Page 50 of Your Every Wish
“Stay,” he tells them, and they do.
From upstairs comes the high-pitched whine of a vacuum cleaner. Bent walks me outside.
“Thanks again,” I say.
“You know the way, right?” He points across his field in the direction of the trailer park as if I’m so dimwitted I can’t retrace my own steps, and hides a grin. “Oh, and Kennedy . . . it is Kennedy, right? That wasn’t twenty million I was offering. It was twenty thousand. A hell of a deal, given how much it’ll take to bulldoze the place. I’ll make it all cash, thirty-day closing, no contingencies. Talk it over with your sister and let me know.”
I can still hear him laughing when I get to the stone wall.
Emma
“Did you get it?” I call through the front door, ready to bolt at any minute.
“Not yet. He’s a sly little fellow.”
“Okay. Just tell me when the coast is clear.”
“Will do.”
When I got home from the bank there was a lizard in the pantry. And while I’m not proud of this, I jumped up on the table and screamed bloody murder like one of those characters in a cartoon show. Luckily, Liam happened to be passing by, heard me, and came to the rescue.
I’m not afraid of much, but lizards give me the creeps. My mom, too. When I was little, we went to Southern California to visit my aunt just outside of Palm Springs and they were everywhere, even in the house, sunning on the windowsills. We had to cut our trip short when my mother found one in the shower. I would diagnose her as having herpetophobia, a fear of reptiles. I hate them but I wouldn’t call my discomfort a phobia. Just an intense disgust.
“Got it,” Liam calls from the kitchen.
“Don’t kill it, just let it go, but far away from the house.”
“I’m coming out,” he warns, and I run for cover and duck behind Kennedy’s car.
“All done,” he says a few seconds later. “It’s safe to come out.”
I come around the car to find him holding a broom pan, which I didn’t know I owned. I’ve been using the cordless vacuum to clean the floors.
I throw my arms around him and give him a great big hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
He chuckles and hugs me back and for a second we stand together, embracing. He’s warm and smells deliciously of coffee and laundry detergent. Then, awkwardly, I pull away, remembering myself.
“They’re everywhere, you know?” he says.
“Yep. Not much I can do about ’em except get used to them.” Fat chance of that but what else can I do?
“You want coffee or hot apple cider?” There was a big display at the grocery store next to the bank and I thought to myself, why not? It’s autumn and hot apple cider on a cold day seems so festive. And something I’d never drink in San Francisco. I was in the process of putting it away when I spotted the lizard.
“Cider sounds good.”
We take the party into the kitchen, where I pour the cider into a small pot to heat on the stovetop.
“Do you know who lived here before we moved in?” Whoever it was must’ve left in a hurry because the place was fully stocked when Kennedy and I moved in.
“Ginger Croft. She was the property manager, at least in title?” When I give him a quizzical look, he says, “She didn’t do a whole lot around here, mostly drove around in a golf cart, yelling at people to pull their trash cans in after garbage pickup. No one liked her after she told Ralph Perez that his grandkids couldn’t visit anymore because they’d splashed her in the pool.”
“People swim in that?”
“It wasn’t as bad then as it is now. Giddy Carmichael used to keep up the pool chemicals, even paid for the chlorine himself. But he moved away seven months ago, and no one has taken over the chore since.”
I’ll take it over. By summer the water will be crystal clear. I’ve heard that temperatures here can reach 100 degrees and am looking forward to having a swimming pool to jump into when those days come.
“What happened to Ginger?” I ask.
