And One Last Thing... (9 page)

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I woke up to a pitch-black room. I panicked for a moment, unsure of where I was or whose bed I was in. It was still an adjustment to sleep alone, even though Mike wasn’t exactly an exciting presence in the bedroom, when he was there. And it was a comfort to have his warm weight balancing the mattress. Once you get used to that, trying to sleep alone feels like you’ve forgotten something. You lie there and wonder whether you left the front door unlocked or the stove on and then you realize, oh, there’s supposed to be another person in my bed.

I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything during the literary unburdening of my soul. I foraged in the fridge and was overwhelmed with my choices. I never ate midnight snacks. Since, as my mother-in-law put it, “Mike likes his girls thin,” I was pretty careful about what I ate. And despite the fact that I loved to cook a variety of dishes, so much of my meal planning and shopping revolved around Mike’s finicky palate - no spices, no fish, no nightshade vegetables. The rare exceptions were when we entertained people who, say, might like seasonings other than salt and pepper. Mike suffered through those meals, and after our guests left, groaned for the rest of the night as if I’d poisoned him.

Even now, the contents of my pantry reflected Mike’s tastes. White bread, American cheese, deli-sliced roast turkey. (Because smoked turkey was too exotic.) I must have shopped on automatic pilot.

So what did I want? It was so strange not to have to take anyone else’s feelings into consideration. If I felt like eating pot stickers and waffles for dinner, I could. If I felt like eating pot stickers and waffles for dinner every night for the next two weeks, I could.

So what did people eat at this hour of the morning?

I finally settled for the makings of a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and a can of Coke. I didn’t bother turning on the porch light as it would only attract mosquitoes… and the attention of my neighbor, who was awake and sitting at his computer near his living room window. He seemed to be smiling at the screen. The tilt of his lips, the arch of white teeth, lit up his whole face. He was relaxed, happy, an entirely different person from the ass who pulled me out of the lake. It would have been nice to spend time with -…

Wait, I disliked this man, intensely. “Enjoy barelylegalfarmgirls.com, you jerk,” I muttered.

He stretched his long, lean arms over his head, craning his neck toward the window. He did a double take when he saw me watching him. His relaxed expression all but evaporated and with an abrupt flick of his wrist, he shut his blinds.

Asshole.

I took an overly aggressive bite of sandwich, feeling a surge of guilt at being so tense in the face of such serenity. This place was my sanctuary. I had just as much right to be there as Monroe did. I would not let him take this from me. I forced the snark to drain from my body so I could enjoy it. The sky was perfectly clear and so close to dawn that it was starless. I could hear the water gently bumping Gammy’s rowboat against the dock. Somewhere in the weeds, a bullfrog tried to drown out the crickets. Across the cove, a devoted fisherman was rowing along the shore, setting gig lines, long, floating strings of hooks that you set before dawn, hoping to return for an economy-size catch. It was so peaceful. Opening my drink seemed to make an obscene amount of noise.

I yawned. The hermit lifestyle was messing with my internal clock. I doubted that post-midnight snacks involving grilled fats and soda would do much for my waistline. If I wanted to do my trainer, the Carb Nazi, proud, I would put on my running shoes and go for a jog at daybreak. But the first thing I wanted to do was get back on my laptop and start writing about Mike’s mother’s ability to sense every single time we were naked and call to “see what we were up to.” It was like she had a chip implanted in him somewhere.

Revived by bubbly caffeine, I worked until the sun came up, describing how I felt when Mike first hired Beebee and how all the women in town seemed to have a collective fit. I looked out the window and saw that Monroe’s lights were off. Apparently he’d turned in for the morning. Maybe he was some sort of nocturnal creature, only capable of annoying me after dark.

I tapped at the keys to bring up what I’d written about the morning I’d received Beebee’s flowers. I had my own neuroses to deal with. I didn’t have time for his.

12 • Shakespeare Territory

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Come on, loser, out of bed.”

Lifting my drool-stained face from the pillow, I squinted up at my brother, who was smirking down at me and waving a pint of rocky road under my nose. I winced when Emmett pulled up the shades, flooding the room with late afternoon light.

