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Snickering had our heads snapping in the direction of my sisters, who’d been leaning against the big island.
“What are you gonna surprise her with?” Daisy asked with mock innocence.
“That monstrous pipe you’re packing?” Poppy guessed.
And Grant smirked. “Nah, that one hasn’t surprised her in at least twenty minutes.”
Daisy almost choked on the drink she’d sipped, which had proved to be a grievous error. She pinched her nose. “Jesus, that burns.”
“You earned that, Daisy Mae,” I said. “Now scram so we can bottle.”
Daisy shook her glass so the ice rattled. “Mama said no drinks in the living room.” She took a seat on a barstool.
“Then don’t go in the living room,” I suggested.
“She said no eating in there either.” Poppy sat next to Daisy with a bowl of popcorn between them and a couple of terrible smiles on their faces.
“God, you three look alike,” Grant noted.
At the same time, the three of us said, “I’m the pretty one,” and busted out laughing.
It was true. We had identical black hair and sharp blue eyes and pouty lips. When she was little, Presley was convinced that Elvis was our grandpa even though it was mathematically impossible. But with the way we looked and the fact that we could all sing, I could see the reach.
But there were differences too. All of us had long hair—more out of laziness than credo—but Daisy had thick bangs and a heart-shaped face. Poppy rarely wore her hair down, had a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and sported a subtle cleft chin, courtesy of Mama’s genetics.
I gave them both the hairy eyeball.
They laughed.
“We don’t have to do this part if you don’t want to,” I said to Grant.
“Why? Worried they’re going to spill your secrets?”
“Oh, I know they will.”
“Then we should definitely stay.”
“I like him,” Daisy said with her mouth full of popcorn. “When he’s not selling something, at least.”
Poppy leaned to look around the island. “The jeans lived up to the hype too.”
I rolled my eyes so hard, I was lucky they didn’t detach from my optic nerves. But I otherwise ignored my sisters with the practiced patience that only the youngest sibling can muster.
I picked up a jar and handed it to Grant before getting one of my own. “This is the easy part. Just fill ’er up.”
He filled his first, holding it up to the light when it was full. “You don’t do anything to it? Like, sterilize it?”
“The jars are sterilized, but the honey doesn’t need it. Honey is too acidic for bacteria to grow, so no raw honey is pasteurized.”
“Huh.” He screwed a lid on and fixed a label to the front. “Like this?”
“Just like that.”
“All right.” He looked to my sisters. “Spill it.”
The three of them were smiling so evilly, I wanted to fling a handful of honey at each of them, splat, splat, splat. Grant’s curiosity was warranted, but I gave Poppy and Daisy warning looks.
“Don’t be scared,” Daisy said sweetly, which was her whole cover. Everybody thought she was such a peach. But “everybody” didn’t have to endure her torment.
“You’re an asshole,” I answered.
“Have you always gotten along this well?” Grant asked.
“You should have seen us as kids,” Poppy said, tossing a few pieces of popcorn in her mouth. “Like the shower wars.”
Daisy and I groaned.
“Shower wars?” He screwed the lid on another jar.
“I don’t even know how it started,” Poppy said.
“I squirted the last of the shampoo into the shower so I could make bubbles,” I reminded her.
“Oh my god, yes—Daisy’s good stuff, the all-natural crap from the mall.”
“Mama said it was expensive,” Daisy defended. “I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
“That gene apparently skipped me,” I noted.
“So Jo got in trouble, and Mama got us each our own shower stuff in a little caddy with our names on it so we wouldn’t use each other’s stuff. Except that Jo kept taking ours and dumping it out.”
“It smelled better than mine.”
Daisy rolled her eyes. “Poppy got so mad, she took Jo’s shampoo, put it in a Coke bottle, and stuck the pump nozzle in the neck of it.”
“And then Jo got so mad, she emptied Poppy’s entire shaving cream onto the wall and wrote Poppy sucks in it.”
“I got my mouth washed out for that one,” I said.
“It went on like that for years. There was other stuff too,” Poppy continued. “Like nobody will own up to wetting wads of toilet paper and sticking them to the ceiling.”
“Because it was you,” Daisy noted.
“Was not. And anyway, what about Daisy’s hairballs?”
I made a gagging noise. “She’d stick her hair all over the wall, and when you showered, they’d wave in the breeze like spider legs. When she got in trouble for it, she just balled it up instead and left it in our soap dishes.”
“I swear one time I thought it was a goddamn rat,” Poppy said with a shudder.
