A laugh sputtered out of her, and with it went the minuscule amount of sympathy she’d had for this guy. “Okay, I was being serious, but you can fuck right off with that offer.”
“That’s the best I can do! Did you not hear the part about my horrible financial circumstances?”
“You don’t think I have horrible finances? Two weeks ago, I paid a speeding ticket in change. And not just quarters. We’re talking, like,allof the presidents. Where do you expect me to live for two hundred a month while you’re renting my place?”
“You can crash with me when someone’s renting for the weekend.”
“With the turtles? Hard pass.” She scoffed. “Look. I have my own money issues to worry about. Two hundred dollars a month wouldn’t even cover my insurance premiums, let alone my migraine medication…” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t need to provide her enemy with her entire medical history. “I at least need those expenses covered by any financial arrangement. Or else I can’t even afford to consider it.”
“How much is all that?” he asked her, all hopefulness for their circumstances draining from his voice.
“Basically no plans cover my migraine medication, so altogether, all my meds are, like, fifteen hundred a month.”
“That’s highway robbery.” He said it flatly, and she wasn’t sure whether the robber he was referring to was her or the pharmaceutical industry.
His eyes lingered, making her squirm in her seat. She directed her attention to the road, and only when she could no longer feel the weight of his gaze on her cheek did she venture a glance in his direction.
“Maybe my brother will give me Phineas’s old room. He leftfor Bible college last fall.” His forehead was pressed against the window, his body bent in a way that made him look much too large for her tiny car. Men must’ve been smaller in the eighties, she reasoned.
“It’s good to have dreams, Hodges.” She pulled off the highway for the candy and cheese store. They were sorely in need of both.
Chapter 5
An Unnamed Side Character in a Scorsese Movie
62 Days until Busy Season
Thursday night markedthe end of the crow-hunting season in Wisconsin and the beginning of the Crow Closer, a potluck put on by the Timber Creek Crow Hunting Society (TCCHS) at the VFW that blessedly served just about every Midwestern delicacyasidefrom crow, as the TCCHS was notoriously bad at bagging the very bird they’d sworn to defeat.
Town events weren’t really Lainey’s thing—she was always turning down Bree for a carnival this or a fire muster that—but the Crow Closer was a free meal she wasn’t responsible for cooking herself.
“For names, I’m thinking something original but sort of Parisian,” Bree said, pouring herself a pink lemonade from the spigot of a fluorescent cooler. In a black column maternity dress, she looked exceedingly chic for a room filled with folding chairs and men wearing shirts that readWill Do Anything for a Buck. “I’ve narrowed it down to Navette, Pastille, or maybe Céloise. What do you think?”
Bree had reached the point in her pregnancy where conversations were merely opportunities to crowdsource opinions oneverything from baby names to the practicalities of cloth diapering.
Lainey’s attention was briefly commandeered by a group of bearded men who began to assault the room with unsolicited bird calls like a college a cappella choir under a stone archway.
“Why are we here again?” Lainey whined, grabbing a plate at the start of the buffet line of Crock-Pots and casserole dishes.
“Because we are part of a vibrant and exciting community—” Bree shuddered at a bald man’s squawk practically piercing their eardrums. “I don’t know. Just shut up and eat your free meal.”
“Corn casserole?” Lainey offered from an aluminum tray.
“What do you think of my names?” Bree demanded impatiently.
Lainey inhaled. “Navette means ‘shuttle,’ as in an airport shuttle, and a pastille is sort of like…a lozenge? A medicated lozenge.”
“Ah, shit.” Bree shook her head while plopping a spoonful of macaroni and cheese onto her paper plate. “I always forget you’re, like, a French citizen, or whatever.”
“I’mtechnicallya French citizen,” she corrected. It was odd to be a citizen of a place she’d never been simply because her estranged mother had been born there. Lainey had hardly left Wisconsin.
“I think thattechnicallycounts. I always think back to when we canceled that trip to France as ourSliding Doorsmoment,” Bree said innocently. Lainey’s spine straightened, as though someone was tugging a string between her shoulder blades. “What do you think we’d be doing right now if we’d gone through with it? I’m sure I would’ve ended up back here eventually, but I think you’d still be in Europe. You probably would’ve gone to art school. You’d be living this completely different life.”
Lainey laughed, not because it was funny, but because it seemed like one of the few blow-off responses Bree would accept. It was ancient history. In Bree’s single act of defiance ever, she’d applied to graduate school in Paris. Lainey had been twenty-one, with a steady job and no real problems to speak of.
All the other Davis women have gotten to have their adventures. It’s your turn, Gran had urged her.
Then everything fell apart. Not all at once—it so rarely does—but in a series of small postponements. At first it was an awful headache. Then another, and another. Then a male doctor who convinced her it was hormones and prescribed her birth control and an Aleve. Then several other, better doctors. Lots of medication that helped a little or not at all. Add a bad relationship somewhere in there and severalMaybe next semesterconversations. Suddenly, it had been two years, and Bree’s window of rebellion closed. She was headed to Vanderbilt for business school, and Lainey was still in Timber Creek, but now she was drowning in medical debt and struggling to hold down a job.
