Page 40 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

The next morning (it’s still morning if McDonald’s is still serving breakfast), Bobby was gone when I woke up.

Sunlight filtered into the room through the blinds, and in spite of my body’s determination that another six hours of sleep were absolutely necessary, my brain told me it was time to get up.

I showered. I dressed. I realized Bobby and I were both running low on clothes, so I found the Mais’ utility room and started a load of laundry.

I made my way upstairs, trying to catch any sound that would indicate that Bobby was nearby, or that his dad was moving around, or that Eric was in the house.

I felt like one of those admirals summoned to talk to Darth Vader—you knew it wasn’t going to go well.

But I pushed that thought aside. I decided to be optimistic. I was an optimist at heart. That’s because I remembered I still had the Malibu and, if necessary, I could drive straight north and flee the country.

Instead, though, the main floor of the house was empty.

Cooking wasn’t exactly my strong suit, and it felt doubly hazardous in a kitchen that wasn’t my own.

I put in a delivery order for coffee—LOTS of coffee—and three different breakfast scrambles.

I told myself it was because Bobby would probably want something to eat.

But let’s be honest: how is a human being supposed to decide between the Achin’ Bacon egg scramble and the Ham-ster’s Delight?

(It’s got ham, not hamsters, in it—just to be clear.)

While I waited, I went back downstairs and got out my laptop.

I’d been putting this off as long as I could.

Mostly because I was a procrastinator, which was mostly because I was a perfectionist. (Although you’d never believe it to see my sock drawer.

Bobby gasped the first time he saw it.) (He didn’t; I made that up.) (And for frick’s sake, they’re socks—as long as you can find two of them, why does it matter?

What is everyone’s obsession with folding them in neat little pairs, which is—now that I think about it—probably heteronormative?) (You can say anything is heteronormative if you’re gay.)

Anyway.

I went to work on my laptop. I’d spent enough time feeling sorry for myself about the agent rejections. Now, it was time to get back on the horse.

See, that’s the thing about writing. You never know if you’re going to touch a live wire.

You never know if it’s going to be as good as you hope.

That’s why, in all art, there’s some degree of magic.

All you can do is try your best and keep creating, keep working toward that moment when the muse speaks or whispers or, uh, tickles.

All you can do is keep trying, so that someday you’ll make something that will touch someone else—comfort them, or excite them, or make them smile.

All you can do—and I guess this goes for life in general—is hope.

I worked my way through each rejection email again.

If you haven’t gotten a bevy of rejections before (cue jokes about my dating life), you might not know that there’s a range of, uh, quality, at least in terms of feedback.

Some agents simply don’t respond. Like, ever.

(Rude, right?) And others send a one-line rejection.

(I even got a one- word rejection once. The word was No .) But sometimes, they write a little more.

They might tell you what wasn’t working for them with the opening pages, or with the character, or with the voice. They might tell you they got bored.

And at the end of the day, all feedback is data. The trick is mining that data for something valuable.

So, I set to work, combing through the emails, making a list of the feedback I’d gotten.

Like I said, it wasn’t a ton. But I’d go back.

I’d take another look at A Work in Progress .

I’d see if there were ways I could make Will Gower’s first story stronger, if I could make it better, if I could address the things that these agents had stumbled over.

And then, at some point, I’d have to let it go, and I’d write something else.

(I mean, all that was in theory. Let me tell you: I am a master at avoidance, and I was already brainstorming all the time I could waste turning this “data” into spreadsheets and graphs and maybe even rallying a focus group that didn’t include a certain fortysomething who had once thrown themselves dramatically on a fainting sofa, in the middle of my reading, and declaimed, If he waffles about which door to open one more time I’m going to scream! And then they did scream.)

My phone buzzed. I grabbed it, expecting it to be Bobby, but instead, Indira’s name showed on the screen.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Oh my God, the sheriff didn’t arrest you, did she?”

Indira laughed. “No. I am, apparently, cleared of all charges, although the sheriff did give me a talking-to about my decision to avoid arrest.”

“She’s terrifying, right? I mean, she’s amazing. But terrifying.”

“She’s a formidable woman. And an excellent sheriff.” Indira’s tone lilted with amusement. “She told me that she plans on having a conversation with you about your decision to investigate even after she asked you not to.”

“Thank God I’m in Portland. I’ll be back in about ten years.”

Indira laughed quietly. When it faded, she said, “Thank you for what you did, Dash.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“Of course I do. You saved my life.”

“Well, technically you saved my life.” In a rush, I added, “And I love you, so obviously I’m going to help you.”

“I love you too,” she said. “My life is much better—and much more interesting—with you in it. I hope you know that.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

“How’s Bobby?” she asked. “I didn’t want to bother him.”

“Better, I think. Day by day. You know how it is.”

“I do.”

“How are you?” I asked.

“Better, I think.”

“You don’t have to be better. You don’t have to have some sort of miracle cure. What you went through was awful, and it doesn’t matter how many years it’s been, or what’s happened since then.”

“I know. I do, Dash, believe me. And I appreciate you saying that. But I meant what I told Larry. I’m not alone anymore. I’ll be all right.”

A part of me wanted to rush in and offer more reassurances—that she didn’t have to be all right, that she could feel whatever she needed to feel for as long as she needed to feel it.

But she knew all that. And, by some miracle, I kept my trap shut.

“In happier news,” Indira said, “I’ve been talking to Talmage.”

“You have?”

Indira laughed. “Believe it or not, we have a lot to talk about.”

“That’s putting it lightly.”

She laughed again, but her voice grew brisk again as she said, “Mal had managed things so that she doesn’t really have any ownership in Mizzenmast.”

