Page 19 of My Favorite Lost Cause
I don’t actually think wewillfigure it out, but something about Maren has always soothed me. She soothes everyone, which is why it pisses me off that her husband doesn’t try to give that back to her. Someone should.
“I guess we’ve found you a rat-free home for the next five days,” I tell her.
She laughs and puts her head on my shoulder, and Elijah glances between us once again.
We act more like a besotted couple than we do siblings, something Maren doesn’t realize.
While it’s something I’ve known since we met.
11
MAREN
The cottages are adorable. As much as I like the house, I can see why his mother would have preferred to sleep out here, if she was alone. They’re cozy, first of all, but also set side by side into the hill, with an entire wall of windows facing the water, and each boasting a French door that leads to a small deck overlooking everything.
Charlie says I’m not allowed on the deck because the floorboards are sagging, but generously gives me the furnished cottage—which is the only one with its own bathroom—rather than the one that is currently so full of painting supplies and discarded lawn items that we can’t stand fully inside it.
“You can’t sleep in here,” I tell Charlie.
“I’ll empty it out,” he says. “It’ll be fine.”
My mouth opens to tell him he can just stay with me, but I suppose that might sound a little weird to Elijah. And Charlie isn’t exactly a shrinking violet. If hewantedto share a cottage with me, he’d have just told me he was going to.
Elijah leaves to go deal with permits and tells us to dump the stuff from the cottage on the grass and he’ll have a crew getit tomorrow. Charlie walks him out, and I finally get around to returning my mother’s call from the day before.
“How’s your diet going?” she asks. “I’ve got some juice for you to try. It’s lemon juice with cayenne pepper and agave syrup. We’ll get that weight right off you.”
My mother is, objectively, a terrible parent. She tried to talk both Kit and me out of going to college and has suggested to us both that bulimia would be the perfect solution if it didn’t ruin your teeth (though, she added, veneers can fix that right up). This—her efforts to help me lose the whole ten pounds I packed onto my five-foot-eleven-inch frame once my modeling days ended—is as close as she’s ever come to maternal.
“Oh, I actually, uh—” I look around me wildly. “I’m at a resort.”
“A weight-loss resort?” she asks hopefully.
I wish I could just tell her the truth, but even if she knew about Charlie’s mom’s death and the house, I would not. She’d make it into a thing, probably a thing that would ruin the family entirely, a family I adore. I love our get-togethers—me, Roger, my mom, Kit, Charlie, and Henry—who’s now best friends with Roger. We are six wildly dysfunctional people who somehow become normal around each other, and I can’t imagine how depleted my life would feel without that.
“No, no weight loss,” I reply, because otherwise she’ll suggest joining me. “They’re more focused on meditation.”
The purr of an engine catches my attention. Charlie is, inexplicably, driving the rental car over the long grassy lawn. Why the hell he’s driving when we’re five minutes from the house is beyond me.
“Mom, I’ve got to go,” I tell her.
“I hear a motor,” she says. “Tell me you’re at least walking around the resort and not taking a golf cart. Those pounds creep up fast when you’re?—”
“Sorry, Mom, silent meditation. They’re taking the phone.” Ihang up before she can suggest ways I could lose weight while meditating too—walking meditation works just as well as sitting!Fidgeting burns calories too!—and head down to where Charlie is now parking the rental—right on the narrow trail and perilously close to the marsh.
“What the hell, Charlie?” I ask. “You couldn’t walk?”
His shoulders are tense and he doesn’t quite meet my eye. “I want to get this shit out of here. I don’t want to wait for the crew.”
Oh.
That’swhat’s behind the tension. I think it bothers him, seeing these remnants of his mother’s life disposed of, and he’d rather cut the emotion away than sit with it. I get that. How many times have I thrown myself into decorating something at the start of my period to keep from weeping over the fact that my period arrived at all?
“Okay,” I reply, grabbing the keys from his hand and popping open the trunk, “but if that car slides into the marsh, you’re the one telling the rental company.”
“That’s fine,” he says. “Anyone who’s seen you drive will still assume it was you.”
It takes hours—and multiple trips to the dump—to get the little cottage emptied. I try to suggest to Charlie that he might eventually want the rakes and the lawnmower and fifteen bags of potting soil, but he just says no in that hard voice, and I decide not to push. As subpar as my relationship with my mother is, if she chose to die alone or never told me how hard her life had gotten, it would break my heart. And I think it’s breaking Charlie’s.
