Page 43 of The Cadence

M iss Mozella sighed so heavily through the phone that I could almost feel a wind blow against the windows all the way up here in Michigan.

“Ophelia Bodine,” she said heavily. “Well. She has a beautiful sense of fashion. She always dresses to the nines, even when we were supposed to go into the attic to clear out all the boxes they’d been storing up there.

The stairs are very steep and are too hard for her to negotiate in her high heels. ”

I sat back on my bare heels and put down the scissors. “Are you saying that you had to clear out the dirty attic by yourself?”

“Dirty and hot. She was never put in the position to have to work very hard, God love her,” Miss Mozella answered. It was the nicest way in the world to say that someone was lazy.

“She had jobs,” I said, but since I’d learned about the extent of Will’s support of his parents, I had begun to doubt how diligently she’d worked at them. “You have to tell her to step up or you won’t help her anymore.”

“You know, Bug, we actually get along just fine,” she surprised me by saying. “She does play on my last nerve when she gets dramatic, but I can ignore it. She’ll quit that nonsense soon enough because it won’t get the response she’s after.”

“She needs attention,” I said.

“Don’t we all?”

Well, that was true. I picked up the scissors and opened another box. “Do you remember my grandma’s red muffin tin?”

“Of course I do! She always told me that it made everything taste sweeter.”

I held it up and smiled, but I also took a tissue to wipe my eyes.

Will had come home with another supply of them when he’d heard from the moving company that the contents of the storage unit in Tennessee would be arriving shortly.

He had wanted me to wait to unpack until he could be here with me, but I could handle it alone—as long as I had a lot of tissues.

And it was funny that even with how much I cried, I was also smiling as I looked at the contents of the boxes, like this old red tin.

I bet that my muffins would also taste sweeter when I baked with it.

Miss Mozella had called with the report on Will’s mom as I was in the middle of slicing through packing tape.

She was happy to tell me that four rooms of the Bodine house in Chattanooga were now cleared due to what must have been almost entirely her own work, and then she mentioned something else that surprised me.

“Ophelia and I were discussing a trip to Florida,” she said.

“You and Will’s mom might travel together? Really?”

“We get along,” she reminded me. “She thinks it’s funny that I’ve never been on a plane before and she told me the science behind why they stay up in the air. It does make sense.”

“Bernoulli’s principle,” I agreed, nodding. “It works.”

“It would just be a short flight. Then I might feel better about coming to see you, which I would also like to do,” she continued.

“I can come down there, too. I’ve been thinking about it because I miss everyone a whole lot.”

“Would you ever move back home?” she asked.

I looked around the house, Will’s house. It felt like this was my home, but…no. No, it wasn’t really, no matter how comfortable I was and how little I ever wanted to leave it. “I’m not sure,” I hedged.

“Bug, you listen to me,” she said sternly, and I had a good idea of what was coming.

It did.

“You can’t spend your life pining after some man who may or may not care about you,” she lectured. “I thought that living together might get him out of your system. Doesn’t familiarity breed contempt?”

That was what I had threatened Kirsten with, too. “Is that saying in the Bible?” I asked.

“You don’t know your Bible?” she demanded, and went off. My question had been a distraction that worked perfectly. She recited various verses and I thought about people living together and familiarity.

In Kirsten’s case, the familiarity was having an effect even if she and Cully hadn’t bought a house.

They were acting much, much calmer and not as sexual, which was a real relief to everyone at the grocery store.

The customers and I were spared the sight of their tongues and grasping hands, and our manager also enjoyed the reprieve.

I had wondered why, given the number of times Cully had received a talking-to, he hadn’t been fired.

It turned out that she was besties with his mom, but even she had gotten sick of the show that he and his girlfriend were putting on and she had expressed relief to me that they were cooling off.

It was the same emotion Kirsten’s grandmother felt. “I think they’re coming off the boil,” Miss Sloane had texted to me, along with some happy-face emojis. “Can you stop by later? I can show you that new stich and my granddaughter says that she’ll try knitting if you’re here.”

I had said yes to that, because it was fun to knit again and I liked Miss Sloane a lot.

