Page 45 of Getting Lucky

Iris beamed back at her, and goodness, she hadn’t known the girl had a look like that stuffed away.

“She came up with some great ideas for outreach,” Beatrice said. “She’s going to take over the Instagram account. About time we got a young person handling that.”

“Hey,” Maisie said, “I’m young.”

Beatrice just gave her a look. Which, fair enough, the Instagram account had all of four pictures on it, and one of them was of Dustin eating one of his infamous blue cheese Danishes.

Maisie lifted her hands. “Okay, fair enough. I can’t hashtag to save my life. Nor would I want to.”

“Well, we’re lucky we have Iris here,” Beatrice said. “But I bet she’ll be getting a letter from Northwestern any day now.”

“Oh, did you do Early Decision?”

Iris nodded emphatically. “I’ve wanted to go there since I was ten.”

Imagine that, having a university you’d wanted to attend since you were ten. Maisie hadn’t finished college. She’d been at the end of her second year at UNC-Asheville when her parents had died. Although she’d stayed the course for a while, she’d failed some classes in the fall, and then the idea for the shelter had come, and she’d dropped out of school. Mary always made noise about her going back, but she didn’t see the point. The shelter was her life. If she finished school, it would only be to make other people feel better about her life decisions, and that seemed like a pretty stupid reason for doing anything.

She had a sudden image of the several large pieces of furniture literally sitting on her stoop.

“Hey, Beatrice, you know everyone. You think you could rustle up a couple of people to help me move some furniture tonight? My sisters apparently took it upon themselves to get me some furniture for Christmas, but it arrived early, and it got left outside.”

Beatrice twisted her mouth to the side, thinking, but Iris jumped in before she could say anything.

“Jack and I can help you. He used to move furniture as a side hustle.”

She liked the image of Jack lifting her new furniture, those impossible arms of his looking even better while lifting…what came in a bedroom set, anyway? How much furniture were they talking? But then again, Jack had been weird on Tuesday, and if he was pissed at her or had resolved to stay away from her, she didn’t exactly want to throw herself in his face.

“I doubt he’d like to do it in his free time,” Maisie said, but Iris was already texting. God, she was fast. She found herself shifting on her feet a little while, waiting for the verdict, which pissed her off preemptively.

But Iris looked up from her phone and said, “He’s in if there’s pizza involved.”

Maisie grinned. “What do you take me for? Of course there’s pizza involved.”

“That’s settled, then,” Beatrice said. She made a shooing motion. “Now y’all get out of here. I need to wrap things up for the night.”

But she hugged both of them before they left the office, saying something softly to Iris that Maisie couldn’t hear.

Maisie and Iris headed for the front together in silence, but Iris broke it by asking, “Jack said you have dogs, too?”

Interesting. What explanation had Iris given him for being at her house?

But she just said, “Yeah. They’re going to love you.”

Then they were leaving the building, and Jack was standing against his car, arms crossed in a way that made his biceps strain against his sweater, and she felt a suspicious flutter in her belly that she refused on principle to call butterflies.

“I hear you have furniture that needs moving?” he asked.

“I hear you’re a man who knows how to move things.”

“Ugh,” Iris said with over-the-top disgust, “are you guys flirting? Let’s get over there so I can meet the dogs.”

Jack’s face turned an adorable shade of pink, and he nodded to Maisie as he ducked into the driver’s seat of his car. She found herself laughing as she got into her Jeep. To her surprise, she wasn’t thinking about getting rid of the old furniture or adjusting to new stuff. She was just thinking about the fun she was going to have with Jack and Iris. And she was looking forward to it.

* * *

“Um. Feel free to change your mind,” Maisie said, gesturing to the enormous boxes and mattress and box spring set littering the front of her house. Why had they just left it here? She’d never heard of anything like that. Fear of Einstein and Chaco didn’t properly explain it, what with the fact that the two of them, together, wouldn’t be forty pounds soaking wet. There were so many things it looked like moving day. And sure, there was probably only a dresser, a bed, plus a couple of nightstands, but it was a lot for three people, and definitely a lot if two of them were volunteer helpers paid by pizza.

“Oh, he could probably do all of this by himself,” Iris said dismissively, already heading toward the door, where Einstein and Chaco were pawing at the glass.

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