Page 35 of My Favorite Lost Cause
I laugh. “No, I mean, literally where these cottages sit.”
She swats my arm. “And you’re just waiting to tell me now?”
“I didn’t want you going full Professor Trelawney on me and start channeling the dead.”
“So who died?”
I shake my head, rolling on my back. The crickets and cicadas are making such a fucking racket tonight I can barely hear my own voice. “I don’t know. There was a shack here. Elijah and I tore it down before we put up the cottages. Butapparently whoever owned the house at the time came out here and died in her sleep.”
Maren’s eyes go wide. “She died in her sleep? Are they sure? I mean, sometimes there are gasses in the ground that?—”
“Which is exactly the sort of shit I knew you’d worry about. She was super old.”
“How old?”
I smile at her. “Like…your age. Natural causes.”
She hits me again. “We’re the same age, Charles.”
“Males and females age differently, like dogs. What’s thirty-two times seven? That’s your real age.” I meant it as a joke, but she isn’t laughing. “I was kidding, Maren. She was legitimately old.”
She rolls onto her back and stares at the sky. “I know.”
I’m on the cusp of reassuring her that she’s not old and her fertility is fine when she rolls toward me. “You said your mom got this place dirt cheap, but I don’t understand how it didn’t stay in the family or sell for a billion dollars.”
I’m just relieved she isn’t choking back tears about her declining fertility.
“My mom bought it from the bank,” I reply, “so I assume it was foreclosed on. It was in rough shape even then, and the area wasn’t booming. I imagine no one wanted to deal with it.”
She bites her lip. “But they had so many kids. You’d think their descendants would pitch in to save it.”
It’s sort of endearing how naïve she is about the way the world works—she and Kit grew up with too much money. “Maren, the majority of families probably can’tpitch into buy a mansion.”
“But this is a family who started offhere,” she argues. “They had money.”
“It was over a hundred years ago. There’ve been three major wars since then. A lot has changed.”
“What are the odds all those boys survived World War One?” she asks quietly. “They were just about the right age.”
“All of them?” I ask. “Not good. Reason number one to not have kids, beyond the hundred ways they ruin your life.”
She elbows me. “You’d like kids, if you had them.”
“I know,” I reply. “That’s why I don’t want them. Look at what happened to my parents and tell me why any reasonable person would assume that risk.”
We lapse into silence. It’s too hot to sleep, so it looks like I’m gonna lie awake all night, thinking about how I wish things were different. Wishing she didn’t want the things she wants and that there was just a fucking way to…
“Charlie,” she whispers tentatively.
A viciously hopeful part of myself, one I have tried to beat back for years, suggests that she might say, “There’s something going on between us, isn’t there? There’s always been something going on between us.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s so hot out here. And that mosquito thing isn’t working at all.”
I laugh, stifling a hint of disappointment. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”
“What did you think I was going to say?”
