Page 33 of My Favorite Lost Cause
She’s in the second room, standing on a ladder to grab a strip near the wainscotting. The curve of her bare ass is visible as I move to hold the ladder. Over a week without sex has reduced me to a man who’d give his entire fortune to palm that ass once, but who am I kidding? I’ve always been a man willing to hand over his fortune where she’s concerned, whether I was getting anything out of it or not.
“Hey,” she says, “I’m glad you’re here. You’ve got to look at this.”
“If it’s a creepy doll that keeps moving around the room when your head is turned, we’re on the next plane home.”
“The doll ordered me not to tell you about our friendship,” she replies, climbing down the ladder. “She said you’d try to turn us against each other. No, look.”
She points out something written on the wall where she’s removed the paper.
Sam shouldn’t get the biggest room.
“Isn’t it cute?” she demands. “This must be Walter because Sam complained about him on his wall.”
“Proving that children have been little pains in the ass who fight over fucking nothing century after century. But speaking of the dead ghost children, Elijah found some stuff in the attic and wanted to know if he should dump it.”
She inhales as if she’s been slapped. “Dump it? Without us even looking first?”
I figured she’d say that. She turns, heading down the halltoward the attic, and she’s reaching for the pull before I can warn her not to.
I wrap my arm around her waist and snatch her backward just before the ladder comes sliding down.
For a moment she’s sandwiched against me, the soft curve of her breast pressed to my arm.Jesus. I’m not sure why I’m being tested like this, but I clearly did something really fucked up in a past life.
“Thanks,” she whispers. “I didn’t know that was gonna happen.”
I release her and pull the ladder the rest of the way down before allowing her to climb up, with me in her wake.
The attic is mostly an empty room full of rotting joists and crooked beams. Elijah thinks it’s safe enough, but I still tense as Maren heads toward the furniture in its center. I’m sure it was considered quality stuff a century ago, and the fact that it’s still in one piece, though somewhat weather damaged thanks to the leaky roof, attests to its craftsmanship. But…I still don’t want a bunch of dark, mahogany furniture, so I sure wish Maren wasn’t already pulling drawers open the way she currently is, which will inevitably lead tooh, Charlie, look…little Sam threatened someone’s life here. It’s so cute, you can’t throw it away.
“This is really good furniture,” she says, “but it’s pretty ugly.”
Thank Christ.
“Agreed,” I reply. “I’ll tell Elijah to dump it.”
“Hang on now,” she warns me. “We haven’t looked at everything yet.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m looking at it as we speak.”
She nods toward two boxes sitting side by side on the rotting floorboards and crosses the room to them.
She opens the one on her right and withdraws a book. “Weren’t you just saying you wish you had aFarmer’s Almanacfrom 1941?” she asks with a grin.
Reluctantly, I join her and open the second box. There are a lot of old law journals and books from the turn of the century—Commentaries on the Laws of England, Constitutional Limitations. They’re probably valuable because of their age, which is precisely the reason I shouldn’t have opened this box in the first place. I’m going to feel bad sending it straight to the dump, but I’m already a little maxed out on guilt, so to the dump it goes.
“Charlie!” she squeals. “Look! There’s a photo album.”
She sprawls out on the dusty floor with her back against the wall and pats the space beside her, commanding me to sit. Like a whipped idiot, I do it.
The album must have belonged to the family who built the place. There’s a photo of the house under construction, horses tied to the nearest tree. A woman in a long dress, holding a baby on her hip. The next photo shows a family on the front porch once the home’s been completed: that same woman, who stands with a different baby and three very small boys.
“Look at how cute they are in their little suspenders,” Maren murmurs longingly, running her index finger lightly over the photo. “Oh my God. I wish you could still dress little boys like that.”
“I mean…you can. They’ll just get beaten up.”
She ignores me, continuing to flip the pages. “They had another baby,” she says.
She flips ahead, reading the cursive caption aloud. “Margaret and Papa,” she whispers.
