Page 6 of A Class of Her Own

His dark eyes flashed over his shoulder briefly before turning back to his work. “Mosaic,” he stated. “Found some glass bottles at the thrift store. I came home and shattered them into pieces.”

I couldn’t help but notice that his voice wasn’t scratchy from disuse tonight, and I was relieved at the proof that he’d interacted with other humans today. Dad was the type of artist who went on a deep dive with every new creation. Sometimes he disappeared for days at a time. I had a few wispy memories of him spending time with us, but most of my memories involved me hunting him down before I became old enough to accept he didn’t always remember we existed.

“Willow made beef stew for dinner,” he continued, using his head to point toward a plastic container on the counter. “I don’t eat beef.”

Yeah. This week. Last week he’d been on a keto diet kick and got annoyed when I brought grilled cheese sandwiches. The carbs were out to kill him.

“Quite the storm,” I commented, heading to the corner, where I knew I’d find the snow shovel. “Thought I’d get your walkways cleared.”

“Thanks, Evergreen,” he said absently.

I stiffened at the detested name but didn’t bother to correct him. I hated my given name with unreasonable passion. Can you imagine naming a child Evergreen Atwood? Just because my father had changed his name to Forest in his twenties, ‘in order to better align with his personal views while still honoring his surname,’ didn’t mean he had to give tree names to his three daughters. Willow and our youngest sister, Ash, had at least gotten monikers they could live with. Evergreen? It wasn’t even a specific tree—it was a broad classification. He said it was because him and my mom thought I could use the inspiration of the evergreen and its ability to survive year-round.

Why they’d looked at a newborn and thought she’d need a fighting name was a sick kind of foreboding, but they’d gotten that one thing right. I was a survivor. However, when I’d gone to public school for the first time and realized precisely how strange that name was—and we’re not talking quirky strange—I’d quickly switched to my middle name, Meredith, and never looked back. When Mom had passed during that first schoolyear, I’d said a permanent goodbye to Evergreen. That girl had ceased to exist. Heck, my best friends didn’t even know Meredith wasn’t my first name. Dad, however, during unfocused times, would still slip up and use the old name. It gave me the shivers every time, as though he was still talking to that little five-year-old girl. I often thought time had frozen for him the minute Mom had died.

My father was the last person anyone would have pegged as the marrying type. He’d lived a nomadic and artistic lifestyle until somehow my practical and beautiful mother, Judith, had caught him in his late thirties. Together they’d settled down and had three girls. After she was gone his anchor was too, and now he was a solitary old man, in his late seventies, with dwindling attachments to the world.

I dragged the shovel around to the house and began the work of digging out the back steps and walkways that would never be used. Dad didn’t host guests. The only people he spoke to were cashiers at the store, unless he was in a grunting mood that day, and our family members. His only walking path was from the house to the shed or to his truck. But I shoveled until my shoulders ached and my lower back screamed because I was not interested in having to nurse him through an injury caused by icy, snow-covered paths.

I caught a glimpse of his mosaic cat as I returned the shovel to the shed and had to admit it was beautiful. Oranges and yellows, with bright green eyes and slivers of whiskers. If he decided to put it up for sale, I had no doubt it would make him some money. Money he’d never cared about.

“I’m done,” I said as I spun to head back down the gravel driveway to my car. I didn’t bother to shovel that, because, seriously, shoveling gravel would be a wasted effort and Dad’s truck could plow down it in the same tracks Willow had created and I’d used. “I’ll see you next week for Thanksgiving.”

“What?” he actually turned to face me.

I stopped and looked back at him. “Thanksgiving. Next week. Ash is bringing her boyfriend home to meet us.” Heaven help the man. “We’re eating at my place.”

His large, bushy white brows sunk into his weathered face. “I don’t want to eat at your house.”

I put my hands on my hips, ignoring the soreness in my arms. “I know that. But my house has a little more room, and I thought since we have another guest this year . . .”

He was shaking his head before I finished. “The Atwoods always have Thanksgiving at the family home.”

What family home?I thought, shooting the sagging building a glare. But I only nodded at my dad. “Okay. I’ll talk to the girls.”

“Good.”

And with that, we turned our backs on each other and walked in separate directions.

When I arrived home it was to find Brooks VanOrman standing on my porch. My mood was shot, my back was in agony, and just . . . no. I pushed the button to open my garage door and parked my car. When I got out, he was standing in the open doorway of the garage, watching me from underneath a dark beanie pulled low over his eyes. Between that and his beard, it looked like his face was a small strip of flesh with two dark eyes peeking out.

“You look like a murderer,” I said flatly. “Come to gloat?”

“Gloat?” he asked.

“The blow-up turkey is dead, thanks to this storm, and I shoveled my own driveway.” I slammed my car door and cocked my head. “I can applaud your resourcefulness. Rather than ticketing me for the turkey, you somehow made sure the snow removal company skipped me. Nice.”

He shook his head. “Actually, I didn’t ticket you for the bird because Hazel said she was hoping to run a social media campaign about it and thought it would increase the attractiveness of our community to potential homeowners. Something about making us look fun.”

I blinked. “Hazel runs social media campaigns?” Some of my bluster washed out, and my tired mind went down that rabbit hole for a second.

“I haven’t actually looked at it.”

“Afraid you’d end up having to ticket your own ticket master?” I asked, my mouth quirking.

“Something like that. Listen, I came to check in, actually. Leland told me your drive wasn’t shoveled, so I called the snow removal company. Turns out their machines ran out of gas, and they didn’t get the last few houses.”

“Hmmm. That excuse would make sense to me if I wasn’t the only house on this block who was missed. You’d think it would have been a few houses in a row.”

---