by Молли Харпер
After a moment’s consideration, they all nodded. “That just about sums it up, yes,” Thomas said.
“This has not been helpful, at all.”
Thomas took my chin in his hand and made me look him in the eye. “Sweetheart, if you want someone to cuddle you and stroke your ego, get a dog. But we will always tell you the truth, which is why a lot of people don’t spend time with us. You’ve screwed up. And you’ve screwed up big. Own it, apologize for it. Either make up with him or move on.”
I frowned, draining the last of my wine. “Can I get a second opinion from a panel of lesbians?”
“No,” Emmett told me. “All verdicts are final, no appeals. Who wants dessert?”
Emmett was never one to let me dwell. The bastard.
Instead of being a decent brother, he allowed me only two days of wallowing in the intensely cheerful comfort of his guest room before forcing me to come in to work with him.
“Come on. Up and at ‘em, kid,” he called as he poured himself a cup of coffee at his kitchen counter. “There are no free lunches in this house - what the hell are you wearing?”
I looked down at my usual daytime ensemble of yoga pants and a hoodie. “What? This is what I’ve been wearing during the day.”
“Well, then, my darling sister, it wasn’t luck that landed you Monroe. It was a miracle.”
“Keep the gloves above the belt, Em,” I muttered. “You’re the one who’s told me for years that I dress like a Junior League fembot. I’ve just taken your advice and relaxed a bit.”
“You left ‘a bit’ behind a long time ago, Lacey,” he said, dragging me into the guest room and going through the dresser drawers. “We need to find you a happy medium.”
I flopped down on the four-poster canopy bed, wallowing in the mussed white eyelet spread. Emmett’s guest room was a 1950s teenager’s dream come true. Candy-striped pink-and-white wallpaper, the princess bed, and a picture of Elvis in his army uniform on the refurbished nightstand. He didn’t even like Elvis. He just loved a good theme. Emmett’s own room was a little less innocent, a lot more Pier 1 Imports. I loved my brother, but he was a throw-pillow junkie. I’d been planning on an intervention before Cherry Click came along and derailed the course of my existence.
That seemed so long ago now, like it had happened to someone else. And yet, the idea of going into town with Emmett was exhausting. So far I’d managed to dash into town to visit Sam’s office without encountering any of my former Singletree friends and neighbors. Once people knew I was helping Emmett at The Auctionarium, they’d make up any excuse to come by for a chat, just to get a look at me.
I could probably deal with being a sideshow attraction if I wasn’t busy throwing myself a big Monroe-based pity party. At the moment I just wanted to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.
“Come on, Lacey, out of bed, this stopped being cute about five minutes ago,” he said, tossing dark jeans and a tomato-red sweater at me. “If you’re going to stay with me, you’re going to pull your weight, which means coming into the store and humoring the cranky techno-phobic geriatrics who insist they could get ten thousand dollars for their mothers’ china if they took it to Sotheby’s.”
“Well, you make it sound so attractive,” I snarked, tossing the sweater back at him. “Why do you even have women’s clothes here?”
“Merry Christmas,” he said, opening the guest room closet to show me several color-coordinated, accessorized outfits in my sizes. “When you left Mike, I figured there would be a makeover at some point. Though, I’ll be honest, I thought it would be sooner. I like to be prepared.”
“Emmett, were you not listening last night when I was drunkenly ranting about men who keep pushing me to do what they want?”
“Yes, but I don’t count, I’m family,” he said, frowning.
“Bullshit!” I exclaimed. “Being family means you count twice. I don’t want a makeover. I don’t want you laying out outfits for me like I’m six years old. I’m perfectly comfortable in what I have on, thank you, and old enough to pick out my own damn clothes.”
“Fine,” he said icily, dropping the sweater on the bed. “You have ten minutes to do something with your face and get your poly-blend-covered ass in the car, woman, or I’m calling Mama and telling her you chose to stay here instead of with her.”
