Page 101 of Cherry Picking

“One.”

“Shh.”

“Are we going to the Cherry Bomb or not? That’s the question.” She spreads her hands, looking innocent. “You thought I was going to ask something else, and now you feel silly.”

“I do not feel silly.”

“You feel a little silly.”

I feel about four whiskeys, is what I feel. The room has gone warm, and the edges are beginning to blur. “We’re going to the Cherry Bomb.”

“Thank you.” She heads back into the closet. “I’m wearing the skirt. You’re wearing the green dress. Don’t argue with me anymore. I’ve also had a hard week because some man is hinging his entire livelihood on a fucking Toyota.”

At two minutes past seven, while Hazel is doing her eyeliner and narrating the process, my phone lights up on the counter. It’s a Google alert—a notification I definitely shouldn’t have enabled in the first place.

MAXWELL THREE GAME SUSPENSION LANDS AT WORST POSSIBLE TIME

Charlotte’s winger is unsigned past April, and his market just got harder to read.

Oh, you have got to be kidding me.

Three games. I’m finding that out from a push notification, because he hasn’t told me a single thing—no call, no text, nothing all day. My patience officially ran out somewhere around the second whiskey.

“Ev?” Hazel calls from the bedroom, still narrating her own eyeliner. “I need a hand with this top!”

“Coming!”

I put the phone screen-side down on the counter and go deal with her zipper. This is fine. I’m fine. The dress is an obnoxious lime green, and I’m going dancing.

CHAPTER 29

BRIGGS

Iclear Ophelia’s threshold shortly past ten and head toward the cemetery to visit my brother.

Sierra Vista sits a mere fifteen minutes from my dad’s place. The route is etched into my brain because I navigated it in a rented SUV back on the second of November with my father silent in the passenger seat. I haven’t allowed myself to go back there until today.

Once I park, I make a stop at my mother’s marker first.

The stone is a double, her details finished while my father’s name waits on the right. I press two fingers against the cool granite and leave them there for a long, heavy minute.

“I love you. I miss you. Honestly, I think Dad could use a good talk with you right about now.”

My father recounted a story once about what she’d said while she was pregnant with Zig. She’d been reading up on swifts—those birds that eat and sleep in the air, only descending to the earth to nest.

She’d decided then that her boys were destined to be just like them. Up and gone for the long haul but always returning to the same familiar spot.

She got one of us right. Never quite got to meet the other.

I shift my weight, looking past her marker toward the fresh green sod of the next plot over. ZIGMUND KEANE MAXWELL. I walk toward him, standing awkwardly with my hands in my pockets.

“So you were sober.”

Two crows are arguing in a palo verde over by the access road.

“For two years,” I say shakily. “You got a chip, and you didn’t call me, and I know why now. I had it explained to me an hour ago by somebody who had to break a promise to do it.”

The February wind pushes at the flowers in the next row over.