Chapter 8
Astunned silence followed, and then everyone started speaking at once, which was overwhelming and difficult to follow.
“This is ridiculous, Dad,” my mum said as though Grandad were still in the room to hear her.
“To Taliesin?” Lettie said. “Onlyto Taliesin?”
“Let it not be said he didn’t play favorites.” Marlowe chuckled, as though he found this darkly amusing.
“The toilet screams when you flush it,” Amelia warned me. “Pretty sure it’s haunted.”
“Wait,” I said. “What about the spa?”
“He shouldn’t have it all to himself, surely,” Lettie said, ignoring me.
But Marlowe didn’t. “Nobody’s told you?” When I shook my head, his amusement shriveled up. “He sold it years ago.”
“To who?”
“Westley Warwick.”
I didn’t have time to process the strangeness of that or ask why before Lettie returned to the issue of the house.
“It’s ridiculous. No offense meant, Tal, but you don’t even live in Shearwater.”
“He can’t,” my mum agreed.
“Then he sells it and we get nothing?”
I didn’t want it. Not the clocks, not the house. I did want a home, but a home was more than four walls, brick and mortar. Homes were built by love, and I wouldn’t find enough here for the foundations.
When Laurelie and I were small—no older than seven—my mum had been going through her old jewelry box, showing us heirlooms and trinkets and gifts from Dad, passed down from family. Laurelie had asked if she could have the engagement ring passed down from Grandma to our dad when he’d proposed.
Mum had said, “Sorry, dear, that will be for Tal when he proposes to his future wife.”
I had said, “I don’t want it because I’ll have a husband. Give it to Laurelie.”
I’d been the favorite, but I didn’t realize it until I wasn’t anymore. After that, Laurelie got to go on special trips for ice cream instead of me, had her artwork hung over top of mine on the refrigerator, was enrolled in competitive gymnastics while Fae and I made our own games in the garden and the woods.
It wasn’t that Mum was homophobic. We had lesbian neighbors whom she’d invited over for tea and sent Christmas cards to. She didn’t have a problem with Fae being non-binary and Sapphic, or me being gay. I’d slighted her somehow by saying I didn’t want the engagement ring.
I’d always wondered why it mattered so much. Turned over the various reasons Mum might hold something so small against a seven-year-old. I never came up with a reasonable answer, and privately knew that none would be good enough.
The shouting and bickering was too much. Grandad was dead, and instead of grieving him like normal, we were fighting over inheritances.
I got up. Everyone quieted down except Lettie, whom Marlowe hushed.
I said, “I don’t want the house. I’ll just sell it and we can split the money if it matters so much. In the meantime, I thought you should know I saw the healer at the spa today, but he can’t help me, so I’ll be going. See you all at the next funeral.”
I hadn’t meant for that last part to sound so ominous, but the ticking clocks and their stunned expressions were making my skin feel too tight, so I left without another word.
I took a big gulp of the summer air once the door to 37 Culpepper Avenue slammed shut behind me, but the quiet was interrupted at once by Amelia catching up.
She didn’t say anything at first. She sat on the front porch step, lit a cigarette, and mumbled with it between her lips. “Family, huh?”
“How am I supposed to fit a decade’s worth of dead clocks in a camper van?” It was somehow the first thing out of my mouth, the absurdity of the situation more glaring in the light of a summer’s day.
She snorted. “That’s the part you’re bothered about?”