I was liking Kirsten more too, because she acted a lot more rational when she was with her grandma and not trying to impress some guy.

And yes, it had also appeared to me that her relationship with Cully was cooling off, and not only because I hadn’t seen their tongues lately.

He was acting unhappy and I decided to ask him about it after I put away my grandma’s kitchen gear and went to the store.

I had something else to discuss with him, too. “Remember how you told me to…” I stopped, because suddenly we had a shopper in our lane. When he had finished loading the groceries into her buggy, I began again. “Remember how you told me to go ahead and fuck Will Bodine?”

“Holy shit, it sounds weird when you swear. I’m sorry I ever said that.

” He rubbed his mouth while shaking his head, but he’d gotten some crud on his hand and he wiped a black smear across his face.

He had to go to the bathroom to get it off, and then we resumed the conversation about sex, me, and Will.

“Why are you asking me about sleeping with him?” Cully shook his head again. “I don’t know if I want to think about that.”

Now he knew how the rest of the world felt about his own oversharing. “I’ve been going back and forth about making a move,” I answered, but I immediately held up my hand. “Wait! Don’t tell me about Kirsten unzipping your jeans. I already know that story.”

“It was pretty hot,” he said, but then he sighed. “I don’t think she’s interested in doing that anymore.”

“I heard that things were cooling off.”

“Holy shit,” he repeated. “She told you?”

“Her grandmother did,” I explained. “Why is that happening?”

“I guess it’s natural that you get sick of someone after a while.

You see more of them and maybe what you see isn’t so…

” He trailed off and looked unhappy. “Do you know that she snacks on hard-boiled eggs with anchovy paste? I’ve never smelled anything that foul!

She’s pissed at me, too. She blew up over the new floor mats I got for my car. ”

“Were they expensive? I thought you were saving for your own apartment,” I pointed out, and he scowled.

“That’s what Kirsten was yelling about. You know, I guess we didn’t used to talk very much. We were mostly screwing instead and our mouths were busy with other stuff. She really likes it when I—”

“No, sir! No, thank you!”

“Now we have more time for conversation,” he continued. “I don’t know how it’s going to go.”

I nodded sympathetically, although I didn’t really understand.

Personally, the more Will and I talked, the more I liked him.

Just yesterday, I’d sat on the counter in his bathroom while he’d shaved so that we could go over some details about the company we were both still working on.

We’d discussed what I would do when he went to the hotel with the team, as they did the night before a game.

He told me something funny that had happened with one of the wide receivers after practice the day before, and we talked more, and more.

He had almost been late and we’d both run out to the garage together, laughing, to keep talking up until the moment that he’d driven away. Then he’d called me from the road.

Cully called my attention to a shopper with a question about the price of our gourds. She explained that she was in a rush because she wanted to make a sculpture out of them, dedicated to the Woodsmen and in honor of their game tonight.

“What were you asking me?” he wondered when that was worked out. “Something about making the first move?”

“The question is, should I make a move on Will? Did you like it when it happened to you?”

“I loved it,” he admitted. “And if Kirsten hadn’t done it, I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve. She’s so pretty and fun, and her last hook-up was the Woodsmen center! I didn’t think that she’d have been interested in someone like me.”

“She is, though.”

“Yeah, and I like her a lot. Even with the anchovy paste,” he told me. “Maybe she could eat that on the porch and then brush her teeth and wash her face. And change her clothes.”

“Maybe you could discuss it,” I suggested. “She could also talk to you about budgeting, because she and her grandma and I have been working on that a lot. Miss Sloane is very savvy.”

Cully went off looking a little happier than when we’d begun our conversation, and he’d definitely given me some food for thought.

Because as the days had gone by (and holy Moses, it had gotten much colder), I had been thinking more and more about my decision to keep my heart intact by not admitting my feelings for Will.

How long could I pull this off? Could I really go on living with him forever in just this same way, as great friends with a huge secret between us?

And would my heart really stay safe that way? What if he met someone? I wouldn’t be able to sit by and watch him fall in love with another woman—