“Come on, Lace, out of bed,” he said, smacking me repeatedly with a pillow. “This is starting to look like something out of Valley of the Dolls. And not in the fun way.”
“I’m coming, but only for the ice cream.” I grumbled, snatching the container from his hand and wrapping the quilt around my shoulders. Emmett, who’d always had a flair for the dramatic, took the tail end of the quilt and carried it like a royal train.
“What time is it?” I asked, using the spoon he ceremoniously presented to dig into the melty chocolate.
“Around four,” Emmett said. “Why were you up at the butt crack of dawn?”
“Writing,” I said. “The sad story of my life. My lawyer wants my thoughts on how exactly my marriage went to crap.”
“Well, it started when you married a pompous, pretentious, prematurely old man,” he snorted.
Emmett loved alliteration, but he had never liked Mike. When Mike and I started dating, I thought it was normal for Emmett to treat Mike like an annoying younger brother. And after a few years, I blamed the distance between them on Mike’s latent homophobia. But now I had to admit that Emmett’s “asshat radar” was just more acutely tuned than my own.
“Hey, where have you been, Em?” I demanded, finally awake enough to be indignant. “My life has come crashing down around my ears and you can’t drag yourself home?”
“Sweetie, I’m sorry, the resort was all about relaxation and binge drinking. The staff didn’t allow TVs, internet access, or newspapers … or Crocs. It was fantastic. I had no idea what was happening until we landed in Florida and I saw you featured on the ‘news of the weird’ portion of Inside Edition. Not your best picture, by the way.”
I glared at him.
“Which is, clearly, not the point. It doesn’t matter, because Emmett’s here now to make it all better.” He dragged me into the cabin’s tiny kitchen, where he proudly displayed the contents of a festive picnic hamper - several bottles of vodka, tequila, rum, and mixers in a rainbow of fruit flavors, lemons, limes, a five-pound bag of mini Hershey bars and bulk-sized box of Hostess CupCakes.
“You know, this looks a lot like the picnic you packed for my twenty-first birthday,” I said, tilting my head against his shoulder.
“Well, let’s see how many colors we can get you to throw up this time,” he said, patting my back.
“Will you be joining me in this neon-colored hooch fest?”
“Ugh. Even I’m not gay enough to drink that swill.” Emmett winced, putting a case of Heineken in my fridge to chill. He reached into the cabinet over the sink to unearth Gammy’s ancient turquoise blender. “This is the one area where I proudly reject the stereotype. But I will gladly mix up a batch of my frosty, frothy cocktails for you.”
As he measured out just the right amount of ice with a flourish, he gushed, “Lace, you wouldn’t believe how many people are talking about you back home. It’s like you’re Princess Di or Britney Spears or someone more interesting and less tragic than you.,,
“I onestly don’t know how to take that.”
“Your husband moved his secretary into your house the night you left town. That’s practically Shakespeare territory,” he told me.
My jaw dropped. “He moved her into our house?” I repeated.
“I was going to break it to you gently,” he said. “But the kindest version I could come up with involved an obscene limerick.”
I shook my head. The emotional emptiness I briefly enjoyed was replaced with a dull ache in my chest. I rubbed at it with the heel of my hand. I tried to make light of it. “Oh, screw it. Let Beebee deal with the damn earth tones.”
“Well, that’s good to hear,” he said. “Mama said I shouldn’t tell you. She was afraid you were going to freak out again and do something stupid, like shave your head or give Mike’s boat a Viking funeral.”
The moment the words left Emmett’s lips, he cringed. It was probably because of the way I stopped in my tracks, face alight with interest at the prospect of setting Mike’s boat aflame. “Oh… no,” he murmured.
I’d almost forgotten the boat was stored just a few yards away. I turned, a sly Grinch-ish grin spreading over my face as I focused on Mike’s little workshop. Short of actually setting fire to Mike, burning his would-be vessel would be the best way to get under his skin. That pile of wood represented his hopes and dreams, the best imagined version of himself. I wanted to take that from him, to make him doubt himself. And, best of all, he would never, ever be able to talk about the damn thing again.
