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“Are you mad about it?”
“Sometimes. Mostly I’m just sad, though,” I answered quietly, honestly.
“Maybe if you had a girlfriend you’d be less sad.”
I chuckled. “Wow, even now you’re angling to set me up. Your dad put you up to it?”
“Nope, I just like Daisy. I think she’s sad too. You could be sad together.”
That time, I full-on laughed. “That’s not quite how you want to pick a girlfriend, squirt. And anyway, Daisy and I are just friends.”
“Daddy said you went on a date the other night though.”
“That’s what he was hoping when he tricked me. But Daisy said we should be friends, so that’s all we are.”
“Well, that sucks too.”
I humphed a laugh. “You know what doesn’t suck?”
Her head rolled my way so she could see me. “What?”
“Pancakes.”
Her face lit up. “Bettie’s?”
“Special this week is cinnamon roll pancakes.”
She hopped off the couch and ran for the entry. “With cream cheese frosting! Let’s go!”
Smiling after her, I picked myself up and headed for my work boots, which hadn’t seen much work lately.
I’d been right—we’d been shut down and handed a laundry list of things to address, everything from underpinning and foundation fixes to electrical and plumbing calls that were unnecessary by most any inspector’s standards, things I’d never been called on before. Nothing dangerous was on that list, just a million little things that would take us a week to address and required resubmitting our plans to the city, which was its own time suck.
It wasn’t long until I was heading for town, Sophie in the back seat singing along to the radio. I was thankful it kept her occupied, using the time to get myself right after the conversation with her. We rarely spoke of Julie and Mandy, almost never addressing of how I felt about them. There had been no point in veiling it for her, which was why I figured she came to me so often. I was the only adult in the house who wouldn’t bullshit her in an effort to protect her, shelter her. I figured there was a way to talk to her about all of it in a way that was appropriate for her age, so I did my best, which I was sure wasn’t good enough. But I tried.
A song came on the radio from those years when we were teenagers, when our only troubles were figuring out how to sneak out for a party and finding a place to hook up where we wouldn’t get caught. Cole and Julie were always around me and Mandy, the four of us spending so much time together, we were family long before we were ever officially family. Julie even came to Mandy’s funeral, and for that one endless day, the three of us mourned that time in our lives, the people we were. The hopes and dreams that we’d held, long slipped through our fingers.
As Sophie had so eloquently said, it sucked. And the pain of that made it near impossible to ever risk heartache again.
Maybe she was right. Maybe we were cursed like Daisy’s family was rumored to be.
The idea of it was a comfort, in its way. Rather it be a thing that had rules than just shitty, awful luck.
Main Street was busy that Saturday morning, but I was able to find a spot near Bettie’s Biscuits. The old diner had been around since the fifties when Bettie founded it with her husband. The sign featured a pinup girl rumored to be Bettie in her youth, wearing a tiny waitress dress, the tray in her hand stacked with biscuits, which were her specialty. Once, in the eighties, a pack of women from Coleburn’s church tried to have the sign removed for being too sexual in nature, but in the end, nobody was going to strip Bettie of the symbol of her youthful figure. Cold dead hands—that was what it would take. Nobody’d questioned her since, lest they lose favor at Lindenbach’s favorite breakfast joint.
As we walked up to the door, I noted the dwindled numbers of homeless on the street. A few still sat or slept under eaves, unwilling to comply to the rules of the tent shelter or untrusting of the operation, I wasn’t sure. But we’d at least made some headway in doing just what Doug and the rest of them wanted—relocating the homeless to a place where nobody had to see them. And yet, they protested, working to stop us at every turn.
I couldn’t make it make sense.
Aggie, one of the waitresses, waved at us when we entered, inviting us to pick a seat. So we ventured over to a booth near the window overlooking Main Street. My brothers were all busy with projects today, running errands and getting themselves caught up for the upcoming week. We were finishing several contracts at once, including the Blum’s barn, and since we didn’t have much to do with the shelter site temporarily shut down, I’d offered to keep an eye on Sophie, grateful for the company.
