I took her arm and helped her to the couch.
Annie fetched Ethel an entire bottle of wine.
“Annie,” I hissed.
“I’ll need something stronger, dear,” Ethel said, closing her eyes.
Annie nodded and disappeared.
“They just wanted to experiment,” I told her.
Ethel pressed a hand to her forehead. “Their hair,” she moaned.
“Goodness gracious! Good thing I brought the big guns!” Vera exclaimed loudly as she bustled into my condo. She took a thermos out of her purse and held it to Ethel’s mouth. “Drink that. It’ll stand you right up,” she assured Ethel, tipping the thermos back.
Ethel took a swig and sat up. “You could burn down a building with that.”
“Made it myself!” Vera bragged. “We had a distilling class a few months ago.”
“Really?” Ethel said, intrigued. “Here?”
“The condo offered it. You should come by to the next one.”
“Oh, I don’t live here.”
“You should think about it,” Vera said. “You’d fit right in.”
I did not want Ethel living anywhere near me.
“I’m not sure if you want to move here,” I told her. “It’s a relatively new building, and the kinks aren’t quite worked out.”
“I would be closer to my granddaughters.”
“Isn’t that swell,” Vera said, bustling around the kitchen, sweeping the trash off the counter. “Beck seems like he could use the help.”
I gritted my teeth.
“You didn’t run Tess off already, did you?” Vera asked. “Though you think with a guy like you stashed in her bedroom, she’d never leave!”
Fuck, I could not think about Tess in my bed.
“Ethel, why don’t you take the girls out for dinner?” I suggested.
“Only if you girls wear hats,” she instructed.
“I have some,” Vera said proudly, rummaging in her bag. She pulled out two rainbow-colored knitted hats.
I wasn’t a knitter, but to my untrained eye, they did look a little scraggly.
“We had a knitting class too. Deceptively hard,” Vera said, slapping the hats on my sisters’ heads.
I slumpedon the couch across from Tess’s ugly painting after everyone left. I needed to convince her to move back. Ethel was going to take my sisters if I didn’t.
I grabbed a broom and swept up the rest of the broken glass and cleaned the kitchen. Then I picked up my phone to call Tess but remembered she didn’t have her phone.
My phone dinged with a message. I hoped it was Tess but no such luck.
Owen:What’s the super-secret thing Tess is working on to get back in Mark Holbrook’s good graces?