I gasped. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me,” he said, before sweeping out of the room. “No. No dramatic exits this time. I have something to say to you. So your life didn’t turn out exactly as you expected? Well, boo fucking hoo, sweetie. You think this is how I saw my life turning out? Despite dating every eligible man between here and New Orleans, I don’t know if I’m ever going to have someone to share my life with. Dad doesn’t have anything to do with me. Even though I have plenty of acquaintances, including that coven you met the other night, my baby sister is my closest friend, which is just fucking sad. The only thing I have going for me is my keen eye for breakables made fifty years ago and the fact that you occasionally let me boss you around, even if it’s just about your hair. But that’s my life. It’s what I make of it.”
“I’m your closest friend?” I asked. “That is flicking sad.”
He ignored me. “But you want to know what pisses me off more than anything? That in the end, Mike gave you something most of us would kill for.”
“A vulnerability to STDs?”
I made an “uhhf” sound when he threw a pillow at me. “A second chance! Thanks to his boffing the secretary, you found a man who loves you and is just waiting for you to stop being a moron so you can make a life together.”
“No, I have a man who thinks I’d be great if I just tweaked my personality a bit here and there to suit his needs,” I countered. “Look, I opened myself up to someone completely. And I got burned for it. I’m afraid now that I won’t be able to love anybody else. And part of me thinks that’s okay, that maybe it’s worth it if I don’t have to hurt like this anymore.”
Emmett sighed. “Lace, let’s not romanticize your time with Mike. We both know -”
“I’m not talking about Mike; I’m talking about Monroe.”
“Oh.” Emmett chewed his lip for a moment. “Well, then, that was a valid and well-constructed argument.”
“I’m sorry, Em. I do appreciate what you do for me. Maybe I just need a little less of it. I’ll be in the car in five minutes,” I said, squeezing his hand.
“Take seven,” he said, patting my leg as he pushed up from the bed.
“I’m wearing the sweats!” I called, flopping back on the bed. “I do not know who won that argument.”
A cold strawberry Pop-Tart and a colder Coke later, I was sitting at the computer at Emmett’s desk, cataloging a set of milk glass pitchers.
“I do not know how you drink that stuff so early.” Emmett shuddered as I took a long pull from the frosty red can. “It can’t be good for you.”
“Says the man drinking three hits of espresso mixed with overheated milk and four sugars,” I said, searching through the tangle of spreadsheets on his hard drive for the appropriate tracking number.
“It’s low-fat milk,” he said.
I shook my head and ignored him. Emmett’s office! storeroom was a sort of cross between Au Baba’s cave and Grandma’s creepy attic, filled with old bicycles, old framed movie posters, kitschy cookie jars, and the odd antique wooden dressmaker’s form. Emmett had a special case to protect the books, magazines, and comic books from humidity and dust. There were dozens of china dolls lined up on Lucite cases on the shelves, like an imprisoned evil doll army. I had a hard time turning my back on them.
Emmett had remodeled the former Faber’s Hardware Store so that the storeroom took up the majority of the real estate. He’d walled off the reception area to create a cozy space where he could greet clients at a refurbished Queen Anne table, appraise their valuables for a reserve bid, determine a commission, and sign their paperwork.
While Emmett was willing
to sell online for anyone, there was also a small showroom for the items Emmett had gleaned from estate sales and auctions. Emmett sold direct to select, discerning clients who drove hundreds of miles for the privilege of picking through his private collection of antique glass and furniture.
It was that special collection that was giving me fits at the moment. My brother might have been obsessively protective of the condition of the items entrusted to his care, but he sucked at tracking where they ended up. It was some sort of miracle that he managed to ship the items to the buyers. I guessed the “in the now” quality of eBay sales helped him stay on top of those items, but anything that stayed in the store long-term was in danger of being lost in the shuffle. There were half-finished address spreadsheets, spreadsheets that used abbreviations that might have been Sanskrit, and a list of names Emmett had just titled “Nuh-uh.”
