Page 19 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

CHARLIE

E lijah saunters into the kitchen and takes a seat at the table.

Maren pours him some of her awful juice. I don’t know why that annoys me. I guess I just thought it was sort of our thing.

Annoyance over the green juice aside, I made the right decision in hiring him. He’s just as hard-working and upfront as he was when we were teenagers. If I’m forced to leave before this place is done—and I absolutely will be—I’ll know it’s in good hands.

He goes over the schedule for today and then turns to Maren. “How’s the wallpaper coming?” he asks. “You got started on the second floor, right?”

My gaze shoots to hers. She didn’t go upstairs yesterday. I didn’t want her up there and I still don’t, because what the fuck was that? Even now there’s something worried in her eyes, something she’s not telling me about.

“I don’t want her up there,” I announce. “Not until the HVAC is in. It’ll be sweltering by noon.”

Elijah tips back in his chair, observing me for a long moment. Maybe he knows this excuse is bullshit since he’s up there all the time. “She’ll be fine as long as she keeps the windows open. This house was built before A/C existed, so it’s got good airflow.”

“I’ll be fine, Charlie,” she says.

We exchange another glance. I’ve got no arguments left.

She sort of looks like she wishes I had another one, though.

“Bunch of furniture in the attic,” Elijah says a few hours later, when I emerge from the basement. “You want to take a look? Otherwise, I can just get it carted to the dump.”

I wish he hadn’t asked. If it belonged to the original owners, I’ll have no emotional attachment to it and therefore I won’t want it. If it belonged to my mother, it’s still going to the dump, but I’ll feel guilty as hell about it.

I set my toolbelt on the kitchen counter and shrug. “Ditch it,” I tell him, heading for the sink. And then I think of Maren. Maren, with her stories about a family playing croquet, having a billion children. Last night she was talking about the cotillion they might have hosted here.

I suspect her stories are an amalgam of everything she knows about the South after the war and every movie she’s ever seen about the 1920s.

So basically, it’s post-war Gone with the Wind meets The Great Gatsby , but knowing Maren, it’d only be the good parts of those books: it’d be the croquet they played on the lawn dressed in head-to-toe white, earnest couples courting, wild parties where everyone sloshed champagne across a ballroom floor while waving cigarettes in long holders.

No one’s going off to war or running someone over with their car.

“Actually, let me check,” I reply, wiping off my hands. It’ll give me an excuse to go make sure Maren’s okay anyhow .

He just nods, but I sense, once again, what he’s thinking as he walks away, which is that sometimes Maren and I sound more like husband and wife than we do stepsiblings.

I go upstairs. A peek in the first bedroom to the right shows Maren’s been hard at work: it’s buried in shredded wallpaper.

She’s in the second room, standing on a ladder to grab a strip near the wainscotting.

The curve of her bare ass is visible as I move to hold the ladder.

Over a week without sex has reduced me to a man who’d give his entire fortune to palm that ass once, but who am I kidding?

I’ve always been a man willing to hand over his fortune where she’s concerned, whether I was getting anything out of it or not.

“Hey,” she says, “I’m glad you’re here. You’ve got to look at this.”

“If it’s a creepy doll that keeps moving around the room when your head is turned, we’re on the next plane home.”

“The doll ordered me not to tell you about our friendship,” she replies, climbing down the ladder. “She said you’d try to turn us against each other. No, look.”

She points out something written on the wall where she’s removed the paper.

Sam shouldn’t get the biggest room.

“Isn’t it cute?” she demands. “This must be Walter because Sam complained about him on his wall.”

“Proving that children have been little pains in the ass who fight over fucking nothing century after century. But speaking of the dead ghost children, Elijah found some stuff in the attic and wanted to know if he should dump it.”

She inhales as if she’s been slapped. “Dump it? Without us even looking first?”

I figured she’d say that. She turns, heading down the hall toward the attic, and she’s reaching for the pull before I can warn her not to.

I wrap my arm around her waist and snatch her backward just before the ladder comes sliding down.

For a moment she’s sandwiched against me, the soft curve of her breast pressed to my arm. Jesus . I’m not sure why I’m being tested like this, but I clearly did something really fucked up in a past life.

“Thanks,” she whispers. “I didn’t know that was gonna happen.”

I release her and pull the ladder the rest of the way down before allowing her to climb up, with me in her wake.

