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"Do you want to stop?" Olivia asks.
I blush and shake my head. She always notices my moods—one of her best and worst qualities.
"No, it's fine. I have some leftovers at the bookshop."
Olivia shrugs her shoulders and doesn't press the issue.
At least now that we are closer to the heart of our town, we are farther away from the sea and a little bit warmer.
"Should we talk a little bit about the plans we have for the future of Hope House, of getting a newer house in a better part of our town?"
Olivia is not too interested in the conversation after a moment, so I let it go.
I see that Olivia has a tear in the back of her dark coat. I stop, catching the ends briefly with my fingertips. "You have a tear." Olivia looks back and grimaces. "I know. I just got it last night. I tried to climb over my neighbor's fence to grab my cat, and I heard it rip. Does it look terrible?"
I shrug and start walking again. "Not terrible. But you should let me sew it. There is no need to go around looking tattered and frayed."
"I was just thinking of getting a new coat," she says. "This one is four years old. It has lived a good life."
"You're going to give up a coat that has served you so well without so much as a fight?" I roll my eyes. "Let me take a crack at it. Then you can decide when it's fixed whether you want to spend your precious dollars on a new coat or something more important."
Olivia frowns a little. "Maybe I want a new coat. Maybe I want a different style. I know that you won't approve, but I don't have to patch every hole and mend every ripped seam. I am not as handy as you are."
I shove my hands into my pockets and give her a long look. "You don’t have to be. That's what I'm saying. I'm offering to fix your coat for you."
Her mouth bunches up the way it often does when she wants to say something but bites her tongue. I know that look exactly. After all, we’ve been best friends for almost our entire lives.
"What?" I ask.
"We should talk about something else. Have you got plans for the rest of the week?"
I reply, feeling like I didn't really get my point across about her coat. "Not exactly. I work at the bookstore every day. I'm thinking of cooking a lasagna tonight because I have these coupons that go bad pretty soon that are for ground meat, noodles, and cheese. All totaled, I won't have to spend more than fifteen dollars to make the whole pan of lasagna. And I know that Minnie likes it when I cook, so..."
"Fifteen dollars?" Olivia looks at me, surprised. "That's really cheap."
I slide her a sly smile. "I know. I've gotten to be an expert at extreme couponing."
She smiles and shakes her head. "Of course you are."
"What, I am!" I say in protest.
Her face splits into a smile. As we round a corner and go by a dollar store, she mock bows to me. "All hail the queen of penny pinching, Lady Talia."
I grin. "I'll take that praise. When you have to take on the mantle of household finances at age ten, you develop a keen sense of how money can be spent or saved."
Olivia looks thoughtful. "Yeah, I can see it. Minnie seems like a lovely person, but I don't imagine that she is particularly spectacular with money."
I snort. "Spectacularly bad, maybe. Or rather, it isn't that she is even bad with it. It's more like she gives it away when she doesn't even have anything to give. It's a little frustrating." I scrunch up my face. "Not that I am complaining about her being charitable, I guess. She did adopt me."
Olivia frowns and puts her hand out, shielding me from walking into the street. We stop, and a police officer runs by, clearing the street I was about to step into. He steps closer to me, looking to his right. Glancing down the street, I am able to get a glimpse of the beginnings of a large black hearse. The cop runs ahead to the next intersection, and the procession of vehicles approaches.
I can see from here that all the vehicles following the hearse are limousines, each one long and black, with their windows tinted so that I can't make heads or tails of who is inside.
My mouth pulls to the side, as I am temporarily distracted.
I can tell by the niceness of the hearse that the funeral procession is heading up toward the nicer cemetery, up by the Morgan estate that looks down on the town. Everybody else has to be buried in the same place, about five miles south of our little town, but not the rich people. My mouth puckers, and I feel a wash of resentment for someone that I don't even know.
Olivia isn't distracted and continues our conversation, though.
