I shove the doubt into a corner and ignore it.
“Now that you mention it, she did ask if you and Augusta were together. As a couple.”
I choke on my own spit, and through the resulting coughing fit, I ask, “What?”
“Yeah, I pretty much shot that idea down.”
“See,” I say, recovering. “That must be her angle. She plans on going on dates with all of us.”
“She mustn’t be a very good reporter if she doesn’t know I’m gay,” Harry says with a laugh, and my gut begins to unclench. He sounds more like himself. He’s not going to put his tinfoil hat back on. Granted, he threw away the ones he had when he first joined the club, but I know he could have one fashioned quicker than a clown making a balloon dog.
“Right?” I say, chuckling too. “Well, Augusta did give you a girlfriend in her book. Look, man. There’s no need to worry. Molly got her piece with you—now she’ll try to get sit-downs with a few other people and then move on.”
“Who else is she going to hound for a date? Your dad?” Harry asks in wonder.
“Not if I can help it,” I grumble, because I’m fairly certain he’ll go if she asks, if for no other reason than to be part of “the experience.” My father’s all about embracing life’s oddities these days. It started with his obsession with bad luck. He’s always bought into superstitions—avoiding black cats, not walking under ladders, that sort of thing—but it got way worse after Our Very Bad Year, as we call it. And it’s escalated from there. He’s all about living his truth now, and his truth has begun to encompass all things woo-woo, like collecting crystals and thanking trees for oxygen. Living in Asheville means all manner of woo-woo is merely a stone’s throw away.
“Huh,” Harry says. “Didn’t really seem like a date, but then again, I haven’t been out with a woman since my seven minutes in heaven with Nancy Taylor in seventh grade. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have answered all those questions about Augusta.” There’s a crackle over the line, and then Harry says in a gush, “Gotta go. This line has been compromised.” The call ends.
I stare at the phone. What questions had she asked about Augusta?
I try to rationalize it away. Any “reporter” writing a dating article about the book would naturally be interested in the woman who claims to have started it all, right? But the voice in the back of my head grows louder, shoving its way to the front.
She’s investigating the club, you fool. She basically told you that she doesn’t believe Augusta created the club on her own.
Only Molly doesn’t write those kinds of articles. Does she?
I spend the next half hour scouring more of her pieces, and it supports the conclusion my father and I reached at dinner. Molly is a blogger who writes about her wild escapades on dates. She picked up Augusta’s book and thought it would be a lark to go on dates with all of the men in the original club. That theory is supported by her attempt to go after Harry, one of the few men in our original group.
The best approach is to give her a little something, enough so she’ll move on to the next big dating trend. From the hour I’ve spent researching dating websites—an hour I can’t get back, thank you very much, Molly O’Shea—I’ve learned the meaning of words I never wanted to know. Endgame-ing. Folklore-ing. Sanitizing. Waldo-ing. It’s like there’s a whole different vocabulary to being single that no one ever thought to teach me. Before I can change my mind, I pick up my phone and send an email to her work account. I’m not sure why, but a smile stretches across my face as I work “stalking” into the subject line. And it doesn’t leave my face as I write my response:
I’ll meet with you. Tomorrow afternoon. You pick the place.
My hands are sweaty as I sit in my truck and stare at the entrance to the tea shop. I was lucky enough to find a parking space on the street, and here I’ve stayed for a good five minutes, unmoving.
Crank the engine and get the hell out of here.
That’s what I want to do, but it’s the chickenshit way out, even though I tell myself I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t invite Molly O’Shea into my life to start kicking over boxes to see what she can find. Dad’s right—taking the offensive is the best way to deal with her. The call I received from Harry last night only reinforced it.
But I’m still trying to figure out her angle. The serial dating thing fits the style of her website, certainly, but Harry’s right. If last night counted as a date with him and today is her date with me, who’s next? Surely, she doesn’t actually intend to go out with my father…
Plus, that little voice in the back of my head keeps saying I’m fooling myself, because it’s as clear as glass that she wants something more from me. Maybe she does want to write about dating members of the club, but that doesn’t mean she won’t dig up dirt while she does it. Her articles are full of outrageous stories, ones meant to make readers laugh at the subjects, not with them, and what’s more outrageous than the story of Augusta stealing credit for the Bad Luck Club? All Molly needs to do is make the insinuation, and more reporters will come. Serious ones.
I get a mental glimpse of Molly before she left the dog park, her eyes gleaming like she’d won something shiny. She seemed serious then. She seemed like exactly the kind of person who could dig deep. But she wrote those articles too, and I’m having trouble reconciling those two very different sides of the same woman.
I’m about to get out and head inside when my phone rings, and Willow’s name and face appear on the screen. I’m tempted to let it go to voicemail, but she usually texts unless it’s important. I push out a deep sigh and answer.
“What’s up, Willow?”
“I’m calling about Wendy Jenkins’s marble.”
Groaning, I prop my elbow on the door of the truck and rub my eyes. “What the hell is wrong now?”
“Now, before you freak out,” she says, “it’s actually good news.” Then, with a hint of attitude, she adds, “Come to think of it, I should have strung you along after you made me watch the Jenkins kids this morning.”
We let Wendy loose at the stone fabricator’s warehouse with over a million metric tons of stone slabs, and she insisted on personally examining at least fifty percent of them in search of another cherub that looked like her son. Willow was a little twitchy when we walked off, since Wendy left her with both of her kids. The baby seemed to be content to be perched against Willow’s chest, looking over her shoulder, but the three-year-old thought he was at the Little Gym, trying to scale some of the marble slabs and shouting, “Look at me, Mommy! I’m climbing a mountain!” while Willow trailed him with a nervous look and Wendy barely glanced at him and said, “Not now, Bean, Mommy’s busy.”
I’m still not sure if Bean is a nickname or his actual name, but I’m too scared to ask, despite Willow’s persistent attempts to bribe me to do it. Her last offer in the warehouse parking lot was to reorganize the office supply closet.
I reminded her that reorganizing the closet was part of her job description, and she gave me a glare so cold my balls shrunk for cover. “And childcare isn’t in that description, yet here we are.”