Page 16 of Now to Forever

I shrug. “Smoke it. Flush it. Sell it on the street to a stoner in need. Either way, it’s not yours.”

She rolls her eyes—again—and starts toward her bike with a muttered, “Whatever.”

“What’s your name?”

“Wren,” she says, turning to look at me as she picks up her bike. “Yours?”

“Scotty.”

“That’s a boy’s name.”

“Better than a bird.”

She swings a combat boot–clad foot over the bike and positions herself on the seat and shrugs. “Not my fault.”

Wren takes off down the driveway, and I chuckle. Little weirdo isn’t wrong about that.

When she’s gone, I turn back to the house. A triangle in the woods, not making a lick of sense with its big front porch and wall of windows, a subtle reflection of the trees and water on the glass.

I close my eyes and take a deep inhale. It’s clean. Crisp. It’s still warm, hot even, but fall isn’t far away, confirmed by the slightest yellow tint on the tips of trees across the lake when I open my eyes. Even just one fall here would be more than I’d ever imagined for myself.

I’ll live here, renovate it, sell it, and get the hell out of this town. I said it to Ford last night in a moment of spontaneous verbal combustion—even when I texted June I wasn’t sure I actually meantit—but I see it all so clearly now: Everything I’ve felt these last months is because Ford waltzed back into town, reviving thoughts of what was and what-ifs. Even if I wasn’t leaving, houses like this belong to people with babies in bathtubs and families who sit on porches—things I’ll never have or want.

Molly barks, bringing my attention to her at my feet. “Fine,” I say, petting her on the head for the first time, surprised at how soft her fur is beneath my fingertips. “I’ll keep the house. For now.”

She barks—again—making me wince as she looks up at me with a doggish kind of smile.

“You chew my shoes and you’re fucking fish food.”

Five

“What’shappening,Scotty?”Dondiasks with a gap-toothed smile and a fist in my direction that I meet with my own.

Just shy of thirty, Dondi’s half Native American, half white with shaggy dark hair, a lanky build, and an oddly charming gap between his front teeth. He talks and moves with a kind of drawl that belongs on a surfboard in California more than driving dead bodies around the mountains of North Carolina, yet here he is.

I met him at a bar where he was wearing a ridiculous hibiscus-covered shirt and telling some friends he couldn’t find a job because he has a weak spot for weed and a rap sheet of petty crimes a mile long.“How do you feel about driving dead bodies around?”I asked, interrupting the conversation he was having. He looked at me, as if really pondering the question, then said thoughtfully,“The Dondinator would consider it an honor and privilege to chillax with those heading on towhat’s next.”

I looked at him, wondering what the hellThe Dondinatorwas, but something about him was oddly disarming. A sweetness of sorts. Like a three-legged dog.“I’ll give you a chance,”I said, his friends looking at me like I was a guardian angel with twelve heads.“But if you fuck it up, that’s it.”The next day, I convinced the town’s funeral home, Tranquil Departures, to partner with me to hire him. In the year and a half since he’s been here, he’s been amazing. Not only does he pick the bodies up in his beloved Ice Pop, he’s also gone through trainings so he can service the retort and the rest of the machines we use in the cremation process.

“Dondi,” I say, noticing his Hawaiian shirt is less wrinkled than usual and, due to the belt he’s wearing, the sag of his pants less severe. “You have a hot date or something?”

He drops into the wingback chair in the witnessing room, glancing at Wanda as she sashays in wearing fitted black pants, a low-cut red shirt, and hooker-blue eyeshadow. “The Dondinator is starting to realize life is a date, is it not?”

I pinch my lips at his ridiculous Dondinator, which I now know is his third person name for himself, but don’t miss the look him and Wanda exchange as she sits on the couch with a small smile.

“Noted,” I say. Then to Wanda, “Morning.”

She smiles, but it’s worried as her eyes bounce across my clothes—plain shirt, yoga pants, and rubber ankle boots I haven’t worn in years. “You sick or something, honey? That what this meeting’s about?”

“I got a house,” I tell them, matter-of-fact as I lean against the window. “And I’m going to live in it while I renovate it.” I ignore their shocked expressions. “Like one of those people on HGTV without the dumb drama of needing to take down a load-bearing wall.”

June’s request of me hosting Thanksgiving and the overall state of the house forced me to come up with a plan. She’s never once asked me to do something like this, and I couldn’t say no. For as long as we’ve been friends, I’ve been the forever single, basically orphaned third wheel. I owe her. I’ll renovate the house, host the godforsaken feast, and then list it. I immediately emailed a realtor who responded with a list of comp properties and the speculation that with its location on the lake—and if fully updated per the list of items he included—it could net nearly a million dollars. I almost fell over. I could repay Lydia for the house, pay off the crematorium and sell it, and have plenty left to start over somewhere else. Even the massive to-renovate list he sent didn’t seem so scary in the scheme of the freedom it would give me.

I clear my throat.

“Wanda, you still need somewhere to live?”

She nods, seemingly stunned into silence.

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