Page 11 of The Kiss Principle

“Drugs?”

“Huh? Oh, no. I don’t use anything.”

“Not even weed?”

“You offered me a vape.”

“I asked you a question.”

“No, not even weed.”

“A Xanax you got from your friend, and it’s only this once, and you need it to calm down. You never do addies, but you’re so tired, and so this one time it’ll be okay. You hurt your back, and your mom never finished her pain pills from when she had surgery.”

He shook his head. “I don’t use any drugs.”

“I’m serious, Zé. If you’re on a prescription, we can talk about it, but otherwise I do not want that shit in my house. I don’t want any connection to that shit. It’s bad enough my brother—” But I stopped myself. “This is your last chance.”

His face was hard, and I realized, with a kind of shock, how much I’d pressed him. “I don’t use.”

“All right. Then we’ll see about the background check.” I didn’t know how to do one myself, but I knew someone who did. “I can pay you twenty dollars an hour, and I’d need you here from eight to five on weekdays.”

His jaw sagged. And then, maybe because he didn’t have anywhere else for the emotion to go, he hugged the baby to him and nodded as a tear slid down his cheek. He shouldered it away. He was smiling, and he didn’t seem to know it, and somehow, that made the smile go through me like an arrow.

“Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to take such good care of—”

He hesitated and looked up at me.

I stroked the baby’s hair, and my fingers brushed his. I didn’t mean to say it; a part of me knew I was making a mistake. But the words slipped out anyway. “Isabela. It was my grandmother’s name.”

6

“You look like shit,” Lou said when I got out of the Escalade.

She was a big woman, as tall as me and barreled with muscle, and she wore her dark hair chopped short. The ends of it bristled out from under a John Deere hat. When her mother had named her Lourdes, she’d probably been hoping for good little Catholic girl, maybe even one who would grow up to be a nun. Which goes to show that it’s stupid to hope for things, especially when other people are involved.

Leaning on a wheelbarrow, Lou gave me a closer look as she pulled off her gloves. We’d known each other in college, and we’d stayed in touch even though we’d taken different paths. I’d finished my degree via night classes as soon as I got a job. She, on the other hand, now ran one of the largest grows in the county—acres of hoop houses lined up one next to each other, each of them full of cannabis, until the fields gave way to scrub and stunted, dusty pines. The air held the muskiness of the crop, mixed with a dark, loamy earthiness. Near the road, a massive steel framework mounted on a concrete foundation told me that Lou’s plans for an indoor grow facility were underway.

“Look who’s talking,” I said. “Dakota lets you out of the house like that? Dressed like Paul Bunyan about to go fuck Babe?”

“Dakota’s visiting her mom, and fuck you, and what the fuck happened to you?”

“Long story,” I said. “What the fuck are you waiting for? I’m fucking starving.”

“Fuck off. Fucking pansy-ass wearing your fucking white Lacoste tennis shoes to a fucking farm like a fucking idiot.”

I mimed jerking off.

“Yeah,” she said as she pushed off with the wheelbarrow. “You’re a pro at that.”

I almost laughed, but that would have ruined everything.

She headed for the barn, and I made my way to the house. It was frame, white clapboard, and built sometime in the 1930s. To hear Lou tell it, the first farm, all the way back when somebody had first broken open the ground and started working this land, had been hemp. She liked telling people that. Wouldn’t shut up about it, in fact. Particularly the part about how now a couple of lesbians were making a fortune with a legal grow.

Boards creaked as I went up onto the porch. The door was heavy and had a tendency to stick in the frame, and inside, the house was clean, but old lady curtains and a lot of junk made the place feel small and dark. Part of that was the old-fashioned layout, with lots of little rooms. And part of it was the fact that Lou was basically a hoarder, but she specialized in literally anything she thought she might use to fix something on the farm. One room was full of two-liter bottles she’d saved, don’t ask me why.

The kitchen, though, had the curtains open, and the window looked out on all that beautiful grass. The linoleum was worn down to the backing, and the furniture looked like it was as old as the house (even the refrigerator looked like it predated Eisenhower). But the room was full of light, and it smelled like curry and pepper and cauliflower.

Lou’s heavy footsteps announced her passage through the house.

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