“The garden center closes at nine-thirty. Besides, the nice young man working the register is single. I got his number for you.” Margaret had already turned on the faucet with her elbow and was running her hands under the warm water, dark soil swirling into the drain. “Now, I don’t want to overstep, sweetheart, but what on earth happened to your front flowerbeds? It looks like someone took a weed whacker to the whole thing.”
“I weeded,” Kinsley muttered, collecting her wineglass. “Last weekend.”
“I noticed the same thing when I pulled up,” Lydia offered from the couch, earning a look from Kinsley sharp enough to wilt the mums Margaret had just planted on the porch. “It doesn’t look bad, though. Not at all.”
“The humidity has been horrible this summer,” Kinsley said, directing a glare toward the front door as though the flowerbeds themselves might hear her defense. “And I didn’t have much time last weekend. I just wanted them gone.”
“Mission accomplished,” Margaret said under her breath as she worked soap between her fingers. The water ran brown for several seconds before clearing. She dried her hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle, then folded it neatly and placed it back on its hook. “Your father sends his love, by the way. He’s at home recuperating. The man has been on his feet all week. I left him on the recliner with strict instructions not to move.”
“Which means he moved the second you pulled out of the driveway.”
Kinsley tried to push aside the guilt that surfaced at the mention of her father’s exhaustion. She’d put him through hell the previous week.
“Undoubtedly.” Margaret’s gaze drifted to Lydia with a warm interest that Kinsley recognized immediately as her mother’s reconnaissance mode, the mode in which she gathered information without appearing to gather anything at all. Lydia was in big trouble. “We’ll be planting garlic and winter squash once the weather breaks in September.”
The comfortable way Margaret navigated the kitchen spoke to years of mothering that had never stopped at the property line. She treated Kinsley’s house as an extension of her own, and Kinsley wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Well, I’m off to buy your father and me some banana splits,” Margaret announced as she crossed back through the kitchen, stopping long enough to kiss Kinsley’s cheek. The faint scent of topsoil and lavender lotion lingered in the air. “He’s been asking about the new ice cream parlor on Fifth Street for weeks, and I promised him one on my way home.”
She walked over to the couch and kissed the top of Lydia’s head with the same maternal ease. Margaret made it to the front door before pausing with one hand on the knob. She turned, and Kinsley understood the moment had arrived.
“Oh, before I forget,” Margaret said, focusing her attention on Lydia. “How was the lasagna?”
“Fantastic, as usual,” Lydia replied automatically. Then her mouth froze mid-smile. The color drained from her face before flooding back in a deep crimson that spread from her cheeks to the tips of her ears. “Oh, dear me.”
The lasagna. Kinsley figured her mother must have dropped off a pan of lasagna for Dylan to heat up at the farm. Lydia had eaten dinner there before coming to Kinsley’s. And Lydia had just confirmed it without thinking, because Margaret Aspen had the interrogation skills of a seasoned detective wrapped in the delivery of a woman offering a potted mum.
“Good to know, dear.” Margaret flashed a satisfied smile. “Love you both, but George is waiting for his ice cream. Enjoy your movie.”
The front door clicked shut behind her. The silence that followed was absolute. Lydia slowly covered her face with one hand, the other maintaining a death grip on her wineglass as though it were the only thing tethering her to the physical world.
“You can’t put one over on my mother,” Kinsley said, and the laugh that escaped her was the kind she hadn’t produced in weeks. Genuine, unforced, loud enough to make her stomach muscles ache. She was surprised she hadn’t spilled her wine. “You walked right into that, didn’t you?”
“She knew,” Lydia whispered in mortification, lowering her hand. “This whole time, she knew.”
“Of course she knew. She’s Margaret Aspen.” Kinsley made her way back to the living room, set her wineglass on the coffee table, and sank into the corner of the couch. “Owen still doesn’t have a clue that the rest of us know he’s dating that oil painter who bought the old Cranston farm.”
Lydia downed the rest of her wine in a single swallow. She scrambled off the couch, her bare feet hitting the hardwood floor with a thud, and made a beeline for the armchair where she’d dumped her purse.
“I have to call Dylan.” She rifled through the bag. “I need to warn him before your mother calls.”
She finally extracted her phone, pressed the screen, and initiated the call, pressing it to her ear as she rounded the couch toward the kitchen, as though the extra ten feet of distance might somehow prevent Kinsley from overhearing.
She reached for the popcorn bowl and settled it on her lap, staring at the built-in bookshelf beside the fireplace. There were a few novels on the shelves she’d been meaning to finish, theirspines uncracked since the beginning of summer. But it was the framed photographs on the second shelf that held her attention.
One was of the entire Aspen family from several years back at a Fourth of July gathering, everyone sunburned and smiling. Another was of Kinsley and Alex at a department flag-football game, both of them muddy and laughing. And a third was of Lily grinning through a gap-toothed smile at her school play, her costume slightly crooked and her eyes bright with the delight of being on a stage.
The same play that had taken place on the night Kinsley killed Calvin Gantz.
She stared at the photograph until the edges of the frame blurred. From the kitchen, Lydia’s whispered conversation drifted in fragments.
“...not listening to me. Sheknows, Dylan.”
Kinsley couldn’t help but smile. It lingered on her lips as she leaned her head against the back of the couch. The ceiling fan rotated overhead in its lazy circuit, stirring the warm air just enough to be perceptible. She let her eyes close.
Tonight’s normalcy had done something to her. It had loosened the knot that had been cinched tight in her stomach since Shane came to her house. Her thoughts drifted to how narrow the margin was between this moment and something unrecognizable. A Friday evening on her couch with popcorn and wine and her best friend panicking in the kitchen about lasagna could just as easily have been a Friday evening in a holding cell, staring at a concrete wall under fluorescent lights, counting the cracks in the ceiling while a public defender explained her options.
“...was literally just here. No, at Kin’s. Yes, she asked about the lasagna. Yes,thatlasagna. The one we just ate for dinner.”
