“Natch.”
“And oh—don’t forget that Jan Pennington needs to know what your raffle entry is by the end of the week. She just called to remind me.”
Eden sighed. “I think of nothing else.”
Casey laughed, and a few seconds later jingled on out, the delighted bearer of a tall arrangement featuring blue thistles and calla lilies and a big waterfall spray of greenery, like something a Martian would set the table with on Martian Thanksgiving.
Eden turned to her sister. “What did I ever do to you?”
“Well, for one, you told me to name my Barbie ‘Toilette’ when I was eight because, and I quote, ‘it was a pretty French word.’”
Eden slowly smiled. “Thatwasone of my better ones.”
Toilette had been passed on to Annelise (who rechristened her “Winter”) along with all the other off-brand Barbie-esque dolls she and Avalon had played with when they were kids (their parents had four kids and they weren’t rich), including the one she and Avalon called Scrotal Ken. Their brother Jude, a stickler for accuracy even at the age of ten, had taken umbrage at the smooth area between Ken’s legs and had drawn, in ink, an anatomically detailed penis and scrotum. He’d drawn a heart on him, too, complete with valves, and had just begun drawing a pancreas when her mom bolted into the room in response to Eden’s outraged shrieking and put a stop to it.
Eden had forgotten about Scrotal Ken until her mom excavated him from the attic and passed him on to Annelise. He was wearing pants when that happened. When Annelise inevitably decided to put different clothes on him, Eden used his confusing body art as a teaching moment: boys had different privates than girls, and that a penis on the Ken doll wasn’t dirty or bad or anything to get worked up about... but that her Ken doll probably ought to keep his pants on in mixed company (a good rule of thumb in life, in general), and private parts were private. And so forth.
“So what are you going to do about him?” Avalon said.
“Who?”
“You know exactly who I mean.”
Eden felt a twinge, breathless, delicious and scary, when she thought about “him.” An ancient sensation. She’d have to go back to her teenage years for the last time she’d feltthatsort of thing.
“Oh, nothing. I’m too busy for anything like that. I hardly ever see him anyway, and then only in passing. Forget everything I just said. I was just... I guess I was just making conversation just now.”
Eden let the wordanywayslip out on a yawn, just for that extra frisson of faux nonchalance.
She resumed sorting and filing the day’s flower orders and idly reviewed the little messages that went with them—“Happy Birthday,” “I’m sorry,” “Congratulations on the promotion!” with great satisfaction. She loved being part of everyone’s happy occasions as much as she loved prospering. She paused when she came to one that said simply,“You. Me. Forever.”
Normally those words would have slipped right past her awareness like so much scenery on the highway, nothing more than part of the bookkeeping that kept the shop running. This time they snagged in a teeny little pothole.
A pothole lasered there, if she had to hazard a guess, by the charm of Gabe Caldera.
Forever. She didn’t use that word much. Days, even weeks seemed to go by in a seeming eyeblink, and if the notion of a husband so much as flitted into her mind, it met the same fate as any flies that managed to find their way into the Misty Cat Tavern, slaughtered by the fan blades of her schedule. Her life had a sort of ceaseless momentum. They were good, she and Leesy.
And sleeping with a guy like Annelise’s father was meant to be like skydiving or walking around topless at Burning Man—something one did once, for the experience, a memory to sock away and whip out when she wanted to shock her grandchildren. He’d been gentle but intense, intelligent enough to startle even her brainiac self a couple of times, and full of the misty philosophical bullshit that had passed for wisdom back in college and had once been her catnip, and which she now viewed with great suspicion. They’d spent about three hours in soulful conversation and one hour boinking.
He was long gone by the time that pink plus sign showed up on the stick. And she did, out of a sense of moral obligation, try to get word to him. But she’d never heard back.
Which was actually more than fine with her. Because instead of turning her life into a shambles, that pink plus sign was shockingly sobering. And she realized instantly that while he might not be the last person on earth she’d choose to father any of her children, he certainly wasn’t anywhere near the first, either. And as time went on and the more real Annelise became to her, the less real he became.
Until it was often easy to forget he’d ever existed at all.
Turning up suddenly pregnant was uproar enough in her family and the town at large, without telling anyone who the father was. She’d never regretted her decision to keep it a secret. Her priority was Leesy’s happiness, and part of that was making sure she grew up in peace and safety.
She’d explained the dad thing this way to Annelise when she was six: “Leesy, you know how there are lots of different kinds of flowers in the shop? And some flowers have a lot of petals, and other flowers have just a few, and some are just kind of floppy, like poppies, but they’re all pretty and they’re all exactly perfect in their own way? That’s how families are. Some have dads, some don’t. Some families have one dad, some have two dads—you know, like Matt and Darius at Canyon Collectibles? Some don’t have a dad, but they have cousins and uncles and things. Families are made up of different parts, but no kind of family is better than another kind.”
“So a family is like a bouquet?”
“Yes. That’s exactly right.”
“And sometimes you can all of a sudden add a new flower to your bouquet, like Rosemary at the Angel’s Nest, when the foster girl lived with her.”
When Annelise said things like this—blindsiding in their depth and sweetness and innocent soulfulness—Eden’s reflex was to turn to someone and say,Do you see how freaking cool she is?Fresh deliveries of love and awe arrived pretty much daily in nearly unsustainable quantities. It seemed as though someone else ought to bear witness to the wondrous evolution of Annelise Harwood, to be a mutual memory archivist.
“Boys must be the stinkiest flowers,” Annelise had added thoughtfully. “They’re... collieflowers!”