Page 69 of Salty Pickle

Now her eyes glisten.

“Oh, Lucy. I’m sorry. Did it get built?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I refuse to drive out there and look. It’s outside Louisville. I can’t bear to see it. I want to remember it as it was.”

“I passed through that area last year. There’s farmland out there.”

“But the city was encroaching.” She returns to dragging her fork through the casserole.

I run the back of my hand over my beard. So, this is her fallout with her parents. “What about your mom?”

“She’s a petroleum engineer!” Lucy’s lips press tightly together. “It’s like he married someone as far from BeeBee as he could get!”

“Were you vegetarian when you were a kid?”

“As soon as I could protest. Age six or so. They went to great lengths to fool me. Grinding up meat and mixing it in my soups. Lying about the ingredients in pretty much everything. It’s like they thought I was judging them for eating meat. I don’t care who eats meat. I just don’t want to. The farm was the last resort.”

“Did you ask your dad about buying it yourself?”

“I begged him to hold onto it until I got a job. I would pay for it. I would find a way. But he didn’t want me living out there. He wanted me to have a big-city job, like my brother. I was majoring in finance because that’s what he would help me pay for.”

Another mystery explained. “What does your brother do?”

Lucy shakes her head, setting her fork down. “He’s a crypto, blockchain, tech bro.”

“And Dad is proud?”

“Totally. He thinks he’s cutting edge.”

“When was the last time you talked to them?”

“Graduation. I didn’t invite them, but they showed up anyway.”

“How long was that after BeeBee…”

“Her funeral? About four months. When I first saw them there, I was stupidly hopeful, like maybe he’d give me the deed to her farm as a graduation gift.”

“And he didn’t.”

“He offered me a job at his company! Buying and selling more strip malls!” She pushes a hunk of hair behind her ear. “I took off. I didn’t answer their calls. And I never took a job in finance.”

“Have you been living in a yurt all this time?”

“No. I lived with April and Summer until I got Matilda. In school, I had an internship as a clerk in a small accounting office, and I stayed there awhile after graduation. But then I got tired of being around people who worried so much about money. So I left and added more yoga classes to my roster.”

“And then you came to the Castle Hotel for New Year’s Eve.”

“And then I met you. Yes.”

I sip my water. “Hard to say which of these events was the most impactful.”

“Oh, you, by a long shot. There has never been three minutes of my time that was more life changing.”

“Three minutes!” I sit up. “What are you talking about? We were in that room for hours!”

She laughs at that, and despite the insult, I’m relieved to see her recovering from talking about hard things.

“You are too easy to tweak, Court Armstrong. But the most critical part was maybe thirty seconds.”

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