The attic is mostly an empty room full of rotting joists and crooked beams. Elijah thinks it’s safe enough, but I still tense as Maren heads toward the furniture in its center.

I’m sure it was considered quality stuff a century ago, and the fact that it’s still in one piece, though somewhat weather damaged thanks to the leaky roof, attests to its craftsmanship.

But…I still don’t want a bunch of dark, mahogany furniture, so I sure wish Maren wasn’t already pulling drawers open the way she currently is, which will inevitably lead to oh, Charlie, look…

little Sam threatened someone’s life here. It’s so cute, you can’t throw it away .

“This is really good furniture,” she says, “but it’s pretty ugly.”

Thank Christ.

“Agreed,” I reply. “I’ll tell Elijah to dump it.”

“Hang on now,” she warns me. “We haven’t looked at everything yet.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m looking at it as we speak.”

She nods toward two boxes sitting side by side on the rotting floorboards and crosses the room to them.

She opens the one on her right and withdraws a book. “Weren’t you just saying you wish you had a Farmer’s Almanac from 1941?” she asks with a grin .

Reluctantly, I join her and open the second box.

There are a lot of old law journals and books from the turn of the century— Commentaries on the Laws of England, Constitutional Limitations .

They’re probably valuable because of their age, which is precisely the reason I shouldn’t have opened this box in the first place.

I’m going to feel bad sending it straight to the dump, but I’m already a little maxed out on guilt, so to the dump it goes.

“Charlie!” she squeals. “Look! There’s a photo album.”

She sprawls out on the dusty floor with her back against the wall and pats the space beside her, commanding me to sit. Like a whipped idiot, I do it.

The album must have belonged to the family who built the place.

There’s a photo of the house under construction, horses tied to the nearest tree.

A woman in a long dress, holding a baby on her hip.

The next photo shows a family on the front porch once the home’s been completed: that same woman, who stands with a different baby and three very small boys.

“Look at how cute they are in their little suspenders,” Maren murmurs longingly, running her index finger lightly over the photo. “Oh my God. I wish you could still dress little boys like that.”

“I mean…you can. They’ll just get beaten up.”

She ignores me, continuing to flip the pages. “They had another baby,” she says.

She flips ahead, reading the cursive caption aloud. “Margaret and Papa,” she whispers.

I’m not sure why she sounds so troubled.

Elijah stays late, so Maren invites him for dinner.

I spend more than enough time with Elijah during the day. I sort of like having our dinners on the back porch alone, just me and Maren, and she’s only got two nights left here, but I can’t exactly rescind the invitation.

Maren makes roast chicken and potatoes and grills Elijah for stories about the summer I spent here. She seems certain it was more exciting than we’ve let on.

“So there were no girls here? Not that entire summer?”

“Well, we did have your sister and her friend out here that one night,” I remind Elijah. “That was pretty exciting.”

Elijah laughs as he takes the potatoes from Maren. “Charlie’s full of shit. It was my little sister and her friend, and they were, like, thirteen at the time.”

Maren’s eyes widen. “Weren’t you, like, eighteen?”

“Nobody hooked up,” I promise her. “We told them there was a ghost?—”

“I think we actually believed there was a ghost,” Elijah counters. “So we waited until it was late, and then we climbed on the roof and lowered this sheer fabric from overhead. My sister literally pissed herself.”

“And then her friend punched you,” I add with a laugh. “Whatever happened to that kid? Some pretentious name. Kestley or Eastwick or something.”

“Easton,” Elijah says, his smile fading. “She moved away. She comes back at the holidays sometimes, but that’s about it.”

I’ve struck a nerve. It almost feels like I should apologize for bringing her up. There’s a moment of strained silence and Maren’s gaze flickers between us.

“I want to do a sleep out, Charlie,” Maren says, gamely changing the subject.

“I promise, you don’t. You realize how humid it is, right?”

“It won’t be that bad now that the sun’s down,” she replies.

“And you love the mosquitoes, too, so there’s that.”

“I’ll run our little machine. It’ll be fine. Why do you keep shitting on my plan? ”

Because your plan hasn’t been thought through and that mosquito device doesn’t work for shit.

I lean back in my chair. “You’re going to be sweating your ass off and getting eaten alive while sleeping on a rickety deck.”

“Correction,” she replies. “ We’re going to be sweating our asses off and getting eaten alive while sleeping on a rickety deck.”