Page 46 of The Right Kind of Wrong

Monroe was wearing another all-black outfit, sort of requisite for her life back in New York, but she was going to need to cave soon and start dressing for the weather. She dimly remembered that, while she’d been packing, she’d at least had the good sense to throw in a few outfits that she usually only wore on her annual pilgrimage with Sylvia to the Hamptons. Clothing that was better suited for the humid, sun-scorched Texas weather.

She still hadn’t fully unpacked.

It wasn’t because she hadn’t accepted the reality of her situation, that her life was now in Cypress Falls. But something, an emotion she refused to pick at for fear she’d break open a wound whose depths she hadn’t fully explored, made it feel impossible for her to clean out the dresser drawers filled with her mom’s clothing.

It was too final.

So here she was, on a Monday in late June, deciding to go to the auto body shop of all places, just to avoid the other responsibilities in her life.

On the left-hand side of the large building was what looked like a front waiting area. She found an empty parking spot and cut the engine, looking around.

In some ways, this town was like anywhere else in the world, but in others, it was like she could practically hear the twang in the way that men walked, their legs bowed outward, cowboy hats tipped low on their brows.

She hopped out of the SUV and crossed by two such cowboys in the paved parking lot quickly, the heat already beating down on her.

A bell jingled her arrival into the front waiting room—a generous term for the space, considering it was no more than a scuffed (but clean) linoleum floor and three folding chairs.

Toward the back of the small room was a counter that had an honest-to-god cash register set atop it, amid stacks of paperwork. The woman behind said counter looked up at her, over glasses perched low on her nose.

Monroe was tickled, thinking about how Blake spent her days here. So tickled, in fact, that she almost missed the woman’s eyes growing wide.

For a brief second, Monroe thought she was going to get some kind of scolding, which was the most common reason she’d ever been on the receiving end of that look.

Except that she was twenty-eight, was coming in to have her vehicle serviced, and, well, she hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

Old habits died hard, apparently.

“Monroe Lockhart?” the woman, whom Monroe didn’t know by name, bellowed into the ten feet of space between them. “Is that really you?”

It wasn’t like Monroe had gotten in trouble when she was younger—that was territory reserved for her brother—but, in her experience, being full-named in this town was never a good thing.

Still, she smiled brightly and crossed the last few feet to the counter before placing her keys down. “I’m sorry. I don’t seem to . . .”

The woman waved her way. “Mary Ann Taylor. Y’all used to live down the road from me and my late husband, Terry. Gosh, you couldn’t have been more than knee-high then.” Monroe couldn’t see behind the counter, but it was clear that Mary Ann was sticking out her hand to whatever approximate height Monroe had been at the time.

An image of a younger, rounder version of Mary Ann floated into Monroe’s mind, and the taste of peaches made her mouth start watering as long-buried memories resurfaced. “You had a peach tree on your property! You’d give them to me when I walked by.”

Monroe didn’t add the part about that trailer, tucked at the end of a dead-end street on the outskirts of town, being one of the worst parts of her childhood, as a consequence of her mom being heavy into a pill addiction after her back injury. Not that Monroe had understood that at the time.

Still, she liked that Mary Ann’s soft eyes lit up at the memory. “That’s me, honey. I can’t believe you remember that.” But then, she grew somber, and Monroe knew what was coming. “I heard about your mama, sweetie. I looked in the paper for a service notification to pay my respects, but I never saw one.”

Heat flushed across Monroe’s cheeks. “We didn’t have a service. I came back into town when I was notified, and . . .”

What was her excuse? That she’d been too busy to have a funeral for her mom? Or that, since the death had been so unexpected, she hadn’t known what her mom would have wanted?

At least she knew that Kendra Lockhart had wanted to be cremated. Actually, she’d told Monroe, on a phone call during an especially rainy Texas evening last May, “Under no circumstances do I ever want to be dyin’ with the worms. I’ve had about enough of them in life.”

That had been a little over a year ago.

Had her mom known that something was wrong back then?

In their family, thinking about the future wasn’t exactly high on their list of priorities, so it had struck Monroe as odd that it was something that her mom had been thinking about. But, given the Maisie of it all, she’d just accepted it at the time.

She wished that she’d pressed harder. She wished that she’d done a lot of things differently now.

Still, upon returning home, she’d honored the request, even if Monroe felt like she’d fallen short in every other area. And now, Kendra’s ashes lived atop the wardrobe in Monroe’s bedroom, and Monroe tried not to feel like a complete fucking failure when she woke up every morning.

A door opened from the bays, pulling Monroe’s attention toward it, and her eyebrows drew up in surprise. Still, she recognized him immediately. “Denny.”