“Go away, I was up at the butt crack of dawn,” I moaned, pulling the quilt over my head. “Besides, I’m in hiding.”

“Well, you’re doing a lousy job, love lump,” Emmett chided from the other side of the bed. I felt him nudging my ribs through the quilts. “It took me all of two guesses to get your location out of Mama.”

“What was your other guess?” I asked, my voice muffled by the blankets.

“That creepy old sanitarium where we used to visit Great-Auntie Myrtle.”

Emmett shook my covered shoulders. “Get up or I’ll eat all this ice cream myself and you will be responsible for the resulting cellulite on my thighs.”

I whipped the covers off my head as he continued to poke at me. “Oh, you don’t have any cellulite, you bastard. You’re the only one in the family without it.”

Emmett shrank back at the sight of my horrific bedhead and pillow creases. “Gah! Quick, take the ice cream before your eyes turn me to stone.”

I glared up at him. Emmett was basically a male version of me. The same dimples, our father’s blue eyes, the same topheavy, bowed lips. Our hair was a matching shade of buttery blond, which Emmett insisted he dyed to look like mine. I thought he was trying to be nice until I caught him attempting to cut a sample swatch of my hair to take to his colorist.

Emmett has boundary issues.

My brother ran The Auctionarium, a brick-and-mortar business for people who didn’t know how to use eBay, Amazon, or basically any online site that sold used items. He took in weird family heirlooms, antiques, and garage sale fodder and sold them online for a handsome profit. From looking at him, you couldn’t tell he was a computer geek-slash-the-world’s-foremost-authority-on-carnival-glass. Unless he was crawling around in someone’s basement or barn searching for valuables, he favored a sort of Cape Cod aesthetic. Lots of madras and plaid. It looked like Calvin Klein threw up in his closet.

Imagine growing up with a brother who knew how to dress better than you did. It’s humiliating.

“Come on, Lace, out of bed,” he said, smacking me repeatedly with a pillow. “This is starting to look like something out of Valley of the Dolls. And not in the fun way.”

“I’m coming, but only for the ice cream.” I grumbled, snatching the container from his hand and wrapping the quilt around my shoulders. Emmett, who’d always had a flair for the dramatic, took the tail end of the quilt and carried it like a royal train.

“What time is it?” I asked, using the spoon he ceremoniously presented to dig into the melty chocolate.

“Around four,” Emmett said. “Why were you up at the butt crack of dawn?”

“Writing,” I said. “The sad story of my life. My lawyer wants my thoughts on how exactly my marriage went to crap.”

“Well, it started when you married a pompous, pretentious, prematurely old man,” he snorted.

Emmett loved alliteration, but he had never liked Mike. When Mike and I started dating, I thought it was normal for Emmett to treat Mike like an annoying younger brother. And after a few years, I blamed the distance between them on Mike’s latent homophobia. But now I had to admit that Emmett’s “asshat radar” was just more acutely tuned than my own.

“Hey, where have you been, Em?” I demanded, finally awake enough to be indignant. “My life has come crashing down around my ears and you can’t drag yourself home?”

“Sweetie, I’m sorry, the resort was all about relaxation and binge drinking. The staff didn’t allow TVs, internet access, or newspapers … or Crocs. It was fantastic. I had no idea what was happening until we landed in Florida and I saw you featured on the ‘news of the weird’ portion of Inside Edition. Not your best picture, by the way.”

I glared at him.

“Which is, clearly, not the point. It doesn’t matter, because Emmett’s here now to make it all better.” He dragged me into the cabin’s tiny kitchen, where he proudly displayed the contents of a festive picnic hamper - several bottles of vodka, tequila, rum, and mixers in a rainbow of fruit flavors, lemons, limes, a five-pound bag of mini Hershey bars and bulk-sized box of Hostess CupCakes.

“You know, this looks a lot like the picnic you packed for my twenty-first birthday,” I said, tilting my head against his shoulder.

“Well, let’s see how many colors we can get you to throw up this time,” he said, patting my back.

“Will you be joining me in this neon-colored hooch fest?”

