“There are less painful ways to get rid of your other nipple.”
“Eh? Somebody wants an otter tipple?”
Mabel doesn’t make a sound, but I can hear her staring Pip down.
Pip cackles.
And I tune them all out, because I have an injured woman in front of me who hit her head and—if I’m not mistaken—tweaked her back this morning, now pulling whatever move she needed to pull to save an urn from crashing onto the pink and green rug.
Cricket’s wincing and looking a little dazed as she gets fully upright.
“Did you hit your head again?” I ask her.
She makes brief eye contact with me before grabbing a second rag from Ginny and attacking the juice on her other side, like the rug won’t need professional cleaning.
I addbring in the carpet cleanerto my mental task list.
Just have a feeling Mabel will want to try to clean the rug herself before paying a professional.
“I’m fine.” Cricket’s face is aimed in my direction, but her eyes are staring somewhere over my shoulder.
“Did you see her dive?” Elizabeth asks. “She could’ve been sliding into second.”
“I did a lifestyle piece once on women in baseball and learned how,” Cricket mumbles.
“I want to know!” Lavender says. “I want to know how to slide into second!”
“Who’s biting into a lemon?” Pip calls.
I look at Mabel.
She lifts her brows at me like she’s sayingyou won’t have as far to go when Cricket needs patched up.
And I know.
I know I don’t have a choice about letting Cricket stay in the apartment under my house.
These women took me and my family in when my wife was overwhelmed because half of the internet thought she was faking her illness for sympathy, or that she was selling snake oil with her health advice, or at least not practicing what she preached if she claimed to be eating healthy and exercising and still got cancer before her thirty-fifth birthday.
Truth was, she got the shitty end of the gene pool stick.
And even the people who were onTeam Ava, as they called it, didn’t help. Their arguments with the trolls made it worse.
She was the most fought-over person on the internet for weeks. Someone leaked our address, and we had to hire security, and then flee entirely after protestors and supporters started clashing on our front lawn.
But these women here?
These women with their commune at a closed-up winery in a little slice of heaven on earth?
They have compassion in spades.
They made Ava’s last months the best they could be, then supported Lav and me through my massive legal war with my in-laws when they tried to take my daughter from me, and they’re family.
Even when we keep our distance so that I don’t overstay my welcome or ask for more than I give or cause more trouble than we solve or so that I, as the lone dude, don’t accidentally make any of the women here uncomfortable, these ladies are my family.
I will never not owe them for what they did.
So yes.
