Nodding at the long story her customer was telling about a flooded basement, Lily hit PRINT on the contract and tried to concentrate on her work instead of on guilt and hurt feelings and that aching loss of watching the easy connection with her son begin to crack with brittle age.
“Of course,” the woman continued, “the good news is I’m finally getting the basement refinish I wanted. Greg kept telling me the indoor/outdoor carpet and wood paneling were just fine, because who the hell ever saw it but him? And I kept telling him no one else saw it because no one else wanted to go down there! If—”
“Here we are!” Lily slid the contract across the counter and handed over a branded pen. “One month up front, and then hopefully by month two you’ll be ready to move into your gorgeous new basement!”
“Did I tell you we’re putting in a craft room? I’m so excited. Greg gets his home theater, and I get my craft room, and a full bathroom for when my sister comes to visit with her whole brood. Four kids. Can you imagine? But now I’ll just be able to throw them all downstairs and say good night!”
“It sounds amazing. Bring pictures when you return to move your stuff back home.” The woman’s cheeks went pink with excitement at that, and she signed the contract with a flourish before grabbing the lock she’d purchased and practically jogging out to the big red pickup where her husband waited.
Lily gave them a moment to drive deeper into the complex; then she hurried outside to see if she could spot Everett. His bike was still gone as expected, so she moved past the open gate to look up and down the road. No bike there either.
Still, it was better that he was gone and not wandering the grounds when Amber was hiding. She’d promised not to crack a window or door, but people did thoughtless things sometimes, and kids were so curious.
The business road dead-ended past the storage facility, and Lily headed that way toward the thin dirt paths that snaked through dried grass and mounds of construction debris. The developer had made big plans for this business park ten years earlier, before a couple of local manufacturing companies closed down and shipped overseas. Now the existing buildings were surrounded by lumpy, barren fields, power lines to nowhere, and some distant copses of trees.
Still, this part of their world had been heaven for Everett and his best friend a couple of years ago. They’d even managed to scrape some of the dirt into small ramps for their bikes. They’d built forts. Lived out entire epics of battles and wars and entrenched siege life, complete with picnic lunches Lily had packed for them. The landscape had provided a scene as idyllic as one could imagine in an abandoned construction area.
Lily climbed up on one of the tiny hills and gazed over patches of grass just starting to green up. There was a lot of mud and a few wide puddles, but no bike and no boy. Sighing, she told herself he was fine. She nagged him to go ride his bike nearly every day, and now he was out there. He’d wear himself out and come home, and she’d apologize for pressing him so hard about that stupid texting app.
But were kids really saying he was living in a storage unit? Were they teasing him? Making up cruel stories?
Everyone had problems. It wasn’t the end of the world. But it killed her that he might be embarrassed by her choices. Her job. Her status. It was bad enough he had to be embarrassed by his father. Not that he talked about that much.
Whatever else he’d been, Jones had been a good father when Everett was little. And Everett had missed him terribly those first couple of years, suffering nightmares at night and racing to peer hopefully out the window at the sound of unexpected visitors during the day.
Lily wasn’t sure he remembered Jones at all anymore. She couldn’t remember anything about her childhood before kindergarten.
“Hey there, Lily!” a soft voice called.
She spun to see Nour walking out of the big garage door of her shop’s loading area. Nour, the opposite of her wife, was quiet and studious and introverted. She was softness personified with her piles of black curls and plump shape. She had been born in Egypt and had learned some woodworking from her grandfather before moving to the States at eleven. What an age to be dropped into a strange, new world. Everett didn’t have it so bad, surely.
“Have you seen Everett ride by?” Lily called out.
“Not today! But he dropped by yesterday to RSVP for the crawfish boil!”
“Oh . . . right. Of course.”
The damn crawfish boil. Lily had gotten into such a habit of excusing herself from any invitations that Sharon pulled off an end run around her. First she’d asked when Lily was done with classes for the semester, and then she’d invited her and Everett over for a crawfish boil in mid-May. And she’d done it in front of Everett.
Lily had murmured that she’d check her schedule, though she had no social life at all and certainly no money for a vacation. Everett had asked her about it three times and then dropped it. Now she knew why he hadn’t bothered asking again.
Apparently they were going to the crawfish boil.
“Bring a side dish or dessert or beer, it doesn’t matter. We’ll have all the essentials.”
“Will do.”
Lily waved and turned to carry on with her search, but as soon as she stepped off the hill, she let her frown snap back into place. It wasn’t that she wanted Everett to live in isolation. She just wanted it for herself.
When Sharon had realized who Lily was, she’d asked about her ex-husband a few times until Lily had managed to carefully orchestrate distance. She imagined what Sharon must have said about her to every person who stepped into the store. She would have been thrilled beyond measure to be in such close proximity to a walking scandal like Lily. Lily’s only recourse had been to avoid Sharon like the plague.
Everett, of course, had wandered over to their shop often, craving any friendly company near his lonely home, and they’d welcomed him with open arms.
Face screwed up in frustration, Lily circled back around to the end of the road and peered as far into the distance as she could, searching for Everett’s bike. And then searching for strange cars, just in case. One hatchback approached and turned into the lot across the street to park in front of the plumbing supply place. Probably just a contractor, though everything looked suspicious to her after that visit from the detective.
She finally gave up and headed back inside to wrap up her work and preheat the oven for dinner and for the cookies that felt suddenly vital to saving her relationship with her only child.
Still, the walk had done her good. She felt calmer now. Everett was growing more distant because he was supposed to at his age, and their fight was a blip in their life together, not a tragic turn. After all, things had been perfectly rosy between her and Jones when their life had blown up in her face. She should see calm happiness as more of a warning than a mild argument might be.
Ten minutes into reviewing delinquent accounts, her memories of the argument were blotted out by her tortured stress over customers who were going to lose their belongings. She hated to watch the moment lumbering slowly toward her as she sent out warning after warning, silently begging each person to respond. She’d lost nearly everything once, and the scars burned when she got too close to other people’s hardships.
When her phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number, her distracted brain served her the briefest flash of Everett’s bike wrecked somewhere, but then she saw the text.
It’s in your mailbox.
What? What was in her mailbox? She had just opened her email app to search for new notifications when she sat straight with a sudden jerk. “Oh,” she said on a breath. That was in her mailbox.