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“Now, I’m gonna tell you something, all right?” Carine shifted her weight and flicked what felt like a pebble off the bottom of her bare foot. “I don’t want y’all to think for one second that I’m out here looking like this and running my mouth about stuff I don’t know anything about. I sell houses for a living, and that’s my bread and butter. I know how to read bylaws and covenants. I also know that sometimes, the things that aren’t expressly written into those documents can be read between the lines by most reasonable people. More often than not, law enforcement is gonna agree if you call ’em out to mediate.”
Carine leaned her elbows onto the top of the stone wall and looked each worrisome weightlifter in the eyes. She needed them to understand and didn’t want to repeat herself. Any patience she’d woken with evaporated at the derailment of her sleepover.
“I don’t want to call law enforcement, all right? Let’s just say I grew up in a place where folks figured out ways to solve their own problems. Their solutions tended to be faster, and they lasted longer. The sheriff’s not a friend of mine. But just know that’s an option I’ll use if I have to. Now, what I would suggest you do is move your weights down there onto the sod, so folks don’t have to hear the grunting and clinking. If that’s too soggy for you, or if the COA tells you nuh-uh, then I suggest you get yourself some real good mats, okay? Take your weights inside, bearing in mind that your floors are your business, and it’s on you if you damage them. Hard to resell these condos when they’re not perfect given how much slicker new construction is nowadays.”
She straightened up and knocked the dust off her elbows. “Lord, y’all look like you can’t even scrape together earnest money between the two of you to buy this place. Did your parents sell off a dead relative’s family home to start your nest egg?”
The lady opened her mouth.
“Nuh-uh,” Carine said. “I don’t actually care. What I care about is going back to bed until I absolutely have to get up. Do you understand me? I want you both to understand me. Some people work all week for the weekends and then are on edge all Saturday and Sunday long, worrying they’ll get called in for a few hours, just long enough to ruin their day and make the weekend feel like a lunch break. Please be good citizens. Because if you’re not?” She grinned. “I can think of at least twenty legal ways to make your home ownership experience an expensive mistake for you. Now, y’all have a good morning. Be good people. ’Kay?”
They didn’t say a word as she stepped through the patio door and closed it.
She’d always known that she’d eventually evolve into the hereditary Aggrieved Nag variant, but she’d assumed she’d at least have a couple of kids or at least a cat before she did.
“I guess I’m gifted and talented in one thing, at least.”
She worked on unclenching her jaw as she closed the vertical blinds and drew the curtains shut.
Then she returned to Heidi’s room and shut the door softly.
Holding her breath again, she waited for Heidi to stir.
Heidi was still in the same position she’d been in when Carine had taken her weight off her.
Like a child afraid of the dark and the sounds of her room, Carine climbed cautiously back into Heidi’s bed. She didn’t check her phone for appointment notifications or “suggestions” from Lipton that she handle a few tasks in the office on a Saturday morning. The Aggrieved Nag was running too hot to be bothered. She clutched the covers over her, closed her eyes, and comfortably crossed her legs at the ankles.
“You let in a draft,” Heidi murmured before Carine could relax all the things she’d clenched.
Carine opened her eyes.
Great, now she’s going to get up and give me that look that means go home.
Carine sighed. “Had to get up. Heard the weights outside.”
“I don’t hear them.”
“I would hope not. Wicked Witch of the Southeast had a little chat with Hans and Frantzine this morning.” Carine hadn’t known if Heidi would catch the oldSaturday Night Livereference, so she was gratified when the other woman snickered. “Maybe the lecture I gave them will stick in their brains for a while. I doubt it, though.”
“Do you always lecture your host’s neighbors?”
Carine cringed and was about to say, “No, of course not,” but realized that she would be lying if she did. She’d told off several of her friends’ dorm room and apartment neighbors in college. Her professional nagging skills weren’t as newly evolved as she’d thought. She’d simply thought of them in a different way before. In college, her sorority sisters had named her the designated confrontation queen. She was always the one who volunteered to stick her neck out because her feelings had been hardest to hurt, supposedly.
The truth was actually that she played the part of the bold mouthpiece because she never was ready to go home. She did what she could to keep the group out and together for a few minutes longer.
If the neighbors ruined her visit, she would have had to leave, and leaving meant going back to her white-walled room in her borrowed house to be alone with her thoughts.
She didn’t want to go back to Shora and be alone. She wanted to stay where she was and convince herself that Heidi wanted her there.
“I’m sorry,” Carine murmured. “I wasn’t trying to make trouble. Something snapped in me. I only needed to hear the sound once for it to set me off. I don’t know how you’ve lived with the noise for as long as you have.”
“CBD gummies. Leah smuggled them out of Colorado the last time she had a show there. And, of course, the earplugs help sometimes.”
Carine couldn’t tell if Heidi was joking about the gummies. Leah traveling back east with a toiletry bag full of semi-legal pharmaceuticals would have been entirely in character, though, and she was never shy about offering to share. Carine’s problem was that she was too timid regarding the product that she hadn’t yet let herself say yes.
“Are you going to sleep the day away?” Heidi asked.
“That was kind of my plan, if I have to be honest. You have good pillows.”
