Zoe slaps both hands on the table, appearing out of nowhere and startling both of the women as she looks at me.
I know that look.
It means one of her kids did something to her house, apparently with the plumbing since she’s at my table and not stopping to chat with Manuel, our local electrician, or Steve, Tickled Pink’s handyman, who are having lunch across the way together.
“Here, or your place?” I ask her, just to verify.
Her eyeball twitches. “My place.”
I rise and nod, grabbing one last fry before I pull out my wallet to dig out some cash. After what I did to Zoe in high school, she gets plumbing for free, for life, no matter what her kids do. “On it. Ladies, anyone who’s coming better grab her lunch to go. Time to get to work.”
Chapter 16
Tavi
Sometimes I wonder how my grandmother came to exist.
How can one single person be so hell bent on causing chaos and misery at every opportunity, while pretending it’s all for the good of everyone around her?
There’s something to be said for learning through suffering, but it’s something else entirely when the suffering is unnecessary.
Like right now.
“No, Octavia, you have to stick your handdown the toilet,” she says imperiously.
I point to Dylan, who’s siphoning water out of the toilet and into a bucket. “Dylan says that’s not what we have to do.”
“And what will you learn from that experience?”
“I already learned how to use a snake. What have you learned? I don’t see you in here offering to stick your hand down the toilet.”
“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady. Your soul could use some more patience with old people.”
I will not murder my grandmother.
I will not murder my grandmother.
I will not murder my grandmother.
I dig deep, deep,deepinside and find my inner flake. “Oh, are you old, Gigi? I didn’t notice.”
Pebbles half barks but mostly makes a noise like she’s choking on something.
She probably is.
It’s undoubtedly goose feathers.
She should still be sleeping, but Gigi insisted that if we’re making Dylan a social media star, then we needed the full star power of my own feeds, and that includes my dog.
She’s micromanaging my soul-saving tasks.
I wish I had the freedom to do what Phoebe did and tell her to worry about her own soul, but Phoebe also has a healthy bank account after working for Remington Lightly in mid- to upper management since she graduated college, and she’s also one of those people who are smart about investments, which means she took her trust fund disbursements and invested them wisely, and now she could build her own tiny house in a tree across from Teague’s if they ever need more room, in addition to funding the start of what she hopes will be a small amusement park off the Tickled Pink square.
She wouldn’t have bought a failing cacao farm in Costa Rica, and if she had, she would’ve had venture capitalists and investors and environmentalists with grants lined up to cash in on the Lightly name before the ink was dry on the purchase contract, because she wouldn’t have been attached.
It wouldn’t have been a mission for her. A calling. A future.
To her, it would’ve been just business, which works for her. But not for me.