“Since Jethro’s inheriting everything, what’s she going to do? Take him to court?”

“I don’t think so. In fact, Jethro seemed amenable to a new arrangement. He’s a sweet young man, and I think he really does want to do the right thing.” Her voice grew dry. “Although my brother is going to have a fit when he finds out Nalini has a boyfriend.”

“A very rich boyfriend.”

“There is that.”

“So, what’s the new arrangement?”

“Oh, well, I still have the money from my settlement with Mal. I asked Talmage if she wanted a silent partner. She really is talented, you know, and I think Mizzenmast could do quite well under the right management.”

“Wow,” I said. “Indira, that’s really kind of you.”

“It’s a bit selfish, actually. We’d be partners.” A note I couldn’t quite identify ran under the next words. “I’d even do some work in the kitchen.”

The sting in my eyes caught me off guard, and it took me a moment to swallow, take a deep breath, and try to find a normal voice. “That’s great,” I finally managed. “You’re going to be great.”

From upstairs came the sound of the front door, and then the familiar timbre of Bobby’s voice, although the words were indistinct.

“I’d better go,” I said.

“Give Bobby my love,” Indira said. “And let us know if he needs anything.”

“Will do.”

“We’d like to come to the service if that’d be okay.”

“I think that would mean a lot to him. I’ll let you know once they have it all arranged.”

Pocketing the phone, I trotted up the spiral staircase.

Bobby was crouched next to a cardboard box in the living room. His dad was draping a red cloth across the small table I’d noticed the night before. Mr. Mai nodded at me. Bobby glanced up, smiled, and said, “Morning, babe.”

“Morning.” I joined him next to the box and scritched lightly at the back of his neck. “Where have you guys been?”

“Storage unit,” Bobby said. He lifted out a frame and displayed it for me.

It held a faded photo, with the saturated colors of another era.

The woman in it was young and slender with a bob of black hair and sensible bangs.

Her expression was serious, but she looked happy.

And even in the slightly yellow cast to the photo’s colors, her eyes were an unmistakable burnt bronze.

A matching pair was looking up at me.

“It’s for the ancestral altar,” Bobby said. “Although Eric threw a fit, so we’re splitting the difference and calling it a memory table.”

For the second time that day, my throat was tight. “That’s a nice picture.”

He looked at it as though seeing it for the first time. His thumb rubbed the corner of the frame.

Then his dad held out a hand, and Bobby passed him the picture and went back to rummaging in the box.

I was lowering myself to the floor to help him when my phone buzzed with a notification that my three (count them: three) breakfast bowls had been delivered. Along with approximately an oil tanker’s worth of coffee. Which I would now have to carry in from the porch in front of Bobby’s dad.

I only groaned a little.

“Everything okay?” Bobby asked.

“Peachy.”

When I came back from the porch with the bags loaded with food, Bobby got that huge, goofy grin again. He must have seen something on my face, though, because he ducked his head and got very busy looking inside that box again.

“Mr. Mai,” I said, “I got us breakfast.”

Honest to God: Bobby broke up laughing. It only lasted for a second, and then he burrowed even deeper inside that box.

“Thank you,” Mr. Mai said.

“We’re going to keep working, babe,” Bobby said; he was still rummaging around, finding excuses not to look at me, but I could hear the edge of laughter in his voice. “You go ahead without us.”

And that was how I ended up eating my breakfast bowl on the couch.

(For the record, I went half-and-half with the Ham-ster and the Bacon Breakfast or whatever it was called.) I drank coffee.

I checked Crime Cats on my phone. (There was one about a Siamese who had concocted a purrfect plan to sleep inside a box in the sun, and it was honestly so heartwarming that I forgot about my plans for revenge on Bobby Mai.) I moved on to an exposé about cats sitting in things that weren’t boxes.

One was a kitten in a mug—God, it was so cute I almost died.

Bobby and his dad worked silently while I ate.

Their interactions were minimal: they handed things back and forth, held things up for inspection, moved around each other without needing to say anything.

The memory table was slowly coming together.

On it, now, there was the red cloth, and the framed photo of a young Mrs. Mai, and an incense burner.

A vase held lilies and chrysanthemums, and Bobby was unpacking plastic containers of the lotus flowers I’d finally managed to track down.

“Dash found these,” Bobby said to his dad as he set the first one on the table.

Mr. Mai said, “Thank you, Dash.”

And then the two of them went back to their silent work together. As Bobby started rooting around inside the box again, his dad stepped out of the room. Bobby pulled a small wooden painting of a dragon out of the box and smiled as he showed it to me. “She did this in eighth grade.”

“That’s amazing you still have it.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “It is. It’s pretty good, right? I didn’t even know she liked to paint.”

He turned his attention back to the table, and he was busy trying to find a place for the painting when his dad came back. Mr. Mai was carrying something in his hand. He knelt next to Bobby, and Bobby shifted automatically, moving to give his dad space as he turned back to the box.

Mr. Mai held out the small item he’d brought with him, and Bobby stopped.

It was an old iPod. Like, old old. It was scratched. The screen had a crack in it. The symbols were wearing off from use.

And I saw, in my mind, Bobby lying in bed, or stretched out on the floor, or folding laundry. Always with his earbuds in. Always with his music.

Bobby looked at the iPod for a long time. Then he took it from his dad and started to set it on the table.

Mr. Mai stopped him. It was the first time I’d seen them touch: Mr. Mai’s weathered hands caught Bobby’s, and he brought Bobby’s hands back down, away from the table. And then, trembling, Mr. Mai folded Bobby’s fingers around the iPod and squeezed Bobby’s hands in his own.