Page 61 of Pickled
Me: Fine. But I’m not going to like it.
Lisa: You don’t have to like it. You just have to show up.
I set the phone down and looked at C.C. “What do you think, buddy? Am I being an ass?”
He surprised me with two impressive leaps. One to the chair, the second to the countertop. There, he sauntered to the end to give me a purr-fueled head-butt.
“Yeah,” I said, scratching behind his ears. “That’s what I thought too.”
C.C. sniffed the air above the apple crisp. His bowl still had food in it, and I wasn’t going to start sharing my dinner with a cat.
Or maybe I was. He stuck his nose in the pan, and I let him lick the remnants of the crumble.
20
PIPER
Was Judy punishing me?I scrubbed the mirror in the same bathroom I had deep cleaned only two days earlier. The marble countertops gleamed, the faucets sparkled, and I was pretty sure that someone could eat off the floor.
Three days ago, Gideon walked away from me in the driveway, and I still couldn’t force myself to eat. I kept replaying the conversation, wondering if there was anything I could’ve said or done differently. There wasn’t. Unless I could go back in time and tell him the truth the night we spent searching for Pussy.
The sound of heels clicking on marble brought me out of my cleaning hyperfocus. Judy appeared in the doorway, wearing a crisp white tennis outfit. “Kiddo, you’ve been cleaning that mirror for ten minutes. It’s not going to get any cleaner.”
Judy was a good person, but her contradictions were giving me whiplash. Did she want the perfectly clean bathroom cleaned again or not? I set down the spray bottle. “Sorry. Just being thorough.”
“Mmm.” She studied me. “Maybe you should take a break. Come and hit some balls with me at the club. Lisa mentioned you’ve been playing pickleball with the girls.”
“I went once. I’m sure there are much better players to dink around with.”
Judy’s lips twitched into a smile at the pickleball reference. “Lisa said you’re a natural.”
“Thank you, but I should finish the bathrooms.”
“The bathrooms are finished. They’ve been finished since yesterday.” Judy crossed her arms. “Go. Exercise will help with the moping.”
“I’m not moping.”
“You’re absolutely moping. And while I appreciate your dedication to making my toilets sparkle, you need some fresh air. It can’t be good breathing in these chemicals all day long.”
Sometimes Judy was out of touch, and this was one of those times. It wasn’t exactly my dream to inhale Mr. Clean all day long. “Judy, I need to get as many hours in as possible this week.”
“Ah, I see.” Judy nodded, her hand on her chin. “Well, I need a dinking partner, and I can’t find one. I’ll double your cleaning wage if you come to the courts with me.”
Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the club parking lot in Judy’s Mercedes. I breathed a sigh of relief when I didn’t see any of Gideon’s fleet of cars in the parking lot. Lisa was waiting by the valet stand, paddle in hand. “There she is. How are you holding up?”
“I’ve been better.” I grabbed Judy’s pickleball bag from the back seat and glared at her. “I thought you said you didn’t have anyone to play with?”
Judy shrugged. “We need four.”
We walked toward the courts, passing a group of women in matching tennis outfits clustered around a table at the clubhouse restaurant. I recognized a couple of them as the group of ABCLWL club that had been on the jumbotron at the game. Judy bopped off to network with her Ladies Who Lunch crew. There were plenty of players here. I was Judy’s pity pickleball partner.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Lisa leaned into me as we passed the Desperate Housewives of the Azalea Bay Club.
“Not really,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. I wanted to talk, but every time I thought about it, I could only see myself as the pathetic liar who’d convinced herself she could be someone else for a few weeks.
Lisa stopped walking. “Piper. What happened?”
“I screwed up, Lisa. Really screwed up.”
