“I know,” I say, cooing as I bend and scratch him behind the ears before filling his food bowl to the brim.
Everyone thinks I’m ridiculous for moving into this place after the split with Brendan, but I don’t hate it, at all. Yes, it’s about the size of my bedroom growing up, but it’s mine. Not Dad’s house, where my sisters tried to pressure me to move, more I suspect to keep an eye on him than anything. Not the creepy storage room at Samantha’s shared house.
Mine. One space for just me and my babies.
I pick up baby number one, Pepe, who puts up as much resistance as a bowl of slime, and turn to my other babies: book nooks.
What started as a way to blow off steam during lockdown has become a full-on obsession. Despite it being a little wonky, I’m still proud of the very first one I built from scratch. It’s a scene from the old Sugar headquarters. Since then, I’ve done more than two dozen, including a Paris bookshop, a sweet little greenhouse, and a cozy winter cabin, complete with a mountain man, his dog, and Pepe snoring in front of the fire.
Brendan hated my book nooks. Sam thinks he was jealous of all the time I spent on something that wasn’t him. My sisters are convinced it’s because I was good at something. And he wasn’t. What matters, though, is the deep satisfaction I feel as I sit at my workstation now, settle my purring fur ball on my lap, and jump back into the process of putting my real-world problems into itty-bitty bookshelf boxes. Right where I can keep an eye on them.
“What are you working on tonight?” Samantha asks, knowing that I can’t go to bed without spending time with my projects. They’re my late-night darlings. My actual nightlife.
“My first commission.”
“Right. You mean the one you’re doing for Hannah,” she intones with obvious skepticism.
“Just ’cause it’s for my sister doesn’t mean it’s not a commission.”
“That and the part where you’re not getting paid,” she says around the Blow Pop she’s obviously just stuck in her mouth. “Let me see.”
I hit the camera button and give her a wide-angle view of the whole piece.
“Oh my god. It’s Romero’s!”
“You got it!”
“Closer. I can’t see anything.”
I show her the checkered tablecloths and the tiny candles in bottles and move up to the signed black-and-white photos on the walls. “What do you think? Is it okay?”
“Holy shit, Rae. That looks exactly like Otty.” She gasps. “Is this the soda balls incident?”
“Yep.” I step back and stare hard at my take on the incident that lost our youngest sister, Otty, her very first job, when she spilled an entire pitcher of iced cola in a diner’s lap.
“You need to start selling them.”
I don’t bother arguing. I’ve heard it before.
“I’m serious, Rae. You’re really good at this.”
She can’t see my shrug, but she knows me well enough to say, “At least have Hannah pay for supplies. That husband of hers makes money.”
“I will.”
“Why must you turn your she shed into a house of lies?”
A noncommittal hum is all the answer I give her as I sink into the minute details of creating worlds where everything is fine. Just fine.
“The second someone finds out at work, you’ll start getting requests out the ass.”
“I’m not telling anyone at work.” I glance back at the shelves, where probably two-thirds of the book nooks immortalize infamous scenes from work, including such classics as Pajama Party Friday (highly inappropriate) and Bring Your Pets to Work Day (an epic disaster). “They’d want to see my work and… that wouldn’t go over well.”
“Do Klaus as a marauding Viking. I’ll pay you.”
“With what? Blow Pops?”
She snorts. “You start a TikTok yet? You could totally monetize this.”