“Ugh. Even I’m not gay enough to drink that swill.” Emmett winced, putting a case of Heineken in my fridge to chill. He reached into the cabinet over the sink to unearth Gammy’s ancient turquoise blender. “This is the one area where I proudly reject the stereotype. But I will gladly mix up a batch of my frosty, frothy cocktails for you.”

As he measured out just the right amount of ice with a flourish, he gushed, “Lace, you wouldn’t believe how many people are talking about you back home. It’s like you’re Princess Di or Britney Spears or someone more interesting and less tragic than you.,,

“I onestly don’t know how to take that.”

“Your husband moved his secretary into your house the night you left town. That’s practically Shakespeare territory,” he told me.

My jaw dropped. “He moved her into our house?” I repeated.

“I was going to break it to you gently,” he said. “But the kindest version I could come up with involved an obscene limerick.”

I shook my head. The emotional emptiness I briefly enjoyed was replaced with a dull ache in my chest. I rubbed at it with the heel of my hand. I tried to make light of it. “Oh, screw it. Let Beebee deal with the damn earth tones.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” he said. “Mama said I shouldn’t tell you. She was afraid you were going to freak out again and do something stupid, like shave your head or give Mike’s boat a Viking funeral.”

The moment the words left Emmett’s lips, he cringed. It was probably because of the way I stopped in my tracks, face alight with interest at the prospect of setting Mike’s boat aflame. “Oh… no,” he murmured.

I’d almost forgotten the boat was stored just a few yards away. I turned, a sly Grinch-ish grin spreading over my face as I focused on Mike’s little workshop. Short of actually setting fire to Mike, burning his would-be vessel would be the best way to get under his skin. That pile of wood represented his hopes and dreams, the best imagined version of himself. I wanted to take that from him, to make him doubt himself. And, best of all, he would never, ever be able to talk about the damn thing again.

“Lacey!” Emmett hissed. “Forget I said anything! It was just a joke! You cannot possibly be thinking of setting Mike’s boat on fire.”

“Technically, it is on my property,” I murmured, chewing my lip. I mean, it’s just an idea. I mean, a joke. I’m just joking.”

“You don’t sound like you’re joking,” Emmett objected as I walked out the back door toward the workshop. “Besides, I think you need flaming arrows and a virgin for a Viking funeral.”

“I just want to see it,” I told him as we approached the workshop, which was difficult with him dragging on my elbows.

Emmet’s voice broke into a panicked pitch. “Look, I have a better idea. We’ll break into your house, take a bunch of Mike’s stuff, and I’ll sell it online for pennies. We’ll start a website called TakeMikesStuff.com. Or hell, we’ll give it away.”

Emmett waved my cell phone in my face. “Mama said your lawyer told you to call her before you made any rash decisions. Call her. Let her talk some sense into you.”

I forced the workshop door open and was assaulted by dust.

You would think it would smell of sawdust or pitch, but this was the dust of dead space. A damp, mildew-spotted canvas was slung over the hull frame. I swear, my mouth just about watered at the thought of lighting that first match. I could almost smell the smoke, hear the explosion as the varnish ignited. Dialing my cell phone, I shook my head as if waking from a strangely satisfying fog. I muttered, “We could say it was an accident… Like I tripped and the gas just spilled out of the -”

“Samantha Shackleton.” My lawyer picked up on the first ring. And from the tone of her voice, I could tell I was taking her away from valuable after-hours downtime.

“Hi, Sam, it’s Lacey,” I said. How exactly did one broach this subject with their attorney, I wondered. “So … uh, that thing they say about possession being nine-tenths of the law … if something’s in my possession, I can’t really get in trouble for damaging it, right? Because nine-tenths of it is mine anyway.”

“Oh, Lord,” she muttered. “Lacey, whatever you are thinking of doing, first of all, don’t tell me about it. And secondly, just don’t. I want you go into your bedroom, get a pillow, and punch it. It will make you feel better.”

“It would just be a little fire.”

“Am I going to have to declare you a danger to yourself and others?” she demanded. “Lacey, I can’t represent you if you’re going to do things like this. Destroying Mike’s property particularly with arson, is what we call, in legal terms, a bad thing, all right? It won’t make you feel better in the long run and it will just make things more difficult for us. Mike could get all kinds of injunctions and damages and there’s the chance you could hurt someone -”

“I was speaking in the hypothetical!” I protested.

