Page 57

I pick at the blades of grass beneath me. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it,’ I say, squinting up at her as a beam of sunlight breaks through her branches and pierces my eye socket.

‘That’s fair. That’s fair.’ She nods.

I exhale with relief.

‘It’s fair, Miller. But you probably should.’

My brows pinch. ‘With you?’

‘Fuck no, with a professional, obviously,’ she says. The prospect of having to play therapist makes her voice high and squeaky. I laugh and lie back in the grass. It’s so soft. The clouds above look like someone’s mum licked their thumb and tried to wipe them away. A smudge of white on a blue sheet. How can such gentleness exist in such an ugly, hard, world?

One day, gentrification will get here too. Lavender will have to move. The chickens will be displaced. The forest will fall and some new city will rise. But right here, right now, this quiet little moment feels a bit like paradise.

‘Lavender, one day when I die, can I be buried near you?’

‘That’s so fucked, Miller. You want your decomposing corpse rotting somewhere in my root system?’

I cringe. Well, I hadn’t quite thought of it like that.

‘Alright!’ I cover my face with my hands. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.’

She looks down at me like I’m a dead rodent that’s passed away beside her. ‘Are you even drunk?’

‘No,’ I lament, ‘I’m devastatingly sober.’

When she shakes her head, her leaves fall like rain, burying me in autumn. Paradise. ‘You’re always doing that,’ she says.

‘Doing what?’

‘Saying things most people don’t.’

It is true. I do have chronic foot-in-mouth disease. I believe it may even be terminal. ‘Does it bother you?’

‘Not much.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, nonetheless.’

‘You don’t need to apologise for being yourself, Miller – least of all to me.’

‘Because you’re my friend?’ I ask. My eyelids feel so heavy. It’s been a long day. Maybe I’ll take a nap.

‘Something like that, yeah,’ she says, and I drift to sleep beneath her shadow.

For once, I beat him to the couch. I thought I heard that strange tinkling sound again when I got in and thought he might be home, but it stopped, and he didn’t appear. I’m watching The Vampire Vants a Vife season three and dining on a nutrient-packed dinner of trail mix.

He walks down the stairs that lead to nothing and pauses when he sees me.

I pause too, mid-chew. ‘You seem… dishevelled.’

Says the woman who rolled into the house with leaves sticking out of her hair. That’s what that look Walker is giving me is saying.

He sighs like an eighty-year-old man with the weight of the world resting on his aging shoulders. He continues down the stairs.

‘I’m tired,’ he says, unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt. Shut your mouth, Miller, you’re drooling. I look around the room for something other than the veins popping in his forearms to focus on. ‘I’ve no stamina for villainy today.’ Walker pulls his belt from its loop and tosses it over the back of the couch.

Well. Lucky me. Except, this is uncharted territory. I don’t think I know what to make of a civil Walker. Whatever will we do without his biting scorn and my lukewarm hatred to fall back on?

I throw another nut in the air, and nearly lose my life when it gets stuck in my throat. It’s okay, I right myself, spit the nut across the floor and promise to pick it up later.