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Poppy dug in her pocket for a quarter—we all had them, though my cousins were lucky their lives had only been ruined by the swear jar for a few days. Once cash had been exchanged, Priscilla smiled with unnatural pleasure.
“Maybe it should be the other way around,” Dottie suggested. “I shouldn’t date until you all are paired off and settled down.”
“Nice try, Mama,” Daisy said.
Dottie huffed.
“Speaking of dating, Seb came over here asking for you the second he got back.” Poppy’s brows did a little jig. “Marnie found out and came around asking fifty questions.”
Jo snorted a laugh. “More like a thousand.”
My discomfort intensified at the mention of Sebastian’s ex, then multiplied at the thought that she would know about Priscilla. Soon. So would the town and my cousins and his family and everyone.
I had a suspicion that nothing could prepare me for that, especially since the only person who’d known all this time was my mother, who happened to be watching me out of her periphery while she colored Eric’s eyes that blue that made all the cartoon panties melt.
“Well, Marnie’s a big girl. I’m sure she’ll—”
“Boil a bunny in your kitchen?” Jo asked.
Priscilla’s face bent in a frown, her bright eyes shining. “She kills bunnies?” she whispered.
“Iris Jo,” Dottie started as she comforted Priscilla, “you stop that.”
“What? Marnie is a world-class psycho. I don’t know how Seb ended up with her.”
“Was she always that way, or did Sebastian make her crazy?” Daisy asked.
Her sisters looked appalled.
“How could you even suggest such a thing?” Jo asked.
“I don’t mean he did it on purpose, but you have to admit it was plain to see she was always more invested than he was,” Daisy said. “Can you blame her for going bananas when he’d inevitably break up with her? Or when Presley came for the summer?”
Jo laid a look on Daisy. “Have you forgotten that I’m in her grade? Or that she bullied me into therapy in elementary school?”
“Of course not,” Daisy answered. “I’m not saying she’s an angel, but you can’t say Sebastian didn’t make her worse. Plus, she was just a kid. She’s a nurse now. Surely she’s compassionate.”
“Or she likes the ideas of sticking people with needles,” Jo said under her breath.
Daisy nibbled on her lip. “Anyway, I get it. She was familiar to him, safe. And when you’re grieving, it’s hard to know if what you feel is real. There’s just so much feeling, figuring out what’s what isn’t so easy.”
The room quieted for a second at the remembrance of Daisy’s high school boyfriend who died in a car accident their senior year. Dottie wore a similar look of sadness, having lost my uncle before Jo could walk.
“Well,” Poppy said with a little extra cheer, “it’s nothing to worry about. The two of them were probably over before they got started. It’s not on you, and I’m sure she won’t get herself involved.”
We all shared a look but let it go.
Mom shifted to get off her stool, and I hopped down fast so I could help her.
“Thanks, honey. Will you walk me back to the house?”
Dottie frowned. “You okay, Birdie?”
“Oh, I’m fine—just a little tired is all,” she said with an encouraging smile.
“Can I leave Cilla here?” I asked as I took Mom’s arm.
“Of course,” Dottie answered, smiling down at Priscilla. “I can’t lose my helper or I’ll never finish.”
Priscilla straightened up proudly. “Yeah, Mama. I’m helping.”
“Keep up the good work, kiddo,” I said, helping Mom with her oxy-go before steering her toward the door. “Be right back.”
We headed outside, the heat instantly stifling. Cicadas rattled long, slow hisses in rounds as we headed for our house on the back of the property.
The ranch house where my cousins lived had been built as a small cabin in the eighteen thirties by our homesteading German ancestors, expanded in the early nineteen hundreds, and remodeled completely in the fifties, keeping as much of the original structure as possible. It’d grown out, not up, over the decades, and at this stage was a five-thousand-square-foot compound with a courtyard full of ancient trees in the middle and breezeways along the inside.
The house in back where we were staying was once for part of the family—nobody used to leave, just stayed on and worked the farm generation after generation. Dottie had redone it for us when we came down for the summers—the little two-bedroom, one bath cottage had all the charm and memories I could stand.
It was perfect. And if it hadn’t been for Dottie, I didn’t know where we’d have gone when we lost the house in Maravillo.
My dad left us before my tenth birthday, and Mom had always struggled to keep up with the mortgage on a single income. But just after Priscilla was born, she caught a bout of pneumonia that almost killed her, and they discovered her COPD. This was what finally convinced her to quit smoking, but the damage had been done—the state of her lungs had deteriorated to the point that she would need an oxygen machine for the rest of her days.