She was silent on the other end of the line.

“Okay, it wasn’t entirely hypothetical,” I admitted in a small voice.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“Not … yet.”

“Are you alone?” she asked. “Is there at least one sane, sober adult with you?”

I handed Emmett the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”

With Emmett occupied, I wandered toward the boat. After my Realtor related hissy fit convinced Mike that I wouldn’t budge on selling the cabin, he tried to talk me into replacing the dock with a huge boathouse /workshop. His buddy, Charlie, had just added something similar to his lake house. Mike figured that if he couldn’t get the cabin he wanted, he would have a brag-worthy place to house his future seaborne penis replacement. While my refusal was rooted in my attachment to Grandpa’s dock, I appealed to Mike’s money sense. What was the point of having a waterfront cabin without a dock? How would that affect the potential resale value?

So Mike built the workshop around the dock, grousing about the added expense the entire time. He was unhappy about the cost, but got what he wanted. I was unhappy about having a pretentious faux Cape Cod mini-building ruining my view, but I got to keep my dock. And somehow both of us felt that we’d proven our points.

While I hoped that putting the workshop near the cabin would encourage Mike to want to go there more often, the cabin’s location and undesirability gave Mike yet another reason not to work on the boat. And according to Mike, it was my fault, because if we had a better lake house, he’d want to go to the lake more often, and he would be finished with the boat by now.

“No problem, Sam,” Emmett was saying. “I’ll keep an eye on her. I look forward to meeting you, too.”

“You, eat this and think happy thoughts,” Emmett said, shoving the ice cream back in my hands. “Sam says you are not to be left unsupervised for at least twelve hours or until your destructive urge passes. She said chocolate should speed that process along.”

Behind us, I heard the rumble of Monroe’s truck as he pulled up to his cabin. I looked out the window to see him pause and watch Emmett dragging me toward liquor and, hopefully, improved sanity. Monroe rolled his eyes and began hauling his groceries into his cabin, as Emmett, distracted by the sight of my grumpy, rumpled neighbor, gasped, “Oh, my God, who is that?” He screeched to a halt and stared after him. “I don’t normally go for the scruffy, taciturn lumberjack type but - wow!”

“That’s Wolverine,” I said, my words garbled by a mouthful of ice cream.

He grinned at me. “What?”

“That’s my neighbor, Lefty Monroe,” I said as Emmett shoved me onto my couch. “Despite the hotness, he’s a jerk. I think he’s got an internet porn addiction, possibly online gambling. In a choice between his being over-sexed or broke, I think I’m rooting for gambling.”

“I can work with either,” Emmett said, shrugging. “Wait, did you say ‘Lefty’?”

I swatted at his hand as he attempted to dig a chocolate chunk from my ice cream carton. “Yeah.”

Emmett grinned. “I wonder where he got that name. Oh, the possibilities are endless.”

“I don’t know, but if you start to make guesses, I will leave,” I told him.

“He’s just got so much potential,” Emmett told me. “Lacey, I think that tall drink of water is exactly what the doctor ordered.”

“For what?”

“To help you banish the memory of Mike the Moron. You know what they say, ‘The best way to get over one man is to get under another one,” Emmett said, bowing his lips into a pert moue as he poured the makings of his famous chocolate vodka milk shakes in the blender. “It’s a life philosophy I whole-heartedly embrace.”

“That’s because you’re a man-whore,” I told him.

Smiling sweetly, Emmett hit the frappé button. The grinding noise of the decrepit motor covered the stream of profane insults he sent my way. I could read his lips well enough to tell he was denigrating my intelligence, wardrobe, general hygiene, and ability to color coordinate a room. I let him vent. After all, he was providing the liquor.

“Believe me when I say you deserve a piece of that cranky beefcake across the way there,” he said, cutting the blender off with a metallic groan. “It will be like therapy, only without the couch. Or, use the couch. That could be a learning experience for you.”

“I don’t think more bad sex is the solution to my problem. Besides, he could be a serial killer for all you know,” I cried. “And he’s a potential serial killer who has zero interest in me. He’s made that abundantly clear.”