Page 2 of Anywhere with You
I did neither. I stared at her until she turned around, the bell over the door tinkling softly again as she fled.
I put my head on the cool countertop next to the cash register and tried to breathe calmly. Honestly, I tried to breatheat all.
I was an ass. Obviously.
Cara, sweet Cara, did not deserve to be screamed at, not by me, not when her worst mistake was the same as mine: She’d loved the wrong person.
Chapter Two
Florence came back from lunch, proclaiming that it was “Hotter’n the devil’s armpits out there.”
She took her spot at the register with another frustratingly pitying smile at me, and I retreated to my office, pushed aside the paltry stack of receipts, and picked up the envelope from the lawyers.
Honoria Singh, it said in the center. The font was gigantic. What was that, 20 point?
I wondered why they didn’t just mail it. It wasn’t like they had a therapist bring it to make sure the recipient could handle the emotional hailstorm that followed. No, they had a man in a suit do it instead of a nice, friendly postal worker.
I was always forgetting to stop by the mailbox. Bridget had always been the mail checker, but then again, she was always the one who had ordered something and was waiting for it to arrive: earrings, coffee mugs, clothes that probably wouldn’t fit. I didn’t think she even wanted most of that crap. She just liked to get packages. She never even tracked the deliveries, just waited to be surprised.
She’d left so much behind when she moved out that I felt she’d proved my point.
Now, there was an envelope for me, one that I hadn’t asked for and was certain not to want.
I turned it over and over in my hands.
I was delaying. I literally lifted the envelope to my nose and sniffed it just so I could do something other than open it.
I put it down.
I picked it back up again.
I couldn’t open it. I couldn’t start that next part of my life yet, not when this one had, until recently, been so damned good.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. It saidDadand had a picture of him about to take a massive bite of an ice cream cone, mouth stretched comically wide.
I could ignore the call, but he would likely just keep calling because he was retired and didn’t have any hobbies.
“Hello?”
“Your mother is trying to poison me,” he said, then swore in Telugu. Dad had moved to Houston from Hyderabad when he was nineteen, alone. He’d never gone back, though he still talked about it from time to time.
Since the creation of video chat, he had become much closer to our family in India, and I’d met aunts and uncles and grandparents virtually that I’d only known from the occasional letter and awkward phone call.
“What?” I said with elaborate shock. “Did Mom try to sneak vegetables into your food again?”
“She made sweet potato brownies, Honey. It’s a travesty. She should be locked up.”
“I’ll call the FBI, right now.”
“Call the UN. These sweet potatoes are Canadian.”
I laughed, then realized I was still holding the horrid envelope and put it down, then pushed it to the far side of my desk so I couldn’t accidentally pick it up again. “How are you, Dad?”
“Not too bad, not too bad. I’m generally a cheery guy, don’t you know? How are you doing, my Honey?”
Before I could come up with a believable lie, my mother picked up the other extension.
Yes, they were calling on an honest-to-God landline, maybe one of the last in existence.
