Bittersweet Homecoming (23 page)

“Hey! Give that back!” I protest. I swipe at him, futilely. He’s practically a foot taller than I am, even without his trademark high heels.

Anthony’s dark eyes move across the page and his eyebrows dance on his forehead. “Is this a love letter?”

“No.”

“Yes it is. I know a love letter when I see one.”

“Anthony,” I practically whine.

“Are you
still
pining over that bartender?”

I’m finally able to pry the notebook away from him. “It’s nothing,” I insist. I defensively press the notebook against my chest. “It’s a writing exercise for a play I’m working on.”

“Let me guess—it’s a romantic comedy about a stubborn playwright who pines her days and nights over a lost love.” The corner of my mattress depresses as he sits down. “But seriously, girl. What’s up with the baditude?”

“Baditude?” I repeat.

“Bad attitude—
baditude
. It’s going to be a thing, just you wait.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

He presses his lips together. “This is about that girl, isn’t it? Charlotte the Magnificent.”

“It’s about a lot of girls, not just her.”

“Scandalous,” he smirks.

“Not like that,” I scowl. I sit up in bed and rub my hands over my face. “Today’s Tuesday,” I mumble into my hands.

“Thank you for the calendar update.”

“Tuesday is the day my mom has coffee and an apple tart at a coffee shop in Bunker Hill.”

“Your mom?” he echoes. “I thought all your people lived in igloos?”

“She might. I don’t know anything about her life. I haven’t talked to her since I was five.”

“Then how do you—.”

“I paid someone to find her, and he did.”

“People really do that?”

“I did, apparently. But I’m too chicken shit to actually talk to her. I went to see her this morning, but I ended up hiding among the self-help books in the bookstore.”

“Oh, child. You really are hopeless.”

I flop back on the mattress and pull the covers over my head. “You’re free to leave whenever you want.”

A stiff tug has the sheets yanking off of my bed. “You need to get up, girl, and stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Anthony ordered. “You’ve got money in your pocket and a roof over your head. Plus, you’ve got
me
in your corner.”

“You’re right, Anthony. What more could I possibly want?”

Anthony’s pep talk has me feeling moderately better about myself and my life—so much so that I actually decide to brush my teeth. I’m in the bathroom, cleaning up, when I get a call from Claire. We haven’t spoken since she drove me to the detective’s office earlier in the week, and I’m sure she’s curious how the meeting with my mom went.

“Y’ello,” I greet around my toothbrush.

“Are you dissatisfied with the work I’ve been doing as your literary agent, Abigail?” Claire’s tone is precise and clipped.

I spit the toothpaste into the bathroom sink. “Huh? Of course not. Why would you even ask?”

“Because I got a call from Harper Publishing this morning as a professional courtesy to let me know that you’d submitted a new play to them.”

“A new play? I have no idea what you’re talking about, Claire. I haven’t been writing, let alone trying to get something published.”

“So you didn’t write a play called
The Girl with the Cotton Candy Hair
?”

The name tumbles out of my mouth without my permission. “Charlotte.”

It takes me a moment to think about that day at the airport. I’d tried to push it out of my head, not wanting to subject myself to perpetual humiliation. Charlotte had thrown the manuscript in my face, but had she taken it back? I can’t remember putting it in my carry on bag before going through TSA security.

“The bartender? What does she have to do with this?”

I rub the back of my neck and grimace. “I wrote a play for her daughter when I was there. But she practically threw it in my face after she read it.”

“Your writing isn’t
that
bad,” Claire deadpans.

“You’re hilarious.”

“Harper sent me a copy of the play. The little girl who makes friends with a firefly, but everyone else thinks she’s talking to her invisible friend? It’s charming, Abby. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Yeah.” I sigh and lean against the bathroom sink. “I was feeling particularly inspired.”

“Do you want me to set up a reading?” Claire asks. “I know children plays aren’t your usual genre, but it’s good. I think we go for it.”

“I wrote it as a present. It’s not for sale.”