“Hey, Em, what does ‘dep. R. dais. 4-set,’ mean?” I asked, thumbing the so-called inventory book while I walked into the reception area. Tansy Moffitt, our pastor’s first cousin, was sitting at Emmett’s desk while he looked over a collection of old National Geographic magazines.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you had a customer,” I said, backing away.
Suddenly I wished that I’d shut the hell up and put on Emmett’s stylish sweater and jeans ensemble.
“We’re just finished,” Emmett said, smirking. Tansy Moffitt had the biggest mouth in four counties. The minute she left the store, she would activate a phone tree that would bring every busybody reachable by Ma Bell to Emmett’s door.
“Lacey!” Tansy cried, springing up from the chair. “I didn’t realize you were here! How have you been? We haven’t seen you in such a long time. Let me get a look at you. Oh, I just love that new haircut. It’s so … interesting! Now, I know that things are hard for you right now, but I’d really like to see you in church this Sunday. Your church family misses you, shug!”
“I think that would be sort of awkward, with Mike’s whole family being there,” I told her. “But thank you.”
“Oh, honey, I think you all just need to put this whole thing behind you. You know, the reverend is preaching a whole series on forgiveness this month and I couldn’t help but think last Sunday how much it would help you and Mike to just let the past be the past. You just set it before the Lord and forget it.”
“You set it, and forget it,” Emmett said, grinning at me, daring me to laugh at his inappropriately Jesus-based Ron Popeil-Rotisserie joke.
“I appreciate the thought, Tansy,” I told her, trying to tug my hand out of hers, but she just wouldn’t let go. The woman had a grip like a teamster. “I just need some time.”
“Oh, sure, shug,” she said. “You give me a call if you need anything at all. And I’ll see you this Sunday, right?”
“Still too soon, Tansy.”
“Well, I’m not going to give up, I’ll be stopping by every week until we see you there,” she said cheerfully, waving to Emmett as she walked out the door.
Through tight, smiling lips, I said, “I believe you.”
“I think I know someone who’s going home at lunch to ch-a-ange,” Emmett sang.
“Yes, okay?” I cried, burying my face in my hands. “I will submit to your Machiavellian fashion machinations. Clearly, I was wrong to choose this particular area to make my stand.”
He snickered. “Come on, you have to face your public at some point; consider this a safe space.”
“Hmmph,” I snorted. “My public face aside, could you please explain your organization system, which I suspect isn’t so much a system as a series of brain games designed to drive me insane a la Jigaw the serial killer?”
He frowned and I showed him the entry marked “dep. R. dais. 4-set.”
“That means depression-era daisy glass, four-piece set. It’s in a red box on the third shelf from the bottom in the special collection.”
“Well, it’s supposed to be on a FedEx truck on its way to Augusta, Georgia. You promised delivery by Friday, which is in two days. You put a reminder on a Post-it note that somehow ended up on the bottom of my shoe. How has eBay not put some sort of skull-and-crossbones disclaimer on your sales profile?”
He sniffed. “There have been a few missteps along the way, but I always manage to keep the customers happy.”
“Well, those missteps are costing you a fortune in overhead, like the overnight shipping fees you’re going to have to cough up to get the daisy glass to Augusta,” I said.
“Since when did you become little miss office manager?”
“If there’s anything I learned from serving as an unappreciated part-time serf at Mike’s office, it was compulsive, anal-retentive control over paperwork flow. Your books are a mess. Just this morning I found a dozen payments missing on items you shipped months ago. You’re charging just enough to make an itty-bitty profit after shipping, the mortgage on the store, and overhead. And from what I could see, most of that comes from your direct antique sales to special clients.”
“You couldn’t have seen all that in one morning - okay, fine, it’s a mess. So, you think I should start charging more?”
“No, I think you should start keeping your books in order and cut some of your waste. Like the overnight fees, which I should mention, you probably want to run over to FedEx now if you want to make the afternoon delivery run.”
