Maisie usually video calls in the evening for her “puppy-slash-sister fix.” I put up a token objection to being listed last, but let’s face it, my sister is a crazy dog lady, and I am here for it. But now that I’ve decided to break the news to her, I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin, or panic and, I don’t know, sell the house on eBay, if I don’t just suck it up and do it. So I do.
“What happened?” she asks when she picks up, her cheeks a bright red that says there isn’t enough sunscreen on Earth to keep me from burning at the beach. “Did Ein bite someone? Did he have an episode?”
I pan the phone over to him snuggled up toastily at my feet, and he wags his tail at the sound of her voice.
She does some relieved cooing that draws Chaco over from where she was chewing on one of Maisie’s shoes. Oops. I keep that out of the shot.
Jack pops into view behind Maisie, distinctly tanned and not burned.
“What gives, Jack? Didn’t you slather the future mother of your children with sunscreen? You had one job…”
He grins. “You know that’s a hopeless task.”
I shrug. “That’s what you get for marrying a vampire.”
“Hey,” Maisie grumps, giving him a little shove that’s less go away and more I’m going to babymoon you some more as soon as Molly hangs up. It’s like Tina said—kind of gross, kind of cute.
“It’s a little early,” Maisie says, turning back to me. “Is everything okay?”
And just like that, I flash back to being a teenager again, cycling between sobbing and silence, Mary and Maisie exchanging looks as if silently asking each other what the hell they were going to do with me. Because they didn’t know how to be parents any more than I knew how to be a child.
That was something I’d lost that day.
But I choke the memories down like bad medicine.
Well, might as well get to the point.
“That depends on whether you’re okay with me asking your friend Blue questions about that super-secret club she refused to tell me about way back when.”
Maisie smiles smugly at the camera, and for a second I’m thrown. Jack squeezes her shoulder and walks off to, I don’t know, get a coconut drink or something.
“Wait,” I say slowly, enunciating every word, “you left that book out on purpose?”
She shrugs. “I figured you’d get bored if you stayed at the house for three weeks with nothing to do.”
This is so fantastic, I laugh out loud, and Ein grunts before shifting his position—his doggy way of telling me to shut it and be a better pillow.
“You know me too well.”
“I do,” she says, then scrunches her nose. “Besides, something about that book is off. Blue was really pissed about it, and it takes a lot to get her pissed. She didn’t explain, but…”
Now, I’m the one to give her a smug grin. “But you kind of sort of hoped your baby sister would root out the story for you.”
She lifts a shoulder and tips her head in an admission of guilt. “What can I say? You’re not the only one who likes gossip. So when did you find the book? Jack and I had a little bet running.”
“He’s in on this too?” I squawk.
He comes back on the screen. “Guilty.”
“It was maybe five minutes,” I say.
Maisie grins at him. “You know what that means.”
Something tells me the terms of their bet involve more “babymooning”—or whatever kind of sex a heavily pregnant person can manage. I’ll have to ask her about it later; Jack is easily embarrassed.
Jack wanders off again, and Maisie turns back to me. “Do you think Constance will actually let you write about the Bad Luck Club? I know she’s ixnayed, like, every remotely interesting story you’ve wanted to write.”
I could prevaricate, but I don’t see much of a point.
“We had an…ahem…parting of the ways.”
“You quit?” Maisie asks, sounding way too excited about my sudden unemployment. Then again, she’s not Mary. She’s not going to harp on about COBRA and the unlikelihood of finding another steady writing gig in this economy.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t going to have a party about it. Besides, I was technically fired. Unemployment! Yay, me.”
Her eyes widen. “She fired you? What did you do to make that happen?”
“It’s a long story. Anyway, it looks like Augusta Glower is totally full of shit. I’m pretty sure I have a lead on who really started the club, and if I can break his story, I think I’ll be able to get a job at Rogue Word. The editor is interested.”
Very interested, in fact. She emailed me just this morning to ask about my progress. I sent a few tantalizing remarks about my meeting with Harry and let the bait dangle.
Maisie whistles. “That would be a sweet gig for you.” Her mouth twists to the side. “But aren’t their offices in LA?”
“I guess I’ll be moving to Tinseltown if it goes through.”
“Seriously, Molly? No one calls it that anymore.”
But our mom used to, and it stuck.
She pulls a face. “You know, I kind of hoped you’d come home if you ever left your job.”
Home. It’s on the edge of my tongue to tell her that Asheville isn’t home for me anymore—that it hasn’t been home for a long time—but suddenly I get a glimpse of what that might look like. Me living near Maisie, seeing my niece on the daily. Writing freelance, or maybe for my own blog. Hanging with Tina.
And I get a glimpse of Cal. It makes no sense to envision him as part of my future, and yet I don’t hate the thought. I want to unfurl him as if he were a spool of thread, and not just because I want to write about the club. For a moment, I feel the urge to tell Maisie about him, but I stall. When it comes to him, I am at an uncharacteristic loss for words.
So I make a noncommittal grunt and say, “Don’t tell Mary yet, okay? I’ll do it. I guess she’s coming to see me this weekend with Aidan.” I pause, remembering the weird texts, then say, “I get the sense something is up.”
“Huh,” Maisie says. “She hasn’t said anything specific, but I kind of get that sister sense too. I was thinking she might be having trouble with Aidan’s summer school.”
Our nephew is on the spectrum. He’s smart—like, the kind of smart where he once, at the age of four and a half, created a whole Lego recycling center in the basement of their house, with very specific rules about where everything went and what it was turned into—but school isn’t easy for him. It’s the onslaught of so many bodies, so much noise, so much disorder that gives him trouble. He gets up out of his seat. He makes noises to help offset what he’s hearing. He interrupts the class. He ignores instructions.
His current teacher is kind of a bitch about it, even though she knows. Luckily, it’s only summer school, and he’ll hopefully have someone nicer in the fall.
“Well, shit, I hope not. Anyway, it’ll be good to see them other than the inevitable hard time she’ll give me.”
She nods. “Keep me posted.” Another look. “It’s okay to lean on other people, Moll. It won’t make you weak if you text one of my friends back to hang out.”