Page 11 of Switching Graves

Stepping around me, she rushes to stack the other three buckets she’s already moved, then picks them up before heading toward the back.

I follow half a step behind. “You told me you’d never sell to those stick-in-the-ass bureaucrats. Paul would never have wanted you to.”

It’s a low blow, bringing her dead husband into it, but she knows damn-well that I’m right. The couple prattled on for years about how they resisted the investment companies that triedcoming in here, offering the world for their priceless piece of downtown Briarwood.

“Paul isn’t here, and neither is the money. I have to do something to get myself out of this hole.”

I slow my steps as we pass the ‘employees only’ sign, forcing myself to lean against the metal work table and relax a little before I say something I shouldn’t. Something worse than calling her out for being a sellout.

As my hand hits the cool material, the edges of my vision blurs before a memory plays out in my mind.

A younger, happier version of Paul and Carol are locked into a tight embrace. The store room is cleaner than I’ve ever seen it in all my years working for them. In fact, it’s practically empty. When they pull away from each other, Paul keeps his hands wrapped around Carol’s arms and smiles down at her.

“Congratulations, my love,”he says, letting his gaze roll around the room.

I recognize their clothing from the photo Carol keeps in her office. It’s the first day they got the keys to the shop.

As quickly as it came, the vision fades out and I’m stuck back in the same spot beside an older, much more miserable Carol.

Ever since my fourteenth birthday, I get these random flashbacks at the oddest times. The first one I experienced, I thought I was losing my mind. We were packing up my parent’s home to sell after they died and I was going through my mom’s vanity table. I picked up a tube of her bright red lipstick, and was instantly transported to what appeared to be a memory of her and my dad leaving on a date. Her belly was swollen and pregnant, and his face had far less worry lines than the last time I saw him.

I thought I was going out of my mind. I don’t know why it happens, and I’ve never told another soul about it. Not even Poppy.

Blinking the rest of the memory away, I take a step from the table to avoid it happening again.

“You’re only giving me a month, though? How long have you known?”

She begins plucking the wilting flowers out of the pots and throwing them onto the table across from me, emptying the buckets into the floor drain as she goes.

“A couple months. I wasn’t sure it would work out.”

A couple months. She’s had no problem collecting my rent and utilizing my desperation for money as an excuse to add hours to my schedule. Hours that forced me to miss more than a few classes at the community college this semester.

“Carol, how the hell am I supposed to find a job and a new apartment in thirty days?”

She shrugs, turning away from me to avoid my stare. “I don’t know, kid. It hasn’t been easy for me, either. But people like us are resilient like that. We’ll both land on our feet.”

Yeah, except she’ll land on hers with a fat check to cash and still have a home to go to at the end of the day.

“You should have told me sooner,” I insist bitterly, tossing the paper onto the table beside me.

I can’t even stand to look at it anymore. I spent most of the night reading and rereading it so many times, I could recite it from memory. By the time I found it lying on my welcome mat, she was long gone and rejected all my calls for the rest of the evening. I woke up this morning positive it had to be some sort of prank she was pulling. The moment I heard her moving around downstairs, I came running to question her.

Carol sighs, bracketing her hands on her hips before she finally faces me for the first time. “Look, I’ll talk you up to anyone who calls—let them know you’re a damn good worker and you’re always on time for rent. This isn’t anything personal. I just had to do what was best for me for once.”

Rolling my neck, I lift my chin toward the ceiling—toward my apartment and everything I own sitting one floor above us. I’ve worked for Carol and Paul at Flower Power since I was fifteen. On my seventeenth birthday, when everything built up with Divina and we finally had the falling out that got me kicked out, they offered me the space upstairs as a place to stay.

Since then, I’ve found a home in this cozy, dumpy little flower shop and a family in its owners that I haven’t had since my parents died. And without a single warning from Carol, she’s ripping it all out from underneath me again. Reminding me that Divina was right all along, and I have absolutely no one in this world who truly has my back—outside of Poppy.

“I have to go pack,” I mumble into the sky, twisting on my heels to head toward the stairway in the back of the building before she can stop me.

Poppy falls onto the couch across from mine, throwing her phone down on the cushion beside her with a frustrated huff. Kicking her legs up onto the coffee table, she tilts her head backward and releases another long sigh.

She’s always had a key to my place to use whenever she needs, and I’ve never turned her away. Although, I’d much rather spend the night wallowing alone.

“How has your day been?” I robotically voice the question she’s begging me to ask without lifting my eyes from my laptop and endless apartment search.

At this point, I won’t be able to afford a place within twenty miles of the community college unless I take on a second or third job—if I can find them. And then there’s the question of whether my scrappy car can make the trip each day.

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