“Do you think that’s why he came?”
I sniffled, and Tabitha’s eyes widened, but I pointed at my nose. “It’s allergies.” I wasn’t about to cry over what happened to Pierce. I embarrassed myself as much as him. My anger and only a hint of guilt had me mutilating a tree in the yard. I hoped Pierce walked by it and drew back in disgust when he saw his precious rental yard. It would be perfect. One of those trees so ugly only a mother could love it. And I’d be its mother and refuse to let Pierce fix it. The tree and I bonded.
I was also the best liar in Pelican Bay. To myself, and to everyone else.
“Katy, you’ve always been a good friend to me. Someone who tells it like it is when I’ve needed it most. Even if I didn’t want to hear what you had to say.”
Of course I did. That’s what friends were for. “Yeah, so?” There’s always a so.
“So,” Tabitha exaggerated the word, “I’m going to do the same for you now.”
I lowered the clippers to my side. From the way she grimaced it was easy to see this conversation would not go a direction I’d enjoy. It didn’t begin in a direction I enjoyed.
“You are being stupid.”
I blinked hard and when I opened my eyes, she still stood in front of me. Her hands were on her hips, her stance pulling on the graphic t-shirt she wore that day. A unicorn reading a book and a funny saying about books being better than people. Truth.
The silence after her statement concerned me. That was her big motivational talk? “Well thanks!” What a friend I had in Tabitha. She’d clearly not been paying attention when I spoke in the past. And I liked it. If that’s all she had to say, I won.
I needed to get our talk over with because a second earlier, I’d decided to take my newly found landscaping skills and practice on Pierce’s well-maintained yard.
Tabitha rolled her eyes. “Shut up and listen. You clearly love Pierce.”
There she’d gone too far. “Now hold on a hot second. You put words in my mouth because I never said that.”
Tabitha dropped her hands from her hips, and I reread the slogan on her gray T-shirt and pretended I found it stimulating. “It was implied and written all over your face.”
I huffed. “It’s not love.” Thousands of Pierce emotions were going on in my brain, but not love. Murder at best.
Tabitha didn’t nod her head, agree with me, and run back to her house. That wasn’t her style. Why couldn’t I have found a group of friends who nodded and agreed with everything I said and followed along on adventures? Those friends were probably boring. Or dead.
“If it isn’t love, what is it?” she asked sounding honestly a bit haughty. Like she saw it as love and therefore must be correct.
Her question was easy to answer. “It was a onetime thing.” A simple mistake.
Tabitha cocked her head to the side and smiled. “I remember you telling me about four.”
“Ugh. You would count.” Besides it was only three and a half. The most recent time did not count because there was no penetration and everybody knows it doesn’t count if there’s no penetration. Also if you don’t live in the same zip code, if it happens at summer camp, or if you try super hard to forget it.
Those are the golden rules and I didn’t expect an exception for me.
Also thank the fishes in the ocean I did not tell her about the beach situation last summer. She definitely wouldn’t have forgotten that one in her record keeping.
I picked up one of the larger branches I cut off the tree before she arrived and hauled it to the front of my yard, placing it on the side of the road for the county to pick up. Or whatever happened to them. Leaves and tree branches mysteriously disappeared all the time from the road by my house. Tabitha grabbed another one and helped me stack it on top of mine.
We were halfway back to my yard before she started her interrogation again. “What are you going to do?”
Ugh. Easy to answer, but she’d have strong feelings regarding my answer. She’d loathe it. Nothing. I planned to do absolutely nothing. Pierce and I were never going to work out. And if I had to remind myself of that every day for the rest of my life, I would. Not that Pierce would ever forgive me for what I did to him, anyway.
My biggest mistake wasn’t sleeping with Pierce… Twice…er… thr… the number didn’t matter. It’s what happened at my grandmother’s funeral. The day did not go as I planned and nothing ended up how Nanna wanted. I looked up after talking to Tabitha and saw Pierce in the doorway. He’d always been the one I took my anger out on. He told me he’d be able to handle it. That afternoon it bubbled over and came out all at once. I didn’t even fully remember what I said, but my mother summed it up for me after she pushed me back into the little room and screamed at me for five minutes before the service started.
“I have a lot on my plate right now,” I finally said to answer her question. If the Women’s Auxiliary didn’t kick me out of the ranks, I wanted to run for a committee chair position. They were mostly held by women over sixty who believed you had to pay your dues, but in true fashion I planned to shake things up a bit.
There was also landscaping to be done, plus I needed to find a job, solve a murder, and die of embarrassment while crying in my living room.
I’d be extremely busy for the next two weeks.
“Katy, how many years have you been lying to yourself about not loving Pierce?”
