“No one invited me.” She shifts the fancy bag carrying her dog to her other shoulder, and Pebbles happily turns around so she’s still facing us, tongue wagging. “I followed one of you, but I’m not telling you which one. Won’t do my soul much good to pit neighbor against neighbor, would it?”
She’s looking at Ridhi and Jane while she talks, and I don’t know if she’s ignoring Willie Wayne to make it look like she just doesn’t talk to men or if she tried to do for him what she tried to do for me a couple of weeks back and now can’t look him in the eye either.
Frustrating, honestly.
My days of being the guy that people can’t stand to look at have been over for a long time. And honestly? These days, I like getting along with people.
Even people who don’t belong.
Might even have a soft spot for people who don’t belong.
Like I said, not her fault she’s here, and after almost two months of Tickled Pink living when she’s used to big-city life on one coast or another, seems like it’s starting to wear on her.
“What do you want?” Jane asks. No nonsense, that’s our Jane.
Tavi flashes that smile that’s all over her Instagram but that I don’t see often when I swing by the school that her family’s living in and fixing up. “To play.”
“Four-person card game.”
“I’ll be on someone’s team.”
Ridhi pulls a deck of cards from her back pocket while she eyeballs the bunker’s crude, monochrome gray kitchen setup, where we keep a stash of everything from wine to vodka.
But no food, unless it fits inside the locked fridge inside the cabinet, and even then, we’re serious about crumb pickup.
Bunker’s not as airtight as it was when Willie Wayne’s uncle installed it forty years ago to have a place to hide from the “riffraff,” aka the tourists coming to Tickled Pink to check out wherePink Goldwas filmed, and I hear it wasn’t so airtight then either. No reason to invite the critters in.
“No teams,” Ridhi says.
“I’ll sit out and watch if we switch this over to strip poker,” Willie Wayne offers.
Ridhi pulls a face that says Willie Wayne’s getting bad coffee next time he stops in her café.
Jane pulls a face that says he’s getting something worse than spit in his beer the next time he swings by her garage for an after-work beverage. “Quit being a dirty old man.”
He grins. “Just pullin’ your chain. Akiko would kill me if she heard I watched strip poker. Not that she knows about this. No, sirree. The Tickled Pink Secret Poker Society is top secret. All the way.”
All of us look at Tavi.
She keeps staring at Jane and Ridhi like she’s incapable of acknowledging the presence of the rest of us in the room. “Iwon’t tell. Naturally. Friends, like, keep each other’s secrets.” She drops her voice. “I won’t even take a single selfie while I’m here. Will I, Pebbles? No, I won’t. No, I won’t.”
The dog yips back happily at the baby talk.
“Friends don’t usually follow friends into a secret bunker to crash a private poker game,” Ridhi points out.
“I wasn’t trying to crash! I just wanted to hang out. I’ve been here for, like,months, and Pebbles and I haven’t hung out with any of you yet. I mean, other than when you’re being so kind and volunteering to help us clean up the school, or when Gigi makes us subject you all to our presence at community picnics, or when we’re falling on our faces during snowshoe baseball. Which I try really hard at, for the record. Iwantto be a good Tickled Pinker while I’m here.”
“Because your grandmother told you to?”
“It’s never wrong to make more friends.”
Ridhi snorts. Pretty sure Tavi’s also getting crap coffee next time she’s in Café Nirvana.
Not sure she drinks it there, though. It might not be vegan and sugar-free.
I tip my folding chair back on its rear legs until I’m resting my shoulders against the cool metal wall and study the middle Lightly sibling.
She actively doesn’t look back at me.
