Happy Place(27)

I busy myself with another package of blueberries. “Aha!” I spin back. “See that? Mold.”

“Every rose has its thorn,” Sabrina says, angling our cart back toward the front of the shop. “Just like every cowboy sings a sad, sad song.”

Another flash of memory: me, kneeling on the ground, atop the comforter Wyn’s dragged to the floor. Arms up, baby, he says gently. He peels the ruined white T-shirt over my head, runs a cool washcloth over my collarbones, collecting what’s left of my mess. I can barely keep my eyes open. Did you get me the shirt about the rodeos? The I’ve been to so many fucking rodeos shirt?

I got it, he says. Arms back up. I must not lift them high enough, because his rough palms catch the undersides of my biceps and ease them over my head. Then the butter-soft fabric is being tugged down around me, pooling against the tops of my thighs.

I love this shirt, I grumble.

I know, he says, sliding my hair out from under the collar. That’s why I brought it. Now go to sleep.

“Har?” Cleo jolts me out of the memory. “You actually are puce now.”

“That word.” I press my hand over my mouth and bolt for the bathroom.



* * *



? ? ?

THE INSTANT I step under the jangling bells and into Murder, She Read, I feel five hundred thousand times better.

Which is to say, I still feel like utter shit, but shit ensconced in books and sun-warmed windows. Shit with sugary iced latte flowing through its veins.

I’ve never finished a chapter on one of these trips, let alone a book, but I’ve always loved coming here, picking out my next read.

Wyn and Cleo split off for Nonfiction, and Kimmy darts to Romance. Parth heads for General Fiction, and Sabrina veers toward Horror. I alone head for the black coffin mounted to the wall, door ajar and waiting, Mysteries painted in gold letters at the top of the box.

I step through it to the room beyond, a space nearly as large as all other genres combined.

I’d never been a big reader until the summer before I started at Mattingly, when all my high school extracurriculars and AP summer work abruptly ended. My acceptance to (and funding for!) the school of my dreams was already assured, and I was bored for the first time in my life.

I found the dime-store mystery in Eloise’s old room, now the family office, when I went in to look for packing tape. I sat on the windowsill to read the first page and didn’t look up until I’d finished the book. Afterward, I went straight to the library for another. I probably read twenty cozy mysteries that summer.

I run my fingers along the paperback spines, each title featuring a worse pun than the last. As I pull one out, Cleo appears at my side. “I thought you’d read that one.”

“This?” I hold it up. “Maybe you’re thinking of Dying to Give. The one about the auctioneer murdered at the fundraiser. This one’s Dying to Sieve, about a baker who finds a body inside a bag of flour.”

“A whole body?” she says.

“It’s a really big bag,” I say. “Or a really small body, I’m not sure, but for a mere six dollars and ninety-nine cents, I could find out. Did you find something already?”

She holds up a dictionary-sized tome with a giant illustration of a mushroom on its pale green cover.

“Didn’t you already read that one?” I say.

Her mouth curls. “You’re thinking of Fabulous Fungi. This is Miraculous Mushrooms.”

“How silly of me,” I say.

She leans away from me to peer through the doorway to the rest of the store. “So what do you think about all this?”

“All what?”

“Sabrina and Parth,” she says. “Getting married. In like four days.”

“I guess when you know, you know.” I slide the book back onto the shelf and keep skimming.

“Yeah.” A moment later, she says, “I guess things have just felt a little off with her.”

“Really?” I haven’t noticed anything, but then again, I haven’t been exceptionally present the last few months. I’ve known that the next time we talked—really talked—I’d have to talk about the breakup.

“Maybe I’m reading into it too much,” Cleo says, swirling her raspberry iced tea. “But last month, she texts me out of the blue that she and Parth were going to come up for a visit. And I said yes, because she seemed set on it. Only later I realized we were way too swamped, so I asked to reschedule, and I’ve barely heard from her since then. When we got in yesterday, I tried to talk to her about it, but she brushed it off, and then today she seems mad about it again.”

My fingers stop, hooked over a spine: Murder in the Maternity Ward. “I think she’s just taking this cottage thing hard,” I say. “I don’t think it’s personal.”

Cleo screws up her mouth. “Maybe.” She lifts her braids off her shoulder, shaking them to fan her neck. There’s no airflow in here, and the humidity is dense. “I guess I’ll try to talk to her again tonight. I just wanted to see if you’d noticed anything . . . different with her.”

“Nope!” I say, probably a bit too chipper. “I think everything seems totally normal.”

Cleo’s head cocks. I’m fully expecting her to cry You and Wyn broke up, didn’t you? at any second. Instead, she tucks her arm through mine and rests her head on my shoulder. “I’m probably just tired,” she says. “I always worry more when I’m tired.”