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“What’s the worst that could happen? They shit sparkles and rainbows for a week?”
“Okay, that was pretty funny. I’m still googling it.”
“Whatever, Mom.”
“My mom’s right. You are annoying.”“You have to pull the scissors faster against the ribbon to get a perfect corkscrew curl. Like this. We’re almost done with the goodie bags. Only ten more to go.”
“I can taste the glitter in the air now.”CHAPTER 7Wren
“What a screwball.”“You have to talk to him now. Really talk to him. Not just call him a bag of dicks and drive away.”
“I never called him a bag of dicks,” I tell my sister. “That’s a good one though. I forgot about that one.”
I feel a hand wrap around my ponytail and gently tug, pulling my face up from where it was buried into my arms on top of the bar at SIG. I always love coming to visit Birdie, Tess, and Murphy at the golf course, especially when we get to hang out in the small bar in the clubhouse nestled in between the pro shop and the restaurant. It’s decorated in dark forest-green carpet and furniture, with rich cherry wood accents and a stone fireplace off to one side. It reminds me of a quiet, fancy study in an old mansion, where you can curl up with a book by the fire and enjoy the peace and quiet. Since it’s later in the season and there are less tourists on the island, the golf course only has a quarter of the number of usual customers. Right now, me, my sister, Tess, and Murphy are all crowded around the bar, and we’re the only ones in here, thank God. No one else needs to witness my breakdown.
“He crafted for you,” Birdie says softly when my eyes meet hers.
Sitting up the rest of the way on my barstool when she drops her hand from my hair, I look around at all the eyes staring at me in the same soft way.
“I still think someone needs to bust out his kneecaps. Preferably me,” Murphy mutters from where he’s standing at the end of the bar, arms crossed, with a scowl on his face.
Okay, so all eyes except for Murphy. With his receding white hairline and a little bit of a beer belly that is absolutely caused by beer, even with an angry look on his face, he still slides a bag of cookies down the shiny bar top toward me. Like the grandfather we never had, Murphy is more grumpy than grandfatherly, but he taught me and my sister a very valuable lesson when we were younger. If you suck it up, you eventually get cookies. We learned this lesson when Murphy made us cry by calling us “a bunch of little asswipes” when we were kids and kicked a ball over the fence into his yard, but he promised to give us cookies if we’d just suck it up and stop crying. So we did.
As I easily stop the bag of Pepperidge Farms Strawberry Thumbprint Cookies before they go sailing past me down the bar, I rip into the white bag, grab three cookies at once, and shove them into my mouth, sucking it up and refusing to cry. I did enough of that last night when I got home from work to a quiet house, since Owen was asleep, and found boxes and boxes of finished projects I agreed to do and hadn’t had time to accomplish yet. All of them perfect and looking like they were professionally done, neatly boxed and lined up in date order for when they’re needed.
“Did he sew red yarn into paper plates to make it look like baseball stitching?” Tess asks, zooming in on one of the many photos on my phone I took last night once I could see through the tears.
Shoving another cookie into my mouth, I nod, spraying cookie bits all over the place when I reply without even bothering to finish chewing or swallowing, because fuck manners right now.
“He did. Oh yes, he hand-stitched those. But scroll over three photos. He used my actual sewing machine to make pillowcases with baseballs on them for the giveaway baskets for the spaghetti dinner raffle.”
“You have a sewing machine?” Tess asks, looking up from my phone. “Do you know how to use it?”
“Of course I know how to use it. Murphy taught me.”
Tess’s head whips to Murphy, still standing at the end of the bar with a perma-scowl on his face.
“You know how to use a sewing machine?” Tess asks him.
“Who the fuck do you think hems my pants, the Tooth Fairy?” he fires back. “You women need to focus! I need to know if I should grab the baseball bat out of my golf cart I keep there for knee-breaking emergencies.”
Getting another cookie out of the bag, I shove it in my mouth with the other one I still haven’t finished chewing, spewing more cookie bits and words around the bar.