“You wrote an entire play as a
present
? Did you win the lottery or come into an inheritance I don’t know about?”

“It’s just money,” I murmur. “It won’t make me happy.”

“Is this about that girl? You’ve been noticeably off since you got back from Minnesota.”

“The trip shook me up,” I admit. “Emily losing Adam . . .” I trail off. “It made me rethink my priorities.”

“Are you ready to talk about what happened out there?”

I’ve already told Anthony everything. There’s no point in keeping the information from Claire. “I cheated on Kambria with Charlotte, and they both found out.”

“Oh, Abby,” Claire sighs.

“I know.” I rub my face with my free hand. “It’s really bad. I wrote the play to apologize to Charlotte. I gave it to her the day before I came back to LA.”

“Why would she submit it for publication under your name?”

“I have no idea,” is my honest reply.

“Well, if you change your mind about selling the play, let me know.”

“I won’t, but thanks.”

I know better than to look for Charlotte’s home number online—she practically lives off the grid—but I’ve still got the bar’s number in my cell phone from the night she called me to come over.

Before I can psych myself out, I pull up the Grand Marais number and hit the redial function. I hear the sounds of a working bar in the background when someone answers my call: “Roundtree’s Bar and Grill, this is Charlotte.”

I almost lose my nerve when I hear her voice.

“Hi. It’s Abigail. Abigail Henry.”

I hold my breath, expecting to get cursed out or at least hung up on. Instead, all I hear is quiet breathing and the muffled chatter of background conversations.

“Charlotte?”

“I’m here.”

I audibly swallow. The words I’ve wanted to say to her for so long threaten to come up, but this phone call isn’t supposed to be another useless apology. “You sent my play to a publisher.”

“I thought it was
my
play,” she corrects me.

“It is, I just, no one else was supposed to see it.”

“I don’t have time to talk about this right now. I’m at work.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to reach you. How did you even know how to get the play published?”

“I might not own a computer, but I know how to use Google,” she states.

“Right. Sorry,” I awkwardly bumble. “I was just surprised you’d done it.”

“The play’s good, Abby,” she says. “Like really good. And I didn’t want you to not publish it because of my temper.”

“I broke up with Kambria,” I blurt out, unable to keep the words to myself anymore. “When I realized my feelings for you were more than just a silly crush, I called her to end things. But she had lost her cell phone, and I could only leave voicemails. That night when she showed up at your bar I had already broken up with her. She just didn’t know it.”

There’s a pregnant pause on the other end of my call, but I can still hear the background noise of music and conversations, so I know she hasn’t hung up on me.

“I don’t know if that makes me feel better about what happened,” she finally replies. “I’ll have to think on it.”

“Can I see you again?” I ask. “Or at least talk to you on the phone?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?” she points out.

“I meant after. When we hang up.”

I hear her deep sigh. I know I’m being unfair, especially considering she’s at work. “I need time to figure things out, Abby. I’m a single mom; I have someone else whose happiness has to come before mine.”

“Does that mean you think I could make you happy?” I cautiously ask.

“I really have to go.” She doesn’t answer my dangerous question. “You can call me later if you want, but not at work. At my house.” She rattles off her home number, and I scramble to find something to write it down on. There’s a grease-stained pizza box on the coffee table, and I scribble down the seven digits with a black sharpie pen.

“Thanks for not hanging up on me,” I say in earnest.

“Sure, whatever,” she sighs before she actually does.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After the past few disastrous weeks, I’m more than ready for a little Ben & Jerry’s therapy. I have no plans for the rest of the day except to binge-watch HGTV and eat my emotions. When I unlock my apartment door, arms encumbered with grocery bags and the day’s mail, I notice something different, but it takes a full minute of me standing in the front foyer before I figure out what it is.

“What the . . .”

I would say that I’ve been robbed, but the only thing the thief took was the garbage that had been strewn about my apartment. Gone are the dead potted plants, replaced with new green shoots of promising life. The overflowing garbage can has been emptied, the dirty bowls and spoons in the sink are now clean and air-drying on the dish rack, and the stack of pizza boxes on the coffee table has disappeared. My apartment is clean.

