Page 136 of Perfect Mess

This wasn’t Aunt Catherine’s house anymore.

This was my house.

This was my home.

“Mary?” Gary took my hand in his.

“I’m not selling it,” I said at last. “I think it’s time I put down some roots.”

Gary looked at me long and hard. “Good.”

I should have been scared. I should have been terrified. It would not be easy keeping up with a permanent mortgage and a car payment and electric bills. Sewer. Water. Cable. Pool service. I was going to need a pool service. And I’d have to find someone to take care of the lawn.

“Mary.” Gary’s voice momentarily quelled the rising tide of panic. “Just breathe.”

I did as I was told. I breathed. Long. Slow. Deep. Long. Slow. Deep. It must have worked because my dirty slut brain kicked back into high gear again.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?”

Gary looked at me like I needed fitted for a straight jacket. “Why would I be mad at you?”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“I do think you’re crazy, sometimes, oftentimes, but not for this. I knew you’d come around, eventually.”

“But I almost sold it …” I realized how close I had actually come. If Bonnie or Joyce had handed me a pen and a contract a few minutes earlier …

Gary gave my hand a squeeze. “If you would have said that you were going to take one of those other offers, I was prepared to make you an offer myself. Then I would have insisted on a really long closing. However long it took for you to come to your senses. The sense to realize you should just keep the place for yourself.”

Gary was the one not making any sense. I smiled. “That’s kind, but I would never let you take on that kind of burden.”

Gary shrugged. “No burden at all. Remember Rodney Banks from D&D club?”

I remembered him. One of Gary’s nerd friends. “Gnome Illusionist, right? The kid who used all his spell points to create illusions of naked Elven nymphs.”

“That’s him. Anyway, he went to Yale at the same time I did. Now he’s an investment banker. Helped me set some things up during the architect years.”

I scanned Gary’s face again for any sign that he was joking, but I could tell that he wasn’t.

“Good old Rodney may have had an Elven nymph fetish, but he sure as heck knew what he was doing when it came to picking stocks.”

For the next thirty seconds, I tried in vain to wrap my head around the reality that I was going to be a house owner. A real one this time. Not a temporary asset holder waiting for a transaction to close. No, wait, not a house owner. That wasn’t the right word. Now, I actually owned ahome.

But my sudden and unexpected sense of peace and well-being was short-lived. As soon as I heard the knock on the door, I knew things were too good to be true. There was no way the Universe was going to let me off the hook that easily.

I opened the door, Gary standing tall beside me. I half expected to see the grim reaper standing there. Or an IRS agent. Or Justin Bieber with an army of lawyers suing me for past karaoke sins.

It wasn’t any of those things. The person standing at my door was Janet. Her face was red. I could tell right away that she had been crying.

“Janet?”

“Mary.”

Another face poked out from behind Janet’s head. It was Ralph. Janet reached one arm back over her shoulder and Ralph dutifully maneuvered a loose tissue from a tissue box into her outstretched hand. When Janet blew her nose, the resulting honk attracted every eligible goose within a twenty-mile radius.

Before I knew what was happening, Janet rushed forward and wrapped me in her arms.

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