“Lacey!” Emmett hissed. “Forget I said anything! It was just a joke! You cannot possibly be thinking of setting Mike’s boat on fire.”
“Technically, it is on my property,” I murmured, chewing my lip. I mean, it’s just an idea. I mean, a joke. I’m just joking.”
“You don’t sound like you’re joking,” Emmett objected as I walked out the back door toward the workshop. “Besides, I think you need flaming arrows and a virgin for a Viking funeral.”
“I just want to see it,” I told him as we approached the workshop, which was difficult with him dragging on my elbows.
Emmet’s voice broke into a panicked pitch. “Look, I have a better idea. We’ll break into your house, take a bunch of Mike’s stuff, and I’ll sell it online for pennies. We’ll start a website called TakeMikesStuff.com. Or hell, we’ll give it away.”
Emmett waved my cell phone in my face. “Mama said your lawyer told you to call her before you made any rash decisions. Call her. Let her talk some sense into you.”
I forced the workshop door open and was assaulted by dust.
You would think it would smell of sawdust or pitch, but this was the dust of dead space. A damp, mildew-spotted canvas was slung over the hull frame. I swear, my mouth just about watered at the thought of lighting that first match. I could almost smell the smoke, hear the explosion as the varnish ignited. Dialing my cell phone, I shook my head as if waking from a strangely satisfying fog. I muttered, “We could say it was an accident… Like I tripped and the gas just spilled out of the -”
“Samantha Shackleton.” My lawyer picked up on the first ring. And from the tone of her voice, I could tell I was taking her away from valuable after-hours downtime.
“Hi, Sam, it’s Lacey,” I said. How exactly did one broach this subject with their attorney, I wondered. “So … uh, that thing they say about possession being nine-tenths of the law … if something’s in my possession, I can’t really get in trouble for damaging it, right? Because nine-tenths of it is mine anyway.”
“Oh, Lord,” she muttered. “Lacey, whatever you are thinking of doing, first of all, don’t tell me about it. And secondly, just don’t. I want you go into your bedroom, get a pillow, and punch it. It will make you feel better.”
“It would just be a little fire.”
“Am I going to have to declare you a danger to yourself and others?” she demanded. “Lacey, I can’t represent you if you’re going to do things like this. Destroying Mike’s property particularly with arson, is what we call, in legal terms, a bad thing, all right? It won’t make you feel better in the long run and it will just make things more difficult for us. Mike could get all kinds of injunctions and damages and there’s the chance you could hurt someone -”
“I was speaking in the hypothetical!” I protested.
She was silent on the other end of the line.
“Okay, it wasn’t entirely hypothetical,” I admitted in a small voice.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked.
“Not … yet.”
“Are you alone?” she asked. “Is there at least one sane, sober adult with you?”
I handed Emmett the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
With Emmett occupied, I wandered toward the boat. After my Realtor related hissy fit convinced Mike that I wouldn’t budge on selling the cabin, he tried to talk me into replacing the dock with a huge boathouse /workshop. His buddy, Charlie, had just added something similar to his lake house. Mike figured that if he couldn’t get the cabin he wanted, he would have a brag-worthy place to house his future seaborne penis replacement. While my refusal was rooted in my attachment to Grandpa’s dock, I appealed to Mike’s money sense. What was the point of having a waterfront cabin without a dock? How would that affect the potential resale value?
So Mike built the workshop around the dock, grousing about the added expense the entire time. He was unhappy about the cost, but got what he wanted. I was unhappy about having a pretentious faux Cape Cod mini-building ruining my view, but I got to keep my dock. And somehow both of us felt that we’d proven our points.
While I hoped that putting the workshop near the cabin would encourage Mike to want to go there more often, the cabin’s location and undesirability gave Mike yet another reason not to work on the boat. And according to Mike, it was my fault, because if we had a better lake house, he’d want to go to the lake more often, and he would be finished with the boat by now.
“No problem, Sam,” Emmett was saying. “I’ll keep an eye on her. I look forward to meeting you, too.”
“You, eat this and think happy thoughts,” Emmett said, shoving the ice cream back in my hands. “Sam says you are not to be left unsupervised for at least twelve hours or until your destructive urge passes. She said chocolate should speed that process along.”