Page 96 of No Judgements

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The Mermaid was lit up for the holidays.

Christmas lights of every color imaginable had been strung not only around the windows and doors, but all across the ceiling, in and around the mermaid Barbies, and especially around the counter and serving pass-through, too.

The place was packed, even though it was only a Thursday night... but it was the Thursday night before Christmas, and Little Bridge was stuffed near to bursting with visitors from the mainland, anxious to escape the winter cold up north. The Little Bridge tourist council had worked overtime to advertise the fact that the island had fully recovered from Hurricane Marilyn and was ready to take the vacation dollars of anyone willing to spend their winter break in the Florida Keys.

And it had worked. There was not a single vacancy to be found in any hotel on the island. Even the RV park was packed.

And I was loving every minute of it.

“How’s it going?” Drew asked as I flitted past his counter stool for a third time in as many minutes.

“Um, kind of weird. I just sold another one.”

He lifted his beer. “Why is that weird? I’m not the type to say I told you so—”

“Except you so are.”

“—but I told you so. You should have priced them higher.”

I collapsed onto the stool next to his—the only reason it was empty was because he was guarding it. Otherwise, it would have been filled in a second, the place was so packed with happy revelers.

And the only reason I could sit without Ed yelling at me was because I wasn’t working at the Mermaid.

Oh, I hadn’t given up my breakfast shift. Angela and I still toiled away every Tuesday through Saturday from six in the morning until two in the afternoon—although school had started, so Nevaeh had joined her fellow tenth-graders in class. I only saw her when I went to the Hartwells’, or when she filled an occasional shift.

I was at the Mermaid tonight not to work, but becauseit was a special occasion—the café’s very first art opening. And the art was mine.

And it was selling.

Probably a little too quickly. Drew was right, I’d priced my paintings too low. Since they were small and therefore, as he’d suggested, highly portable in a carry-on bag, and also depicted exactly what tourists—and let’s face it, all the rest of us—loved so much about Little Bridge, the beautiful wide blue sea and colorfully clouded skies, they were selling fast.

This was an ego boost, certainly.

But it was also confirmation of something my donor mom had told me—we emailed occasionally. Not too much, since she really wasn’t, as she’d said, the maternal type. She was simply a nice friend to have, who knew a lot about the kinds of things I was interested in, like one half of my genetic history, animals, and art:

“Find what it is you love to do,” she’d advised, “and then do that thing as much as you can.... That really is the meaning of life. I love to paint, too, but I wouldn’t like to make a living at it. I think that might spoil my love for it. But if that interests you, you should go for it.”

Nowsomeone told me.

Not that I didn’t still appreciate my birth mother. I spoke to her on the phone practically every day. She’d planned on being here, in fact, for my first “gallery” opening, but a nor’easter in the New York area had prevented her plane from taking off.

I was secretly a little glad. I had enough to worry about without entertaining Judge Justine for the holiday weekend.

“Seven.” I held up my fingers to show Drew how many paintings I’d sold. “I’ve sold seven already, and it’s not even eight o’clock.”

“See?” He grinned with happiness for me. “Aren’t you glad you held some back? I bet if you took the rest to a real gallery, you’d make even more—”

I waved a hand to silence him. “Shush. I’m not trying to make a career out of this yet. I just want to have fun with it for now.”

“When do we ever not have fun?”

It was true. Since the morning after the storm, I’d been having nothing but fun with Drew Hartwell—with the slight exception of that incident with Kyle and Caleb.