“That was rude. You can’t just ask when people are getting married, especially not Caleb and Ivy.”
“It’ll be as soon as she’ll have me,” Caleb answers smoothly.
Staggered, I just look between the three of them and the horde of octopi cleaning my store, before I throw up my hands in dismay.
“Are y’all just gonna act like I’m not here? Are we all just gonna act like this is normal?”
“None of this is normal, Ivy,” Posey says. “Matter of fact — well, except for you and Caleb being back together. That’s probably the most normal thing that’s happened to you in about fifteen years.”
“You are so unbelievably rude,” I say.
“She’s right,” Caleb tells me.
“Oh, so you’re on their side now?” I say.
“Is this our first girlfriend-boyfriend fight?” Caleb asks me.
I can’t help laughing at the light in his expression.
“I’m too tired to fight,” I finally say, deflating. “There’s so much work to do.”
I look back at Posey and Rose.
“If you guys made any progress on the ward — how’s Hazel’s ankle?”
“Okay. She’s at home icing it,” Posey answers. “She hasn’t quite figured out what the ward is, but she’s been on the phone with Grandma.”
“Oh, you guys were able to get in touch with Grandma? That’s great. I called her earlier today and it said in her message she was on some kind of tech-free artist retreat.”
“Get a load of this,” Posey says slowly, in a way that tells me she has an excellent tidbit of information. “Apparently Grandma has a secret TikTok burner account and is so addicted to TikTok that she took her cell phone with her into her tech-free artist retreat. And Hazel knows about the secret burner account, so she was able to get a hold of Grandma through TikTok.”
I burst out laughing because this is so typical of both Grandma and Hazel.
Of course Hazel has Grandma’s secret burner account. Can’t keep a secret from that girl no matter how hard we tried growing up. She knew everybody’s business all the time.
And Grandma thinking that her secret TikTok account wasn’t part of the tech-free stipulations of the artist retreat.
Well, that’s Grandma for you. She never met a rule she didn’t want to bend or break.
“So what did Grandma say? Did she figure out how to fix the ward? Did she tell us anything? Do we have anything to go on? Is she coming back?” I ask, relief and hope coursing through me.
“Ohh,” Posey says. “When we left they were still chatting about TikTok. Knowing Hazel they probably still are. But with any luck they’ve discussed it by now.”
“We stepped out so we could figure out how bad the damage was to Rose’s music shop and to see if you needed any help over here at Sugar & Salt. Then we heard from some people that they saw you out this morning and were in here, so we thought we’d stop in on it.”
“I guess we should just be grateful you guys didn’t have your clothes off and were banging in the back room or something,” Posey says.
“Oh, get a grip,” I say, flustered and frustrated — and glad that they have something to tease me about and that it’s Caleb. Because if it were anybody else right now, I’d want to melt into the earth and dissolve.
But with Caleb? It feels fine. It feels normal.
Weird that my sisters won’t shut up about it, but I’m not embarrassed, just annoyed.
I reach a hand out and Caleb grabs it easily without even having to make eye contact with me. He just knows that I want him to hold my hand.
And it’s nice, all right.
“We were thinking about going back to the house anyway so you can get out of your shack-up clothes,” Rose teases.
