Page 16 of You've Got Hate Mail
And here I go again, getting wet in the eyeballs.
“Want a tour?” Mabel nods to the table and the glass baking dish still half-full of cinnamon rolls. “Grab a treat. I’ll make coffee and show you around.”
I barely know Ginny. I don’t know Mabel or Aunt Pip at all.
But I suddenly want to stay here forever.
Clearly, I can’t. I have my life to get back to when I’m ready. In a week or so.
Maybe a month.
But for today—for today, evenwiththe shower incident, I want to stay forever.
4
THE PLUMBING STRIKES BACK
Heath
I’m drippingwet and in desperate need of a place to go scream for an hour, but I’m doing the adult thing instead and tracking Mabel down.
Doesn’t take long to locate her drawing in her sketchpad on the front porch of the Makepeace Cellars compound’s main house, an ornate Victorian mansion that sits in the west corner of the property just outside the little town of Foxwood in Sonoma Valley. The house faces the fields of grapevines on thirty acres of gently rolling hills. Lav and I can see it from the porch of our stone cottage near the old fermentation building.
I can see it a little less well today, courtesy of my swollen eye.
Our newest resident got me good.
Mabel doesn’t immediately glance up at me, but she does acknowledge me. “How’s the eye?”
“Better than the plumbing in the mother-in-law house.”
That gets her attention. “You have bad—oh, shit. You’re soaked. Do you need a towel?”
I shake my head.
Weather’s nice today.
Me being wet is actually the least bad thing about today.
She flips her sketchbook shut and sets it aside, eyes the glass of red wine on the half barrel that serves as an end table out here, and then looks back at me with a wince. “What happened and how bad is it?”
I’d love to sit in the wicker chair next to her, but in the interest of not getting the cushion soaking wet, I stand in front of her, where I have a view of my daughter bent over the coffee table in the sitting room inside. “Good news first. Got the new toilet and shut-off valve installed. Shower curtain rod fixed too.”
“And the bad news?”
I glance back at the vineyard and beyond, to the rolling green hills heading up into the mountains separating us from Napa, not wanting to look at her. Don’t want to look at the mother-in-law quarters that sits across from the overgrown and untended gardens either, but that’s unfortunately where my gaze goes next.
Fuck, my eye hurts. I’m overdue for painkillers. “When I turned the water back on, the kitchen pipes exploded.”
“Shit shit shit,” she whispers. “Is this something you can fix?”
“CanI? Probably.”
“I hate when you say it like that.”
She’s not alone. This is the part of our arrangement I dislike the most—the part where I have to tell her that fixing one thing revealed something larger that needs to be repaired.
Makes me feel like I’m breaking more than I’m fixing.
