Page 13 of My Favorite Lost Cause
He glances from me back to her—a look that asks if he should tell the whole truth, to which I shrug. “I’d imagine so.”
This hasn’t diminished Maren’s enthusiasm for the house at all. Her eyes glow in the dim light. Everything that should send her screaming seems to have the opposite effect instead. Again, though...Harvey.
Elijah stays behind to finish examining the basement while Maren and I climb back up the ladder. When he rejoins us, he suggests, with a polite glance in Maren’s direction, that we stay put while he checks out the attic since he’s not sure how structurally sound it is.
“I don’t know if contractor porn is a thing,” she says with anappreciative purr once he’s out of earshot, “but if so, he could be making a lot more money doing something else.”
My teeth grind. “Maybe this would be a good time to remind you that you’re married.”
She laughs as she heads toward the covered back deck. “I’m married, not dead. I still have eyes.”
We sit side by side on the stairs, and she stretches her long legs in front of her. She has the smoothest skin I’ve ever seen, skin that begs you to glide a hand over it.
“I bet they had amazing parties here,” she says dreamily, looking over the grassy slope splayed out before us, which leads down to the water.
“Whohad amazing parties?”
“The family who lived here at the turn of the century,” she says. She didn’t know shit about this house until an hour ago. Now she’s the Oak Bluff historian, if historians are people who craft tales entirely from their own imaginations. “I bet they had amazing parties and played croquet on this lawn, and the kids ran around catching fireflies.” She smiles as if she’s watching it happen.
“Maren, you don’t even know that a family owned it. Maybe it was some crotchety old confederate widow who remained pissed off until death that the North won the war. Maybe it was the KKK meeting house. Maybe it was a brothel.”
She exhales heavily. “It wasn’t a brothel.”
“And you know thishow?”
She hitches a shoulder. “Pure economics. You said there are only six rooms upstairs. They’d need more rooms than that to cover the mortgage.”
I laugh unwillingly. “It’s funny the way you go from saying things like ‘some things matter more than money’ to providing an accurate ratio of overhead-to-income when it suits you.”
She ignores me, leaning back on her palms, staring at thewater with shining eyes. I think I finally know what Maren looks like when she’s in love. “I adore this house,” she whispers.
“I picked up on that.”
She sits upright and places her hand over mine. “Charlie…do you really feel nothing inside there? Nothing at all?”
I feel as if every asset I possess is about to be bled dry. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say it, but I hold back. Because this is Maren, who is a burst of springtime in the dead of winter and…she genuinely loves this house. She loves it in that same gentle, all-encompassing way she loves her mother and her sister and her dogs and perhaps even me, and though I can’t imagine caring deeply about any of those things, I like that she does.
But none of that changes the fact that I don’t need this place and don’t want to be here a moment longer than necessary.
“I don’t know, Maren. It’s hard to see past some stuff.”
“What stuff?”
My jaw shifts. I didn’t want to get into this, but Maren will find a way to force the issue, so I might as well. “That my mom was living like this,” I finally say. “Or more to the point, wasn’t living here at all, and I didn’t even fucking know. I should have come back to see her.”
She leans her head on my shoulder. A whole day of travel and her hair still smells like roses. “Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.” The words are so quiet they’re barely audible. “Life got busy. It wasn’t easy to get here, and she always offered to come up.” Those are shitty answers, but not nearly as shitty as the truth: that I didn’t come because I just didn’t care enough. My mother suffered about as much as anyone can suffer—she lost an eight-year-old she adored to cancer—and I couldn’t take a week out of my worthless life to visit.
Maren sighs. “I hesitate to say this, because it feels manipulative, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’d say it even if I hated the house: you feel guilty, I think, and you’re going to keep on feeling guilty if you don’t fix it up.”
“You’re right. That does seem manipulative.”
She laughs and nestles closer. “You know I’m right. If you forget about the time it’ll take and what it might cost, picture yourself back in New York after each outcome and tell me how you’ll feel.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep feeling like shit either way,” I argue. “Only significantly poorer in one of those scenarios. And what am I supposed to do with this grand Southern manor after it’s all fixed up? I’m never getting married. I’m never having kids. I’m sure as hell not going to vacation herealone. It’s just gonna sit vacant and decay all over again.”
“I’m not saying you can’t sell it eventually,” she replies. “But your mom wanted to see it shine again. You can do that much and decide the rest later.”
