Page 73 of The Cadence
Miss Mozella sighed so heavily through the phone that I could almost feel a wind blow against the windows all the way up here in Michigan. “Ophelia Bodine,” she said heavily. “Well. She has a beautiful sense of fashion. She always dresses to the nines, even when we were supposed to go into the attic to clear out all the boxes they’d been storing up there. The stairs are very steep and are too hard for her to negotiate in her high heels.”
I sat back on my bare heels and put down the scissors. “Are you saying that you had to clear out the dirty attic by yourself?”
“Dirty and hot. She was never put in the position to have to work very hard, God love her,” Miss Mozella answered. It was the nicest way in the world to say that someone was lazy.
“She had jobs,” I said, but since I’d learned about the extent of Will’s support of his parents, I had begun to doubt how diligently she’d worked at them. “You have to tell her to step up or you won’t help her anymore.”
“You know, Bug, we actually get along just fine,” she surprised me by saying. “She does play on my last nerve when she gets dramatic, but I can ignore it. She’ll quit that nonsense soon enough because it won’t get the response she’s after.”
“She needs attention,” I said.
“Don’t we all?”
Well, that was true. I picked up the scissors and opened another box. “Do you remember my grandma’s red muffin tin?”
“Of course I do! She always told me that it made everything taste sweeter.”
I held it up and smiled, but I also took a tissue to wipe my eyes. Will had come home with another supply of them when he’d heard from the moving company that the contents of the storage unit in Tennessee would be arriving shortly. He had wanted me to wait to unpack until he could be here with me, but I could handle it alone—as long as I had a lot of tissues. And it was funny that even with how much I cried, I was also smiling as I looked at the contents of the boxes, like this old red tin. I bet that my muffins would also taste sweeter when I baked with it.
Miss Mozella had called with the report on Will’s mom as I was in the middle of slicing through packing tape. She was happy to tell me that four rooms of the Bodine house in Chattanooga were now cleared due to what must have been almost entirely her own work, and then she mentioned something else that surprised me.
“Ophelia and I were discussing a trip to Florida,” she said.
“You and Will’s mom might travel together? Really?”
“We get along,” she reminded me. “She thinks it’s funny that I’ve never been on a plane before and she told me the science behind why they stay up in the air. It does make sense.”
“Bernoulli’s principle,” I agreed, nodding. “It works.”
“It would just be a short flight. Then I might feel better about coming to see you, which I would also like to do,” she continued.
“I can come down there, too. I’ve been thinking about it because I miss everyone a whole lot.”
“Would you ever move back home?” she asked.
I looked around the house, Will’s house. It felt like this was my home, but…no. No, it wasn’t really, no matter how comfortable I was and how little I ever wanted to leave it. “I’m not sure,” I hedged.
“Bug, you listen to me,” she said sternly, and I had a good idea of what was coming.
It did.
“You can’t spend your life pining after some man who may or may not care about you,” she lectured. “I thought that living together might get him out of your system. Doesn’t familiarity breed contempt?”
That was what I had threatened Kirsten with, too. “Is that saying in the Bible?” I asked.
“You don’t know your Bible?” she demanded, and went off. My question had been a distraction that worked perfectly. She recited various verses and I thought about people living together and familiarity.
In Kirsten’s case, the familiarity was having an effect even if she and Cully hadn’t bought a house. They were acting much, much calmer and not as sexual, which was a real relief to everyone at the grocery store. The customers and I were spared the sight of their tongues and grasping hands, and our manager also enjoyed the reprieve. I had wondered why, given the number of times Cully had received a talking-to, he hadn’t been fired. It turned out that she was besties with his mom, but even she had gotten sick of the show that he and his girlfriend were putting on and she had expressed relief to me that they were cooling off.
It was the same emotion Kirsten’s grandmother felt. “I think they’re coming off the boil,” Miss Sloane had texted to me, along with some happy-face emojis. “Can you stop by later? I can show you that new stich and my granddaughter says that she’ll try knitting if you’re here.”
I had said yes to that, because it was fun to knit again and I liked Miss Sloane a lot. I was liking Kirsten more too, because she acted a lot more rational when she was with her grandma and not trying to impress some guy. And yes, it had also appeared to me that her relationship with Cully was cooling off, and not only because I hadn’t seen their tongues lately. He was acting unhappy and I decided to ask him about it after I put away my grandma’s kitchen gear and went to the store.
I had something else to discuss with him, too. “Remember how you told me to…” I stopped, because suddenly we had a shopper in our lane. When he had finished loading the groceries into her buggy, I began again. “Remember how you told me to go ahead and fuck Will Bodine?”
“Holy shit, it sounds weird when you swear. I’m sorry I ever said that.” He rubbed his mouth while shaking his head, but he’d gotten some crud on his hand and he wiped a black smear across his face. He had to go to the bathroom to get it off, and then we resumed the conversation about sex, me, and Will.
“Why are you asking me about sleeping with him?” Cully shook his head again. “I don’t know if I want to think about that.”
