“You’re still laughing.”
“Pity laugh.”
“Liar.”
“I just don’t want you to feel bad about yourself.”
“You can use that in one of your lyrics. No attribution necessary.”
“I just don’t want you to feel bad about yourself,” she sings.
“I am grade A top sir space loin,” I sing back.
She blinks at me. “Oh my god. I forgot you can sing.”
“Probably because you were still in diapers when I was hot.”
Fuuuuck.
Her eyes almost cross with the acrobatics her facial muscles are doing, and then the most beautiful but also terrible thing happens.
She busts out laughing.
She has the prettiest laugh. It fuels fantasies I refuse to admit to even myself most of the time.
But also, she’s laughing at me being an old man.
While her giggles peter out and she goes back to her journal, I set the teakettle on the stove and flip on the burner, then dig into the cabinet for the best mug.
The first one I spot saysWorld’s Greatest Grandpa.
Fantastic.
Even the cabin is mocking me.
What I get for talking her address out of Waverly and coming up here in a fucking ice storm to check on a woman who wasfineby herself.
I settle on a mug that has a cartoon dog on it, withDon’t bone breaking my heartwritten on it, then move around the kitchenette, being nosy.
Been a few years since I was in a vacation rental. Or possibly many, many years. Especially one-bedroom, log-walled vacation rental cabins that don’t come with a personal chef and an on-site cleaning crew.
I should come to places like this more often.
It’s cozy.
Quiet.
Smells like cedar and rosewater. Like my grandma’s sitting room.
She was a badass. Left home at sixteen to pursue a career as an actress, lied to everyone about her age, fell in love a decade or so later with my grandpa—who was ten years older than she was—and moved across the country with him to Copper Valley to raise babies and help lead the high school’s drama program.
Lied about her qualifications there as well, but no one cared.
She put on good shows.
I miss her.
Aspen gives me the same vibes. Fearless. Bold. Determined.
