Page 52 of You've Got Hate Mail
“I want powdered sugar,” Lavender says. She’s already sitting at the head of the table, up on her knees, leaning toward the nearest pan.
“Hot, remember,” Elizabeth says to her.
Lav makes a face. “I’m a dragon slayer. I can handle hot.”
“Easier to eat when you’re not hurt though,” Mabel says.
“Dig in before it falls,” Samantha says. “Bacon and sausage are coming in a minute.”
And that’s that.
I’m here.
No one hates me.
I’m probably not even the first person to make a mess in the kitchen.
And speaking of messes?—
I glance at Mabel, who’s seated across from me as we start on breakfast. “Can I—is it okay if I mess around in the garden later?”
“The flower garden between here and the mother-in-law house?”
I nod, and I don’t verbally vomit out that I did a segment on gardening once, and how much I’ve been thinking the past couple days that I want to touch the earth again.
I remember feeling so grounded.
“Do whatever you’d like,” she tells me. “No one’s touched it in a decade.”
“Who’re you calling a sexcapade?” Aunt Pip asks her.
“You, Aunt Pip. You’re a sexcapade,” Mabel replies.
Maybe tomorrow, I’ll hang out with these women again.
And maybe tomorrow, every lighthearted moment won’t make me want to cry in gratitude that I can be here for now.
But for today—well, today, I think I’ll let my eyeballs leak in happiness.
It’s a nice change.
For now.
10
CRICKET POPPINS
Heath
Friday,one week after finding Cricket in the shower in the mother-in-law house, which is something I shouldn’t still be thinking about, I get home after a morning spent staining a deck for a client in town to find Lavender and Cricket huddled next to the rotting latticework beneath the main house’s sunporch.
“They can’t see us here,” Lav’s saying to Cricket, who can’t see me, because she’s facing the other way.
“Are you sure?” Cricket replies. She’s also looking the other way, but as she starts to look at Lav, her head jerks toward me instead, like she noticed me in her peripheral vision.
We make eye contact, and her face goes a mottled red.
“They can’t see us, Cricket,” Lav says. “We should attacknow!”
