Goodbye Earl(33)

“After I left Caro’s this morning, I got to hang with Rosemarie’s dog, Basie, at her place with my second cup of coffee.”

“Kasey and Basie. Cute.”

“I know, right? I’ll send you a pic of her. She’s so adorable it almost makes me want to get a puppy. Almost,” Kasey said.

“Let’s get a puppy the day we get back from our honeymoon. Seriously.”

“Deal.” The wedding was a year away; getting a dog then sounded lovely.

Kasey stopped the car at the end of the driveway. She didn’t want to be on the phone when she drove the last quarter mile up to the house.

“I love you, Kase. FaceTime later and let me know how everything goes?” Devon said.

Yesterday morning they’d FaceTimed. She told him a lot of things, but nothing about Silas. Before she’d left the city, Devon had asked if there was an ex-boyfriend in Goldie he should be worried about. He’d said it tongue in cheek because Devon wasn’t a jealous man. He was confident and coolheaded and he’d proven he could handle her and her emotions, even the sloppiest ones.

So why wasn’t she telling him about Silas?

Was there anything to tell?

She could tell Devon she felt like she had the stomach flu when Silas said hey to her. That she felt like she had a high fever when he picked her up and hugged her. That the room tilted when they were at Duke’s later that night and Silas handed her a fizzy Bellini because when they were in high school, she’d told him when she was grown-up, she wanted to be the kind of woman who drank Bellinis with her girlfriends and wore expensive heels and lived in New York. That her mouth dried out when he said goodbye to her at the end of the night. How he’d said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Fritz? Promise you won’t disappear? I couldn’t handle it. I thought I was going to die last time. I’m serious. I thought I’d legit die of a broken heart when you left. I thought I did something wrong or that I hurt you somehow, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t eat for, like, a month.” He was confessing because he was drunk at that point and so was she. He’d told her some of those things in a few emails they sent back and forth fifteen years ago after she left. He said some of it on the phone the handful of times they’d talked. But then Kasey stopped writing; Kasey stopped answering the phone. She forced herself to stop thinking about Goldie and him too.

They both moved on.

“Yes. I will. I love you too,” she said to Devon, careful not to let her voice crack.

“Promise you’ll let me know immediately if you need me? I’ll hop on a plane so fast—”

“I promise, Devon. Thank you.”



Kasey had been working with a Realtor friend of Holly Plum’s for the past year to rent the farmhouse out from time to time. As her car’s tires rolled over the gravel of the driveway, she imagined a family renting it in July—grilling hamburgers and corn, filling an inflatable pool with cool water for their kids. She pictured little ones catching lightning bugs in mason jars and their parents drinking sweet tea on the porch. Maybe they’d bring their boat or a pair of Jet Skis, or big black rubber tubes for floating away on lazy days.

Her daddy had been smart enough to set the house catty-corner on the land so it caught the best light, and if she squinted, she could see the Castelow lake house and acreage sprawling through the trees on the other side of the water. Her mom could’ve made good money if she’d sold the farmhouse, and she could’ve worked less, but she said she’d never sell it. The house meant so much to them because it felt like the thump of her daddy’s heart was still knocking inside of it.

He’d made that house and he’d loved that house, so no, Kasey wasn’t going to sell it now that it was hers. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it. For as adult as she’d felt for practically her entire life, and for as long as she’d been living on her own and taking care of herself, being responsible for a whole-ass house felt a smidge too grown-up for her liking. She found herself more angry than sad as she pulled up and turned the car off, yanked the emergency brake.



Her mother’s great-uncle didn’t have any children of his own and left her mom that land when he died. Her family disapproved of her relationship with a black man, Kasey’s daddy. Practically the whole family disowned her, so she moved two hundred miles away to Goldie, where her great-uncle was kind and welcoming and not a racist. He loved Angie a whole lot and left her forty thousand dollars too—all the money he had saved up—to help them get started on the farmhouse.



Angie’s favorite rocking chair was sitting on the front porch right next to the door. Kasey didn’t linger too long out there. It was time to get inside and get this over with. She hadn’t put the farmhouse key on her key ring, because even that was too intimate, too much. She went in her pocket for the envelope it was in and pulled it out. When she turned the key in the hole, it made the same soft click she’d heard her whole life.



The threshold was a time machine—a portal to the fuzzy, haunted beyond.



In the corner of the living room: where Roy hollered at her for leaving her backpack on the couch.

In her old bedroom: where she slept with the TV on so she wouldn’t have to hear her mom and Roy arguing. It was where she could have a semblance of peace, especially if she told Roy she was on her period and wanted to be left alone. It was even better when her cycle aligned with her mom’s. Roy would leave the house entirely, sometimes for the whole week. Sometimes Kasey would lie, say she was bleeding when she wasn’t, so they could get a break.