Page 64 of The Cadence
“I have the dimensions of all your furniture in my phone,” he answered. He didn’t say “of course” but his tone definitely implied those words.
“That’s a great idea!” Annie said, so enthusiastic. “I love using heirlooms.” And then they both talked about removingeverything from the storage space he’d rented in Tennessee and shipping it all north. “I’ll get right on that,” she promised, and the two of us had to leave together because she was going to be late for Bjarni’s horn lesson.
“Stay off your leg,” I warned Will sternly, but when he smiled at me, I smiled back. Then Annie elbowed me in the ribs, like I’d seen girlfriends do to each other.
“You’re happy today,” my manager at the store commented, and she smiled, too. It was like it was catching—but I did feel pretty good. I felt very good. Since the day at the beach and with his practices more limited, Will and I had been spending even more time together and I was loving it. I had also sold another piece of furniture and I’d been reading the information he’d sent to me about how to start a company. He’d printed part of the course catalog of a college nearby, and he’d highlighted some business classes he thought I might have been interested in.
“I don’t know if I want to get some kind of degree,” I’d said. Even the college logo on the paper looked intimidating to me. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You can do whatever you put your mind to,” he’d answered, and I’d been smiling then, too.
I was talking to one of the regular customers about her cat as I rang up many, many cans of his special food and a large bag of his special litter, when I heard my name.
“Calla!What’s up?”
I glanced over my shoulder at Kirsten, who stood at the next register. “Holy Moses, are you working here now?”
“No.” She pushed a few of the buttons on the machine. “I always wanted to do this.”
“You shouldn’t play with that,” I admonished. I bagged the last of the cat food and the shopper got on her way, leaving my lane clear for the moment. “Cully’s not here today.”
“He isn’t?” She pounded her fist on the keys. “How do I make it open?”
“If you’re not doing a transaction, only the manager can. There’s no money in there, anyway.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed—actually, she seemed pretty down in general. “I thought maybe Cully forgot to tell me that he was working right now, and that was why he didn’t meet me and the real estate agent.”
“The real estate agent?”
“We’re looking at houses to buy,” she explained.
“Houses to buy?”
“Why do you keep repeating me?” Kirsten demanded. Now she seemed irritated. “Yes, Cully and I are supposed to be looking for a house together, but every time I tell him to come meet me, he no-shows. It’s annoying.”
“Ok,” I said slowly. I was trying to piece together this story. “Ok. I know he talked about the two of you moving in together, but I didn’t understand that you were considering a purchase. I didn’t even know that you’d agreed to live with him.” One thing I knew for sure, though, was that Cully didn’t have any money to buy a house. He hardly had any money to get himself lunch.Every cent he had went into his car, and he’d bought turbo stuff and spoilers and fancy tires, shiny hubcaps and anything else he could find to fix it up. We didn’t make much at the grocery store to begin with and his parents were fine, but they weren’t rolling in wealth.
But someone was: Kirsten’s grandma. “She’s excited that I want to live up here, so she’s paying,” she told me, rolling her eyes and nodding. She’d done that before and I was aware that it was supposed to signal something, some secret subtext or meaning, but I didn’t understand what it was.
“Are you saying that you actually don’t want to live here?” I clarified.
“Why would I? It’s so boring compared to The—”
“Yeah, you’ve said that before,” I interrupted. “But why would you want to buy a house, then?”
Well, that was more complicated. She talked for a while about saving money because of property taxes, but it didn’t seem like she really understood what she meant and I didn’t have a clue, either. I did gather that Cully wanted to stay in Michigan and he wasn’t interested in moving far away, not even to The City.
“I could stay here and we could be together, at least for a while. He’s ok, I guess,” she told me. The words by themselves weren’t very warm and fuzzy, but it was the way she spoke that caught my attention. Her voice almost trembled and then I understood something.
“You really like him,” I stated. “You really, really like him.”
“No!” she scoffed. “He’s totally different from the guys I’m usually with. He lives with his parents and works in a grocery store, and I’m the girl who was fucking one of the Woodsmen players!”
“So what? Are you saying that you’re too good for Cully because of that? You were going at it with him in a puddle of rodent pee. And that Woodsmen player doesn’t seem to like you much now!” I told her. “You threw yourself at him when you invited yourself over to my house—I mean, over to Will’s house. Neither of them wanted anything to do with you.”
I expected her to get mad right back, but instead? Holy Moses.
“Here,” I told her, and took out the box of tissues that I kept under the register. “Are you crying over Cully?”
