Mom did not say anything for a long time. She uses silence like a weapon and this one terrified me. She lifted that eyebrow, the one that has been making people confess things since 1981. Then she said, very calmly, “Vivien. Come sit down.”
And then she gave me the lecture—the Maggie Lawson Karma Special. In a nutshell, “Do bad things and bad things will happen to you.”
She laid it out while I sat there praying I would not throw up on the porch.
Honestly? It wasn’t even bad. She knows I am not going to be a wild one, not now and not in college. She just wanted me to know that she KNEW, and that she will ALWAYS know, because she is Maggie and she has eyes in places where eyes should not be allowed.
And now the room is definitely moving. In circles. I love Kate. I love this summer. And, yes, as much as I try not to and insistthis is the last summer I’ll feel this way, I love Peter, too. Who’s probably kissing Whitless right now.
Maybe next summer. Maybe once I’m in college. Maybe he’ll kiss me.
That could be the vodka talking.
Love,
Viv
When someone put a song on the jukebox calledLike a Hurricane, Maggie had to laugh. Well, she’d been laughing a lot tonight, despite the gale-force gusts outside Gator Jack’s Bar and Grill in Crawfordville.
She hadn’t expected her first hurricane party to be quite this much fun, but somehow Brick Collins made sure it was. She nursed a wine, sitting next to him at a centrally located table near the dance floor, feeling a little like a queen.
Every one of the sixty or so people jammed into the dive bar knew him and wanted to greet him. The man all but signed autographs. He also introduced Maggie—and Jo Ellen, when she wasn’t flitting around like a social butterfly—as his friend from Destin.
He carefully kept his promise to treat her as such, which just made her realize more and more that Brick was a gentleman. He might ride a Harley, have a bushy beard, too many tattoos, and speak with an accent that a duck hunter would envy, but he was a very, very good man.
Outside, anot so goodman, Norman, was doing his worst. The rain came down on the metal roof in a roar, and every fewminutes the wind buffeted the whole building and the lights flickered.
The front windows were shuttered tight, the door boarded up, the electricity still working with promises of a generator that would kick in five minutes after they lost power.
Inside, Gator Jack’s was warm and gold and defiantly alive. The jukebox was on overtime, dozens of locals, bikers, and a few stranded travelers who’d given up on the traffic packed in together.
They all hummed with that cheerful noise as though they’d decided, as a group, to not be afraid.
It was, Maggie thought, the most ridiculous place she had ever been happy. She’d shifted her attention to the dancers, searching for Jo Ellen, who was on the next level of happy tonight.
“You’re smiling,” Brick observed after a young couple had lingered talking to them for nearly half an hour, mostly about hunting deer, of all repugnant topics.
“Maybe. But probably this is my face at rest.”
“No. Your face at rest is just this side of an angry bird. That’s a smile. I’d like it noted for the record that I caused it.”
“You may note whatever you like. The record is not admissible.”
He laughed, the big, easy laugh that came up from somewhere under the gray beard, and Maggie sipped her wine to hide the fact that the laugh was increasingly…yes, attractive.
Even though there wasn’t anything objectively attractive about him. But there was definitely something…comfortable about him. She let her guard down because, honestly, carrying that thing around was a job.
“Where’d your partner in crime get to?” Brick asked.
“I was just wondering that.”
Ten minutes ago, Jo Ellen had been holding court near the jukebox, chatting with Charlene, the pink-haired bartender, who remembered them from when they’d been stranded travelers. She’d hugged them like they were her long-lost aunts.
But Jo Ellen, who’d been strutting around in white slacks and a red top, was nowhere to be found.
“Where could she be?” Brick asked, following Maggie’s gaze.
“That,” Maggie said, setting down her wine, “is the question I have been answering for sixty years.” She gave him a look. “My best friend has a reckless streak, an addiction to fun that one of her daughters inherited, and a penchant for finding the room where the boys are at a party.”
