I picked up a DVD ofA Wrinkle in Timeand looked at everyone in confusion.
“Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until she was in her thirties,” Salcedo said. “And she got her first Oscar nomination when she was forty-two but didn’t direct this movie until four years later. But that’s not all.”
She paused, letting the anticipation build.
“Madeleine L’Engle’s novel, the one that was a basis for this movie? Written after she was forty. At the age of thirty-nine, she contemplated giving up writing because it was taking time away from her family with little to no return, but then she got the idea for her most famous book,A Wrinkle in Time.”
“I hope y’all don’t want me to write a book,” I said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Havisham said as she stood and walked briskly to her bar and then behind it. From Salcedo’s confused expression, I could tell this wasn’t part of the scene they had rehearsed. My favorite bartender soon returned with a copy of Agatha Christie’sMurder in Mesopotamia.
“Agatha Christie? I can solve mysteries, but I sure as heck can’t write them.”
“No, that’s not it,” Havisham said with a smile. “This whole bag of gifts is about not believing it when society tries to tell you you’re over the hill or that you should give up. L’Engle almost gave up on writing, and Christie almost gave up on love.”
“Havisham,” I said in warning.
“Agatha Christie’s first marriage ended in divorce,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “Two years after that divorce was final, Dame Agatha was taking a ride on the Orient Express. She visited an archaeological site for the fun of it, and there she met Max Mallowan.”
“I’m not a dame.”
“She wasn’t either at that time, and she wasn’t looking for love, but young Max Mallowan must have been persuasive, because he became her second husband. This is the first book she wrote after meeting him. She was forty. He was twenty-six.”
“Dang, girl. Rob that cradle!” Salcedo said.
“You gotta do what you gotta do,” Nana murmured. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she was squeezing Lucius’s hand even though they were the same age.
“I mean, it’s working out great for me,” Trace said. “That cradle was getting dull anyway.”
“Havisham, my situation is different.”
“I’m not telling you what to do,” she said. “I’m just saying ... sometimes we all need a mulligan. Or a Finnegan. Maybe even a Branagan.”
“A do-over for a do-over for a do-over?”
“Neither love nor life is golf. We get as many opportunities as we need,” Havisham said as she slid her arm around the waist of her cowboy. “If we’re brave enough to try again, at least.”
Salcedo’s eyes cut between Havisham and me. She could sense the tension and asked, “How about champagne, everyone?”
The next morning, I awoke to a presence very close to my face, a fuzzy presence that purred.
I opened my eyes and saw, in the morning light, that even my emotional support cat was now taunting me. BB’s eyes had changed as she matured. The eye behind the patch of black on her face was green. The eye on the other side, the side with white and yellow, was blue.
“Really? Not you, too.”
I rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom, but what was wafting through the ceiling somehow? “All Too Well.”
Chapter 41
It was the ladybug bracelet that did me in.
For the next month, I moped around while doing the usual jobs for Attorney Lawless. I had enrolled in a new set of paralegal classes. Still went with Havisham and Salcedo to the Waffle House, but not as often as we used to because Salcedo was back in class and Havisham was serious about her cowboy.
Even better, he’d worked through college as a bartender, so a little refresher and a pouring license and he was ready and able to help Havisham around the bar, a place where I felt increasingly like a third wheel.
Then one day I checked the mail, and there was a smaller padded envelope. Inside was a bracelet with ladybugs, nothing too expensive but not too cheap, either. A note simply said,
This reminded me of you. M.
