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“And when we lose it, all we want is to get it back. It doesn’t matter how or why or if it’s even right, if the magic’s long-gone. We hunger for that first miracle, that first unfolding.” Her eyes land on me. “Even if it’s not right.”
I drink the rest of my drink, thinking. I hardly noticed, but at some point, Ky stepped closer to me.
I understand now.
Who she reminds me of, and why.
It’s her, of course it’s her.
Wynona.
I came here to appease her, to spite her, to escape her, and here she is already.
It’s easy to see how tonight will go ... if I let it. How the drinks will ease the tightness of her absence. How she hasn’t returned my texts or calls. How, maybe, they’ll let another in, just to fill the space for a while.
I put my empty glass down on the table with the laughing others. “I have to go.”
“Want company?” Ky says, already following me to the door.
“No,” I say.
Although that isn’t true.
I don’t tell her, I want company, but not you.
I walk outside.
Just in time. The rain’s decided a second, cooler act is in order.
God only knows what I think about that. I never did get my head around it, though.
How I can stand one week that already feels like four months.
Without her.
Chapter 25
Wynona
The wisteria grows.
Purple pods propagate across the arm, joining freckles like a connect-the-dots that finally makes sense after all these years.
“Wisteria is poisonous,” she said an hour or so ago, Jessica, when I asked her what made her choose it.
Roses, I’ve done so many I’ve lost count. A good number of sunflowers, lilies, jasmine, enough lotus and Buddhas to make me secretly itch to give the jolly fat guy a toupee or something totally wrong, like bunny ears, whenever I’m asked to tattoo another.
“Beautiful, but poisonous,” Jessica said with a smile that didn’t even reach her lips. One that I recognized all too well.
“It’s to remember,” she said.
“His name was Wyatt,” she said.
And, as I add one purple poisonous pod after another to the bunch, it makes me wonder.
If one day I’ll need my own tattooed reminder of what mistake to never make again.
If it even is.
It’s been a month now. A month of questioning, of trying not to check on the tour’s progress online, yet checking all the same.
When I go to take a break, Josie’s sitting on the picnic bench behind my place, doodling with a big sun hat and a private smile. She snaps her book shut.
As she holds something out to me, I realize what yumminess I was smelling—chocolate croissants.
“Are you writing your pornos again?” I tease her, shaking my head.
Josie had this period, a few years back, when she’d never go anywhere without her fuzzy purple notebook. What she scrawled in it, she’d never say. Her ‘pornos’ was what we called it, alluding to who-knew-what. She never showed me.
Now, she’s wearing a bright green dress covered with pink lollipops, eyeing me.
“What?” I say.
“Just... If I tell you something, do you promise not to get mad?”
“Nope,” I say.
She sighs.
I sigh right on back, slinging myself down on the picnic bench. “How can I promise when I don’t know what it is?”
“You and your logic,” Josie says, taking a perturbed bite of her croissant, her bright red and yellow striped nails flashing in the noontime sun.
“All right, all right,” she says a minute or so later, flipping open the notebook.
I glance and... stare.
“You did these?” I say.
“Yes, my pornos,” Josie says with a giggle.
Only they aren’t. They’re people, men, women, kids, the odd dog—drawings of them. And they’re good, really good.
“You draw,” I say.
I’m not sure I’d be much more surprised if I saw Josie stealing a car. Drawing and Josie just don’t go together. Like dogs and catnip. Or so I thought.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I just... that was always your thing. I didn’t want to take that away from you.”
I smile at her a bit sadly. “I haven’t always been the easiest person to be sisters with, have I?”
She’s got her own sad one. “No. But it’s okay.”
And then we’re hugging, and she’s saying, “I didn’t come here to tell you that.”
I pull away, my glance saying it. Then what did you come here to tell me?
She swallows the last of the croissant. “I can tattoo, too.”
I eye her. “Jesus. Who are you and what have you done with Josie?”
“All I wanted to say is that... the other night, a few weeks ago, it got me thinking. If you want to go after him, you can.”
“Josie.”
She holds up a finger. “Let me finish. I’ve been thinking about this a while. How you don’t get too many second chances, if you get them at all. I’ve been tattooing on the side, here and there, for close to three years now. It’s just a fun hobby. I’m not nearly as good as you, but I think I could pick up the business, at least for a while. Enough for you to go visit him, maybe even stay. A few weeks, a few months, half a year—”