“Be my unappreciated part-time serf and run it over for me?” he implored. “There’s a shiny nickel in it for you.”
“No, you procrastinated your way into this bed, buck-o, you handle the shipping,” I told him. “But I will go through the rest of your quote - unquote files to make sure you don’t have any customer approval rating bombs waiting to go off.”
“You’re going to reorganize the whole thing, aren’t you?” he said, his voice fearful and small.
I thought about it and found that I sort of liked the idea of having somewhere to go every day, at least for a while, somewhere I could forget about Mike and Monroe and just devote myself to someone else’s mess. “Yes, I am.”
“But I won’t be able to find anything,” he whined.
“Do you know the alphabet?” I asked. He nodded. “Can you use basic reasoning skills?” He nodded again. “I think you’ll be okay”
“Lacey!” Vanessa Whitlock, a friend of our mother’s, came through the door, lugging what looked like a standard Black and Decker bread machine. She must have whipped it off the counter in her rush to get out of her house and to the source of fresh gossip. “It’s so good to see you!”
“Maybe I will go to the FedEx office for you,” I said quietly, peering down.
“Oh, no,” Emmett said. “I have to learn my lesson. You can mind the store for a while. Oh, look, more ladies coming into the store. It looks like they’re forming a line.”
“I hate you,” I muttered.
“You love me,” he said, turning on his heel to the storeroom. “New client paperwork is in the top drawer on the left. It’s called tough love, Lace. I’m ditching you because I care.”
“Emmett!”
But he’d left me, with a pack of gossipmongers gathering in the waiting room. And I was still wearing the damn yoga pants.
26
Hidden Piercings
Emmett had thrown me in the deep end of the pool. And that pool was filled with sharks.
The Great Whites came in the form of church ladies, my mother’s bridge club friends, and wives of Mike’s clients. And they weren’t after my blood, just delicious bits of information about my appearance and overall mental state. They were all on my side, they assured me, and just came by to lend their support during my “trying time.” My mother’s golf partner, Mimi Becket, just couldn’t believe Mike was bringing “that awful woman” to country club events and expecting everyone to just accept her like one of their own. Jenna Upwell swore she and her husband only went out to dinner with Mike and Beebee to be polite, and that she was thinking of me the whole time. I emerged from this gauntl
et of strained social interaction exhausted, with very little to add to the stock but a bunch of gently used kitchen appliances.
After ducking home to change into Emmett-approved office attire, I avenged myself in many, many ways, starting with a complete overhaul of Emmett’s “filing system.” I dumped his banker’s box of invoices onto the floor and used a hand-carved ivory walking stick to shuffle them around. Emmett was both incensed and horrified by my abuse of the stock.
By the time we closed, I’d almost gotten the invoices near some sort of order. Mama came barreling into the shop, clutching her handbag like a Spartan shield.
“Oh, crap,” Emmett muttered.
“Would you like to tell me why I had to hear from Betty Vogel that you’re back in town?” she demanded, stopping to give Emmett a quick kiss before continuing her tirade. “And why the whole of the Ladies Auxiliary seems to think you have a tattoo of a snake around your waist?”
Emmett snickered.
“Mama, I don’t have a tattoo,” I said, the picture of innocence. “But Emmett does.”
Emmett gasped right along with Mama. “How could you?” he spat, unconsciously rubbing at the little yin-yang symbol he’d had put on his hip in a drunken spring break debacle. “I swore you to secrecy!”
“You will never leave me in charge of reception again,” I told him.
“Agreed,” he ground out.
Mama exclaimed, “What is wrong with the two of you? Emmett, I didn’t spend fifteen hours in labor, passing your pumpkin of a head, for you to do that to your body! And Lacey, how could you move back to town without telling me?”
“I haven’t moved back, Mama, I’m just staying with Emmett for a few days while I figure some things out. Emmett, on the other hand, was drunk, and an art student from Atlanta convinced him it would seal their love.”
“Shut it,” Emmett warned. “Or I bring up the public yoga pants.”
