Page 3 of Home Sweet Home

But when she’d seen that the class cost a thousand dollars, any hope she’d harbored had drained out of her body. If one class cost that much, she couldn’t imagine how much four years would set them back.

“I’m working on it.” Evie crossed her arms over her chest. She wasn’t, not really. The only thing she’d been working on was trying to make sure they didn’t sink under the crushing waves of financial destitution. But this wasn’t Josh’s problem to solve. It was hers.

A familiar look of defeat crossed Josh’s face, and he gave her a terse nod before shutting the door.

While she waited for the water heater to kick back in, Evie started on Ryleigh’s birthday cupcakes. Kayla had given Evie “total creative control” over the desserts for Ryleigh’s party. Her only instruction was that Ryleigh was obsessed withMonsters, Inc.“I can recite every word of that movie in my fucking sleep,” she’d said.

Evie pulled out boxes of butter to soften and measured flour on the scale, which kept erroring out.

“Stupid thing,” Evie said through gritted teeth, giving the base a hard whack, and the numbers reappeared. She should have been grateful her hack had worked—the scale had been broken for months, and her success rate had been middling—but it was as if the numbers were taunting her.

Thirty minutes later, hot water blissfully returned. Evie put on a playlist on her phone and sank into the steaming water, wondering why nothing in her life could just be easy. Not her brother. Not her job. Not baking. Not even taking a bath. The bathwater sloshed against the sides of the tub as Evie sank deeper, her chin bobbing below the surface.

She hadn’t heard West Hawthorne’s name in a long time, and she would have been perfectly happy to keep it that way. Sometimes when she was falling asleep and her brain ran through a highlight reel of the memories she would rather forget, she thought about West. The image was always the same. She was fifteen, he was seventeen, and they were sitting in his canary-yellow Jeep in the school parking lot before the first bell. He had that stupid grin on his face, the same one in his Devils photo, as he swiped a cupcake from the Tupperware on her lap then swallowed it in a bite. She’d been so happy—and so oblivious to the hurt lingering just around the corner, waiting to pounce.

What had happened with West had happened a long time ago, almost ten years before, but when she heard his name on the TV, it came back to her, as fresh as steaming cake just out of the oven.

The steroids surprised her. Even before he’d made it to the big leagues, West had always been the quintessential golden boy, and of all the things she imagined him as, she’d never pegged him as a cheater. Back when he’d played in Creek Water, he could have played half as well as he was capable and still been better than every other boy within a hundred miles.

Evie sank deeper into the water, hoping to calm the rage coursing through her veins. West Hawthorne had gotten out of Creek Water. He’d made it to the major leagues. Though she didn’t know for sure, she assumed he had millions of dollars—and hordes of adoring fans. Well, maybe they weren’t so adoring anymore. He had a winning lottery ticket, and he’d lit a match, touched it to the corner, and set it on fire, like it meant absolutely nothing.

The first chords of “Chiquitita” played, and Evie’s eyes watered. The window was open. It must have been allergies from spring turning into summer, pollen floating in each time the breeze picked up. Her mom used to play this song on an old boombox they’d bought from Goodwill and kept even when everyone else in town had iPods. They would sing along, extremely out of tune and more than once with made-up lyrics. Some days, it was the only thing that could draw Evie out of her room or bring a smile to her face.

Evie dunked her head under the water, and the muffled quiet helped her pretend nothing else existed, until a noise cut through the surface.

She couldn’t remember the last time someone had rung her doorbell. There was the occasional Jehovah’s Witness trying to turn her into a disciple, and sometimes, when the mailbox rusted shut, Randy handed her the mail with an annoyed sigh.

Kayla was always in and out of Evie’s house, but she walked straight through the front door. Evie left it unlocked. The habit, which she’d picked up from her mother, was not uncommon in Creek Water, a town so tiny she could walk the perimeter in less time than it took to bake banana bread. “What if the neighbor needs a cup of sugar?” her mom used to joke.

