Page 5 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

CHARLIE

W e land in Charleston, and I try not to visibly wince at how much it’s changed. It’s a major airport now. I should know this. If I’d fucking bothered to visit my mother once over the past few years, I’d know a lot of things.

Maybe I’d even have known she was sick, though she hid that pretty fucking well the last time she was in New York. Jesus, maybe she didn’t hide it well even then. Maybe I just had my head so far up my ass that I didn’t notice the signs.

What else can you assume when your mother doesn’t bother to tell you she’s dying and has someone else spread her ashes?

We pick up the rental car and head out, skirting Charleston for points south. I remember this drive being tree-lined and rural. Now it’s a fast four-lane road dotted with big box stores and fast food and I barely recognize it.

More guilt. More arguing with myself about the guilt.

Her house was a pain in the ass to get to. I’d always resented that she’d left—I’d thought the onus to visit should be on her, given that she’d abandoned me for her new home—and she said she liked coming to New York.

It doesn’t matter. You still should have come back. You were all she had left.

Maren is privy to none of this, and she’s just fucking determined to love this trip—she’s been gasping over the trees and the Spanish moss and the names (Cuckold’s Landing is a favorite) the whole way here, and the closer we get to Riverbend—the landscape finally as rural as I remember—the more deeply she seems to fall.

“You lived here for a summer, right?” she asks, her eyes glued to the window.

“When I was eighteen,” I grunt. “My only way into town was a bike, so it basically meant no drinking and no girls for three months.”

She raises a brow. “I think you could use another three months without drinking and girls, to be honest.”

“I’d be more inclined to listen to those suggestions if they were coming from someone whose life was any better than my own.”

It’s a low blow, but I’ve never seen a marriage quite as miserable as Maren’s. Every time Harvey opens his mouth, it’s to deliver some new way to make her smaller. When I return from a family event, my jaw aches from clenching it.

We reach Oak Bluff, the town nearest Riverbend, and her infatuation grows.

Where I see decay and annoyances, she sees something else entirely.

The tiny diner is pronounced adorable . The old-timey swirling barber pole is also adorable.

The town’s administrative building and the Stop-n-Shop are super cute .

I sort of wish Oak Bluff had a brothel just so she’d be forced to admire it somehow, but none of this bodes well for convincing her I should sell the place off as soon as we arrive.

“Tell me about Riverbend,” Maren says, glancing my way. “It’s old, right? ”

“Yes.”

She pokes me in the side. “Stop being so informative. How old?”

“Turn of the century, I think. Like, 1899 or thereabouts.”

She gives one of those dreamy sighs of hers. “Is it a mansion? It must be, if they gave it a name.”

“It’s a dump,” I reply. “Actually, no, it was a dump years ago, and now I’m sure it’s worse.”

The statement falls on deaf ears, like I knew it would.

Maren is a dreamer. She never sees anything for what it is, only its potential, which is how she’s managed to renovate two condominiums no one even wanted and flip them for millions of dollars.

Her current place is so amazing it’s been in magazines.

But that’s also how she wound up with Harvey, and no amount of faith could renovate that guy.

A gravel lane canopied by Spanish-moss-heavy live oaks marks the start of Riverbend, plunging us in shadow.

“Charlie, I have chills,” Maren says, lifting her forearm to show me goose bumps. “It’s like something out of another century.”

I had chills when I first saw it too, though for different reasons. No females for three months was a death sentence to an eighteen-year-old. It would be a death sentence to a thirty-two-year-old as well, which is why we’re not staying long.

That summer didn’t end up being terrible.

Eventually I got used to the long days, to the quietness of it.

My mom had me and a kid from town building these two pre-fab cottages along the water, side by side—she always said it was so that we’d have a place to live while the house was being renovated, though I suspected it was just to keep me busy—but it was sort of cool, seeing them come together, watching an actual home constructed and knowing I’d been a part of it.

I was frequently bored, but peaceful in a way I hadn’t been in years—not since before my sister’s diagnosis.

And yet, for some reason, I returned to New York and remained there.

Sure, I’d learned my lesson. I never got another DUI, but everything else?

I guess my mother’s letter basically said I hadn’t learned the lessons I was supposed to.

Doesn’t mean I’ll learn them this time either, however.

“Wow,” Maren whispers, rolling down a window and reaching her arm out, as if she wants to grab one of the gloomy trees. “This is crazy. Charlie . Wow. I have a good feeling about this place.”

“You sound like the na?ve girl in a horror movie,” I warn her. “The one who dies first.”

After another thirty seconds, the house comes into view at last and that queasy guilt in my stomach worsens.

What was once a stately old Southern mansion, complete with a broad front porch, is now…

a relic. The kind of place you chance upon and wonder why the hell it’s still standing—the stairs are caving in, windowpanes are broken, the roof sags dangerously, and a massive tree branch juts out of its center like a flagpole.

This isn’t a house my mother abandoned a few months ago. It’s a house that seems to have been abandoned since I last saw it.

How could this much destruction take place over the course of twelve years?

My mother couldn’t have been living here.

God, I hope she wasn’t living here.

A better son would have known what was happening. A better son would have come back to see her.

The last time she came to visit me, she prattled on about endless bullshit that didn’t matter—her friend Marianne’s granddaughter and the clerk at the Stop-n-Shop. Now I’ve got to wonder if it was just so I never got a chance to ask her about anything real.

I pull to a stop in front of the rotting stairs, ready to suggest we just go find a hotel.

Beaufort and Hilton Head aren’t far. The structural engineer will get here within an hour and condemn the place, and we’ll find a five-star hotel and be done with it.

Hot girl with a Southern accent for me, while Maren spends the night on a call with her puppies or watching informational videos about microplastics in the water supply.

We’ll get out of Charleston in the morning.

“Ohhhh,” Maren says, however—as if she has stumbled upon the Taj Mahal by accident. “Oh, Charlie, look at this place.”

“By which you must mean, ‘Charlie, yes, it’s just as terrible as you said it would be,’ yet I’m not hearing that in your tone.”

“ Terrible? It’s an abandoned mansion surrounded by oaks! I feel like Odysseus, chancing upon the home of a god.”

“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, but I can promise you there aren’t any gods in there. I’d bet my ass there’s a family of squirrels, however.”

Maren is clearly experiencing something entirely different, as she’s out of the car and fuck ?—

“Maren, wait!” I shout, darting out of the driver’s seat and lunging in her direction. My warning comes too late. She is already on the stairs, one of which promptly starts to crack underfoot. She flails and hurtles backward, like a tree pulled out at the root.

I barely manage to catch her before she hits the ground.

She swallows, staring up at me with wide eyes. “I didn’t expect that.”

“That the stairs were going to cave in?” I’m winded, and I don’t think it’s from lunging three feet. She could have broken her fucking spine. “Clearly.”

“No,” she says with a breathless laugh. “I didn’t expect you’d bother trying to catch me.”

Of course she didn’t. We probably ought to keep it that way.