Come on, loser, out of bed.”
Lifting my drool-stained face from the pillow, I squinted up at my brother, who was smirking down at me and waving a pint of rocky road under my nose. I winced when Emmett pulled up the shades, flooding the room with late afternoon light.
“Go away, I was up at the butt crack of dawn,” I moaned, pulling the quilt over my head. “Besides, I’m in hiding.”
“Well, you’re doing a lousy job, love lump,” Emmett chided from the other side of the bed. I felt him nudging my ribs through the quilts. “It took me all of two guesses to get your location out of Mama.”
“What was your other guess?” I asked, my voice muffled by the blankets.
“That creepy old sanitarium where we used to visit Great-Auntie Myrtle.”
Emmett shook my covered shoulders. “Get up or I’ll eat all this ice cream myself and you will be responsible for the resulting cellulite on my thighs.”
I whipped the covers off my head as he continued to poke at me. “Oh, you don’t have any cellulite, you bastard. You’re the only one in the family without it.”
Emmett shrank back at the sight of my horrific bedhead and pillow creases. “Gah! Quick, take the ice cream before your eyes turn me to stone.”
I glared up at him. Emmett was basically a male version of me. The same dimples, our father’s blue eyes, the same topheavy, bowed lips. Our hair was a matching shade of buttery blond, which Emmett insisted he dyed to look like mine. I thought he was trying to be nice until I caught him attempting to cut a sample swatch of my hair to take to his colorist.
Emmett has boundary issues.
My brother ran The Auctionarium, a brick-and-mortar business for people who didn’t know how to use eBay, Amazon, or basically any online site that sold used items. He took in weird family heirlooms, antiques, and garage sale fodder and sold them online for a handsome profit. From looking at him, you couldn’t tell he was a computer geek-slash-the-world’s-foremost-authority-on-carnival-glass. Unless he was crawling around in someone’s basement or barn searching for valuables, he favored a sort of Cape Cod aesthetic. Lots of madras and plaid. It looked like Calvin Klein threw up in his closet.
Imagine growing up with a brother who knew how to dress better than you did. It’s humiliating.
“Come on, Lace, out of bed,” he said, smacking me repeatedly with a pillow. “This is starting to look like something out of Valley of the Dolls. And not in the fun way.”
“I’m coming, but only for the ice cream.” I grumbled, snatching the container from his hand and wrapping the quilt around my shoulders. Emmett, who’d always had a flair for the dramatic, took the tail end of the quilt and carried it like a royal train.
“What time is it?” I asked, using the spoon he ceremoniously presented to dig into the melty chocolate.
“Around four,” Emmett said. “Why were you up at the butt crack of dawn?”
“Writing,” I said. “The sad story of my life. My lawyer wants my thoughts on how exactly my marriage went to crap.”
“Well, it started when you married a pompous, pretentious, prematurely old man,” he snorted.
Emmett loved alliteration, but he had never liked Mike. When Mike and I started dating, I thought it was normal for Emmett to treat Mike like an annoying younger brother. And after a few years, I blamed the distance between them on Mike’s latent homophobia. But now I had to admit that Emmett’s “asshat radar” was just more acutely tuned than my own.
“Hey, where have you been, Em?” I demanded, finally awake enough to be indignant. “My life has come crashing down around my ears and you can’t drag yourself home?”
“Sweetie, I’m sorry, the resort was all about relaxation and binge drinking. The staff didn’t allow TVs, internet access, or newspapers … or Crocs. It was fantastic. I had no idea what was happening until we landed in Florida and I saw you featured on the ‘news of the weird’ portion of Inside Edition. Not your best picture, by the way.”
I glared at him.
“Which is, clearly, not the point. It doesn’t matter, because Emmett’s here now to make it all better.” He dragged me into the cabin’s tiny kitchen, where he proudly displayed the contents of a festive picnic hamper - several bottles of vodka, tequila, rum, and mixers in a rainbow of fruit flavors, lemons, limes, a five-pound bag of mini Hershey bars and bulk-sized box of Hostess CupCakes.
“You know, this looks a lot like the picnic you packed for my twenty-first birthday,” I said, tilting my head against his shoulder.
“Well, let’s see how many colors we can get you to throw up this time,” he said, patting my back.
“Will you be joining me in this neon-colored hooch fest?”
“Ugh. Even I’m not gay enough to drink that swill.” Emmett winced, putting a case of Heineken in my fridge to chill. He reached into the cabinet over the sink to unearth Gammy’s ancient turquoise blender. “This is the one area where I proudly reject the stereotype. But I will gladly mix up a batch of my frosty, frothy cocktails for you.”
As he measured out just the right amount of ice with a flourish, he gushed, “Lace, you wouldn’t believe how many people are talking about you back home. It’s like you’re Princess Di or Britney Spears or someone more interesting and less tragic than you.,,
“I onestly don’t know how to take that.”
“Your husband moved his secretary into your house the night you left town. That’s practically Shakespeare territory,” he told me.
My jaw dropped. “He moved her into our house?” I repeated.
“I was going to break it to you gently,” he said. “But the kindest version I could come up with involved an obscene limerick.”
I shook my head. The emotional emptiness I briefly enjoyed was replaced with a dull ache in my chest. I rubbed at it with the heel of my hand. I tried to make light of it. “Oh, screw it. Let Beebee deal with the damn earth tones.”
“Well, that’s good to hear,” he said. “Mama said I shouldn’t tell you. She was afraid you were going to freak out again and do something stupid, like shave your head or give Mike’s boat a Viking funeral.”
The moment the words left Emmett’s lips, he cringed. It was probably because of the way I stopped in my tracks, face alight with interest at the prospect of setting Mike’s boat aflame. “Oh… no,” he murmured.
I’d almost forgotten the boat was stored just a few yards away. I turned, a sly Grinch-ish grin spreading over my face as I focused on Mike’s little workshop. Short of actually setting fire to Mike, burning his would-be vessel would be the best way to get under his skin. That pile of wood represented his hopes and dreams, the best imagined version of himself. I wanted to take that from him, to make him doubt himself. And, best of all, he would never, ever be able to talk about the damn thing again.
“Lacey!” Emmett hissed. “Forget I said anything! It was just a joke! You cannot possibly be thinking of setting Mike’s boat on fire.”
“Technically, it is on my property,” I murmured, chewing my lip. I mean, it’s just an idea. I mean, a joke. I’m just joking.”
“You don’t sound like you’re joking,” Emmett objected as I walked out the back door toward the workshop. “Besides, I think you need flaming arrows and a virgin for a Viking funeral.”
“I just want to see it,” I told him as we approached the workshop, which was difficult with him dragging on my elbows.
Emmet’s voice broke into a panicked pitch. “Look, I have a better idea. We’ll break into your house, take a bunch of Mike’s stuff, and I’ll sell it online for pennies. We’ll start a website called TakeMikesStuff.com. Or hell, we’ll give it away.”
Emmett waved my cell phone in my face. “Mama said your lawyer told you to call her before you made any rash decisions. Call her. Let her talk some sense into you.”
I forced the workshop door open and was assaulted by dust.
You would think it would smell of sawdust or pitch, but this was the dust of dead space. A damp, mildew- spotted canvas was slung over the hull frame. I swear, my mouth just about watered at the thought of lighting that
