Page 74 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“No.”
“Thanks, man, you’re the best,” he says, and turns off his phone alarm. He leaves without taking the diapered stunt baby still on the floor.
Alessandro and Leo look down at the ermine and the pile of diapers next to it, and then Leo nudges the taxidermied rodent with a tip of his shiny shoe. “Well, Bram, I’d love to stay, but Alessandro and I are going back to Kansas City to eat in a restaurant that doesn’t deliver pita wraps to dorm rooms.”
“Why were you in Mount Astra anyway?” I ask a little plaintively.
“Work, business, numbers, I’m a very important man,” Leo says. Then offers his elbow to Alessandro. “Mi’lord?”
Alessandro beams and tucks his hand inside. “Mi’lord.”
They start to leave and Maddie does too.
“Ms. Kowalczk, wait,” I say quickly. “I thought we could talk for a moment?”
“Okay,” she says, smiling at me.
Alessandro discreetly takes his phone out of his pocket and sends a text while he and Leo leave the office. I hear Leo’s phone chime, and from down the hall, Joey’s phone chimes too.Myphone doesn’t.
Fake friends!
But the sting of their treachery fades the minute Maddie closes the door and I have her all to myself. I frequently have her all to myself, but it’s never enough, it’s never enough. I drink in the carmine lips, the dark, shining hair, all of her like she’s water and I’ve just woken up at three in the morning completely parched.
“Sara needs to stay at the research site for another four weeks, and so I wanted to make sure it was okay with you before I brought it up with the agency.”
Maddie bends down and scoops up the ermine, realizes there’s no good way to hold a stuffed ermine, and then cradles it like a baby in her arms while she replies. “Meaning I would stay on to help with the twins for another four weeks? That’s absolutely okay. I love working with them, and I’m still stockpiling the first few months of rent.”
My stomach twists a little, as it does every time I remember that Maddie will leave, that she’ll get her own place. That even if we carry on, it will be harder to see each other, and gradually we’ll see each other less and less and less, until it’s over and she’s moved on and I’m in exactly the same place.
“Okay,” I say, my voice a little weaker than I’d like. “And you know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, even if you’re not helping with childcare. I have the spare room either way.”
“I know, Bram,” she says, green eyes soft. “But it’ll have to happen eventually. And I think I’ll have enough in my account for proof of funds by Thanksgiving, for sure.”
My stomach twists again. I struggle against the feeling silently, determinedly. It does neither of us any good.
“So Sloane bought the bar,” Maddie says, and I think it’s partially to move us on from the semi-awkward silence we’d found ourselves in and partially because, holy shit, Sloane bought the bar.
I scrub a hand through my hair and lean back, still a little bewildered. “I can’t think of a less likely person to own The Dry Bean.”
Maddie’s eyebrow lifts up behind her new bangs. “Why?”
“Why? Because Sloane is elegance embodied and The Dry Bean has a mural of a snake giving birth to a jar of pickled eggs in the bathroom.”
“Maybe it’s exactly the kind of new beginning she needs after her divorce?”
I think about my own divorce, about my greenhouse. But then I think about the box of wooden skewers next to The Dry Bean’s toilet and make a face.*“I don’t know. Would you want a grimy bar as your new beginning?”
Maddie nods, immediately, emphatically.
“Really?”
She gives the diapered ermine an idle pat, like it really is a baby. “Do you know who my brother is?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Really?”
“Should I?”
