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I laughed. Well, I had to, it was that dumb. “Vinz?”
“Lince was just not good, and your last names were just awkward. Cooger? Danper? No.”
I almost told her that I was really a Blue, but that would have been worse: Blueper.
“So Molly came up with Vinz,” Crys finished.
“I’m going to kill her,” I said and then stopped.
Cash was on the other side of the glass door, staring. Not at me, at Peri, and he had that look in his eye that said he was thinking hard. I’d seen that look a lot back in high school, and it always ended badly for me when whatever plan he had went wrong and I had to fix it. Actually, it was a bit worse than that, with an edge I’d never seen before. There was something wrong with him.
Then he looked at me and his face transformed as he smiled.
I turned away.
What the hell are you looking at my kid for?I thought, and then realized it had to be the money. Peri was a very rich little girl, the last of the Cleve Blue line, and Cash always needed money. I just didn’t see how he could get hers.
Crys blew her whistle to get the kids out of the pool to practice something on land. I took a quick glance over my shoulder, but Cash had gone, so I went back to thinking about . . . everything. But for some reason, I kept going back to the room of one’s own thing. Fucking Virginia Woolf and her rebel earworm.
I’d never really thought about living spaces as a choice before. Growing up, I lived with my mother. When I’d run from town at eighteen, I’d rented rooms near whatever diner I was waitressing in. When I fell into ghostwriting a couple of years later, I got smart and made board part of my contracts: if you want me to come to you to write your autobiography, you find me a living space. The closest thing I had to a room of my own was my car, which my batshit aunt had knocked into a ravine while trying to kill me. I had never had a place of my own.
And now, I realized with horror, I wanted one. One that was all mine.
Which was ridiculous, I did not want to own property, even if it meant I could paint a bedroom blue. And I sure as hell did not want property in Burney, Ohio, that would keep me there. I put the idea from my mind and went back to worrying about the copy edits and the factory and why Cash had stared at Peri and what the hell Anemone was going to go at me about when I got Peri back to the Pink House.
My life is very full.
* * *
When Peri was backat the Pink House working on her quest to rehabilitate three-hundred-plus teddy bears that had gotten soaked by a sprinkler a month ago and were now dry and looking pretty ratty—it’s a long story and not that interesting—Anemone opened the door to the library and pointed her finger at the doorway, so I went inside.
“Are you going to leave Vince?” she said abruptly when she’d closed the door behind her.
“No,” I said.
Veronica groaned outside the door, and I opened it to let her in and then closed it again.
Anemone looked serious. “Is he going to leave Burney?”
That was an odd question, so I thought about it. He’d only been here about nine months, but he was pretty invested. I mean, his house was on a flatbed truck so he could pull it up out of the flood plain at will, but I didn’t see him moving it to another town. Actually, now that he’d bolted the new old diner to it, he couldn’t move it anywhere. Not easily. He’d put that on for me, and I’d anchored him in Burney. Which was only fair; he was anchoring me in Burney. I wasn’t going to leave without him and he wasn’t going to leave at all.
“No, he isn’t,” I said.
She was thoughtful for a moment, and I stayed quiet, waiting.
“I have a friend,” she said finally, “who has had a very successful long-running relationship, over decades, without ever living with her lover. They each have their own places and it works very well. Not everybody is good with cohabitation.”
“Not following.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to get a place of your own.”
When I didn’t argue with her, she raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I told her, “but it’s just not practical. I don’t have the money to buy anything and renting a room is just dumb when I can live with Vince or you. I mean, I assume I can move back in with you?”
She shook her head. “You’re thirty-three. It’s time you put down roots.”
I was going to hit her with some sarcasm, “Like you did?” but that was a non-winner: Anemone had put down roots five times and I was pretty sure she was doing it again here in Burney, while I watched, what with the town council and the plans for George.