“You’re welcome,” comes a voice from the living room. Anthony sits on my couch, one leg crossed over the other.  

“What did you do?”

“I hired someone to clean your filthy hole of sorrow and despair,” he grins. “You’re welcome.”

“No, no, no,” I immediately panic. “My pizza boxes. Where are my pizza boxes?”

“On their way to a landfill so your apartment doesn’t turn into one. Honestly, Abs, it was getting disgusting. I could smell you all the way out in the hallway.”

I drop the grocery bags on the kitchen table and head straight for the living room. I can still smell the scent of glass cleaner in the air. The pizza box with Charlotte’s phone number is gone. I had been waiting to call her, stupidly not wanting to appear too eager to reconnect.

“You’re lucky the neighbors didn’t start to complain,” Anthony continues. “They probably thought you died in here and that rank stench was your rotting corpse.”

“I needed that pizza box.”

“Unless Jesus’s face appeared to you in a grease blob, why in the world would you need to keep that old foul thing around?”

“I wrote Charlotte’s number on it.”

His lips purse. “I didn’t know you were talking to her.”

“Just once.”

“So isn’t her number stored in your phone?”

“No. I talked to her at work. She gave me her home phone number and told me not to call her at the bar anymore.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“How was I supposed to know you’d go all hoarders intervention on me?” I growl in defense.

“Why not message the woman on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter,” he lists off on his fingers, “or whatever new app the kids are using nowadays?”

“It doesn’t work like that. She doesn’t even have a cell phone.”

Anthony raises a skinny eyebrow. “Excuse me? Are you dating an alien?”

“We’re not dating,” I’m quick to correct.

“Semantics.”

“Life is different up there. The pace of life is slower, cell service is spotty, and people still have dial-up Internet. People say hi to each other and make eye contact when they pass each other on the sidewalk.”

Anthony pretends to shudder. “It sounds horrible.”

“It’s nice,” I defend.

“Girl, I’ve dated nice men before. They’re also
B-O-R-I-N-G
.”

“Charlotte’s not boring.”

Anthony makes an amused humming sound. “Oh, we’re back to the bartender again?”

“Bar
owner
,” I correct.

“A regular old sugar mama, I’m sure.”

I slam my clenched fist against a couch cushion and release an exasperated noise. “Why did she have to be so amazing? I was perfectly content living my life until she showed up with those legs and that smile. And why does she have to be the world’s most perfect mom?”

“Is this you working out your Mommy issues?”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“You really don’t know anyone who could get Miss Amazing’s phone number for you?”

“My sister, maybe. But I’m sure I’ll get her old lady lecture about how I need to leave Charlotte alone, and that I need to move on and that’s what’s best for the both of us.”

“Is she right?”

“Probably,” I admit with a frown. “It’s not like we’re in a place where one of us could or should move for the other one. I mean, hell, we barely went on a date together.”

“You lesbians and your U-hauling,” Anthony censures.

“And she’s not even gay,” I add.

“Wait, what?” Anthony’s features take on a sharp, confused look. “I thought you all did the horizontal mambo.”

“We did,” I confirm, “but that doesn’t mean she’s suddenly gay now.”

“Are labels really that important to you?”

“No, but I’d at least like to know if she was interested in dating a girl before I moved there to be with her.”

“You would really do that?”

“Why not? It’s not like there’s anything keeping me in Los Angeles anymore.”

Anthony presses a hand to his chest, right above his heart. “I’m crushed.”

“You know what I mean,” I say, making a face.

“We’re going dancing tonight, Miss Mopey.”

“You know I don’t dance.”

“Fine.
I’m
going dancing and you’re going to drink and pretend to be having a good time. I won’t take no for an answer.”

“All I want to do is eat my feelings.”

“Speaking of feelings.” He pulls a stack of envelopes out of his man purse. It takes me a moment to realize they’re mine. “Do you mind explaining these? I thought there’d be at least a little sex, but it was only feelings, feelings, feelings.”