Was it?
“Suit yourself.”
“I just meant that maybe I should do something more productive with my evenings than watch TV. Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.
“I’m not a writer,” she added, thinking back to Professor Blaine. To Seth Sider, from whom she’d taken a screenwriting workshop when she started thinking about starting Moonpics.
“So you keep saying,” he said.
“What doesthatmean?”
He held up his hands. Right. He’d spoken mildly, so why did Blair feel so defensive? She closed her eyes briefly and reopened them.
“Does your neck hurt?”
She opened her eyes. “What?”
“Your neck. You’re always rubbing it like it hurts.”
She stood. “I should clean up.”
He did, too. “Let me help.”
“That’s OK.” She didn’t want him to help. There was something happening to her lately, something that was different from the cyclone but also felt like it was related somehow. One of theways this new… thing was manifesting was with dishes. It was hard for her to leave dishes sitting in the kitchen, to not undertake the cleanup before eating. The only reason she managed was that she didn’t want to look like a nutjob in front of Jack.
And then when it was finally cleanup time, she wanted to do the dishes by hand, even though she had installed new appliances when she’d reoccupied the house, including a state-of-the-art dishwasher.
She didn’t know how to explain that she wanted—needed—to do the dishes by hand.
It was the same impulse that made her fold and refold her quilts until the edges lined up perfectly.
“Seriously,” Jack said. “Don’t you know the rule that the person who cooks doesn’t have to clean?”
“I don’t know that rule.” She made a shooing motion and risked telling him the truth, or at least part of it. “You’ll just do it wrong. Skedaddle.”
Chapter 11
Save the Crows
The crow army came the next week. Jack was sitting by the pool when they swooped in and landed on the lemon tree. It was a small army, only three soldiers’ worth. But three crows in a lemon tree: that wasn’t something a person saw every day.
“Hi,” he said, slowly closing his computer so as not to scare them, and had he just greeted a minimurder of crows?
And given that the answer was apparently yes, he had chosen a mere “Hi”?
He might have summoned them, but he was going to have to up his game.
They contemplated him silently. Should he give them some food? He swung his legs to the ground and slowly, deliberately, smoothly, got up and went inside and ripped open a package of the granola he’d been giving them on the hill. Had he Ubered to a fancy-ass grocery store to buy more of the fancy-ass granola? What if he had? He’d needed some other stuff, too. Some normal, non-fancy-ass stuff.
On impulse, he pulled down a bowl and poured the granola into it. If one was going to offer dinner to one’s potential crow army, why not do it in style? It was one thing for a bird to eat off the literal earth, another for it to eat off a man-made patio. Though why aman-made bowl was any better than a man-made patio, he couldn’t say. He was going with his gut here. They would probably be gone by the time he got back out there anyway.
They were not. They remained in the tree, unsettlingly silent.
He inched toward them, keeping his eyes on the ground. If anyone could see him, it would look like he was kowtowing to a bunch of birds. Maybe he was.
Halfway to the tree, he sensed them getting restless, so he set the bowl on the ground and reversed course, backing up until he was at the door of the pool house.
They did nothing. He went inside and stood by the window, and only then did they start vocalizing. Not the classic crow squawking, exactly, more like they were discussing among themselves.
