smile as she whips a throw blanket off the back of her seat and somehow simultaneously tackles the overturned flowers and Olivia’s spilled coffee.
And Heath—
Well, Heath is looking at me like he wishes I weren’t here.
Like he knows I have a crush on him, and he’s only nice because be nice is one of very few rules here, and he’s annoyed that Lav’s so obsessed with dragons now, and he’s trying to put up boundaries so that my crush won’t get worse.
I need to get out of my own head.
“So you’re in too?” Mabel asks me while she finishes mopping everything up.
Fluffy hisses at her.
“Fluffernutter. Be nice,” Heath says.
The cat sploofs out on the coffee table and stares at him.
Samantha sneezes.
“I’m in,” I tell Mabel. “I haven’t found a new job, and I’m extra hands, and I like working. Helping. Being a team.”
“You paint?”
“I did a segment once on home renovations and got assigned painting and I—actually, I should probably stick to gardening and cleaning. Maybe setting up chairs outside.”
Ginny smiles at me. “You have lived the most fascinating life.”
My cheeks get hot, which is one more thing that’s happened more often since I went viral. “I swear it was only about three times in four years that things actually went badly. I’m usually good at whatever they ask—asked me to do. Was good.”
And we can add stuttering to something I didn’t do before my incident either.
With the clumsiness that’s still there, just not as much, the stuttering, and not knowing how to cope with having a crush on Heath, I feel like I’m in middle school again, and I’m grateful that most of the time here, no one’s judged me for being a complete disaster.
Honestly, staying here through the wedding sounds amazing.
Like a relief.
A purpose while I work through not just going viral, but all of the feelings and realizations I’ve had about my family and how I was raised and where I fit in the world too.
“No one’s good at everything,” Mabel says. “We’d love your help with the gardens.”
“I like dirt. You already know you’re getting dirty, and it’s hard to mess up planting a flower or pulling a weed.”
“Some of the weeds you’ve been pulling are flowering vines,” Samantha tells me.
Is she serious? “No.”
“No judgment, and they should have trellises to climb, but before we turn you loose, how about I show you what’s what so we can make an intentional plan around what we already have and where we want to go?”
“Who’s showing who their what-what?” Pip asks behind me. “About time I wasn’t the only one showing my what-what.”
“Samantha’s showing Cricket what’s what in the garden since Cricket’s enjoying working in it so much,” Mabel says. “Maybe you can help too? Give Dean a big middle finger and help us figure out how we can replace the trellises and trees he tore out?”
Pip steps up beside me, and I realize that while she seems to be pants-less, she’s wearing the brightest red lipstick along with my hot pink trouble-dick shirt, which covers her to her upper thighs.
“He was one of those,” she whispers loudly to me, pointing to the phallus design over her low-dangling boobs.
“I’ve picked up on that,” I murmur back.
She grins, her pale face breaking into wrinkles. “I like you. You’re a lot like me. Showgirl type. Dragon slayer. Black sheep of the family.”
The pride in her voice as she says it makes my eyes water.
Never would’ve called myself the showgirl type before, or taken pride in being the black sheep of my family, but Pip can call me whatever she wants so long as she beams at me like that.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Everyone’s watching.
And that’s fine.
Except for the Heath part.
I just—I get the impression he doesn’t like me, and I don’t like to show emotion in front of people who aren’t safe.
People who don’t like me.
People who judge me.
The way my parents do.
For all that he’s been outwardly patient with me—even while pointing out that my parents aren’t the best for me—I can’t shake the feeling that he wishes I wasn’t here.
And yet I still have a crush on him.
Lav’s right.
Grown-ups are complicated.
I wish I could be a dragon instead.
“There’s a bunch of wood in the fermentation building,” Heath says to Mabel. “I can probably reconstruct fencing or a trellis with it.”
“You can’t do everything.”
Well.
That’s a derisive snort of a response if I’ve ever heard one.
“Watch me,” he says dryly.
Mabel looks at me. “Yes, he’s always like this.”
Like she’s telling me what Heath is like because she thought I’d ask.
Like I have reason to care.
I know from just listening that none of the seemingly straight women here—not Mabel or Ginny or Dori—consider him anything other than a brother.
And Elizabeth didn’t meet him until the same day I did, but she says he’s only a couple years older than her daughter and she’s not into the young ones like her husband apparently is.
But I also know what those feelings are that I’ve been squelching, and having Mabel talk to me directly about him right now is making me warm in the face like I’ve never been attracted to a man before.
Like I haven’t used dating apps for one-night stands and hookups between boyfriends for years.
“We all have our issues,” I say brightly.
The chuckle that goes around the room tells me it was the right thing to say.
Thank you, all of those years of broadcast practice.
That, at least, feels normal.
“My grandpa was a woodworker,” I tell the room. “He taught me to pick good boards. Point me to the fermentation building, and I’ll go poke around.”
This time, the response that goes around the room is less enthused.
Understandable.
Something broke in me when I went viral, and I’ve been clumsier than normal ever since.
I hate being clumsy.
It makes me feel unintelligent and unaware, when I’ve worked so hard all of my life to be cognizant of my surroundings and well-informed with critical thinking skills.
So my parents would think I was as smart and successful as my sisters, even if my choice of careers was second-rate compared to Belle’s law degree and Aurora’s medical practice.
“You have Lav for a bit longer?” Heath says to Ginny.
She smiles at him. “Once I go rescue her from bathroom-cleaning duty with Elizabeth, we were planning on having supervised grapevine time to hunt for dragons.”
He nods.
No frustration.
No cringing.
I’ve seen Lavender enough to know that she’s as wildly unpredictable in her moods and actions as a squirrel on three double espresso martinis.
Which I haven’t personally witnessed, but I did see a squirrel get a little tipsy once.
It was a sight.
“Any objection to the wedding?” Mabel asks him.
“Gotta do something. If you think it’s what we need, it’s what we need.” He looks at me. “You ready now? No time to waste, and I’m stalled on everything else around here. Might as well see what we’ve got.”
I smile, then worry I’m smiling too brightly, then realize it looks worse that I can’t decide how to smile, and my face gets hotter. “Yep. Just gotta grab my water bottle.”
“I’ll meet you in front.”
He rises, and I’m struck once again by how large of a man he is.
And how much comfort I’ve taken in knowing that with me staying in his basement, he’s standing between me and anything that might find me.
My parents.
My sisters.
An ex that I haven’t talked to in a year and a half but who felt the need to reach out to berate me for what his nieces apparently saw on the internet.
The complete randos from the internet whom I’ve tried very hard to not think about while I’ve been cut off from the world here.
Though it’s the randos from the internet that I’m most worried about actually wanting to see me in person.
The rest of them probably appreciate that I’m not close by right now.
Even my friends from back home—the ones who’ve been checking in on me over text while I’ve been gone—aren’t people I want to see yet.
I feel like I’m turning into a new person here, and I’m not ready to face it if I’m turning into the kind of person that even my closest friends wouldn’t want to be around too.
Apparently I have more insecurities about relationships than I thought I did before my viral moment.
“Great! I’ll see you out front!” I smile brightly again, turn, and walk straight into the doorframe behind me.
“Oh, honey,” Samantha murmurs. “It does eventually get better, I promise.”
“I’m okay!” Nothing bruised but my ego.
Pretty much normal these days.
I just hope I don’t bruise it any more before Heath and I are done looking for wood for the trellis.