In less than a minute, Evie dried off and shoved on clean clothes. As she opened the front door, she attempted to straighten out her T-shirt, which clung to her still-damp stomach.

“Hi there, Evie,” Gloria said, sunglasses perched on her ample forehead, pineapple-print muumuu swinging in the afternoon breeze, a manila envelope tucked under her arm. “Can I come in?”

Seeing Gloria, who worked at the bank, at her front door had Evie’s heart thumping like a dog’s leg, so loud, she was sure Gloria could hear. She showed Gloria to the kitchen, remembering too late the mess she’d left. Empty butter boxes were scattered everywhere, flour dusted every surface, and a bowl of white buttercream sat on the counter, waiting for food coloring.

“Smells good,” Gloria said as she settled into a chair. It creaked underneath her weight.

Evie slid into the seat across from Gloria. Through the window of the oven door, batter rose into soft mounds. “Cupcakes. Ryleigh’s birthday.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Gloria said. “Time sure flies. She must be—what? Seven now?”

Evie nodded, biting her lip. Her chest was tight from the breath she’d been holding since she’d opened the door and seen Gloria.

“This isn’t good news, honey, so I’m just gonna get to it.” Gloria opened the metal latch on the envelope and slid a stack of papers across the table. “This right here says you’re five months late on your mortgage payments.” She pointed to an amount underlined on the top sheet. Four thousand dollars.

Evie glanced at the mountain of bills sitting on the counter and shook her head. “I’m always behind, Gloria. You know that.”

In the years since her mom died, every waking second had been filled with anxiety, her pulse spiking at each unknown caller on her phone, potentially a collector. Even hearing Randy’s car idling outside while he shoved envelopes into her mailbox was enough to give her heart palpitations, while she wondered what new bill had arrived to torment her. By some miracle, she’d kept it together, but just barely, because every time she managed to get ahead, something came up.

The past few months had been overflowing with somethings. There was the time she’d opened the refrigerator, greeted by warm air and spoiled groceries she’d bought just two days before. The most harrowing experience had been when the brakes in her car failed at the same stoplight where her mom had died. Evie had pulled into the shop, still shaking. The turbulent roil in her stomach only amped up again when the mechanic handed her the bill for her new brakes. The mechanic, Kenny, was Kayla’s ex-boyfriend, and even with a generous friends-and-family discount, the repairs had drained the small balance in her bank account—and cost her a thirty-dollar overdraft fee when she went over by eighty-seven cents.

The worst something, though, had been Josh’s broken arm, which he’d somehow managed while rollerblading alone on the asphalt basketball court in the park. He’d rolled himself to the diner in the middle of her shift, bone protruding from his skin, his wrist like a cliff overlooking his forearm, an inch higher than it should have been, his face white from the shock. When the hospital gave her the bill, she was sure they’d gotten it wrong. They had insurance. But she’d handed over her Visa anyway. Josh’s memento had been a cast, with only his friend Oliver’s signature on it in small block letters, but she still had three thousand dollars on her Visa, and the balance grew with each passing month.

“By a month or two,” Gloria said. “Five months, that’s something new.”

“No one called,” Evie said, unsure why she was protesting, but as the words came out, she remembered. She’d always been a favorite of the collections reps at Visa, but after the broken arm, they’d started to call more frequently. Each time the number flashed on her screen, her stomach felt like she was on a rocking ship on a turbulent sea, so she’d set her phone to send unknown numbers directly to voicemail. Then she deleted the messages because she couldn’t bring herself to listen to them.

“Called a few times. Sent a few letters too. Haven’t seen you at the bank in a while, so I thought I’d stop by. Talk in person.” Gloria slid the stack of papers closer to Evie, her finger landing on a spot in the middle of the page. “This right here says you’ve got to pay the bank what’s owed, or they’ll foreclose.”

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