Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

He snickered. “Come on, you have to face your public at some point; consider this a safe space.”

“Hmmph,” I snorted. “My public face aside, could you please explain your organization system, which I suspect isn’t so much a system as a series of brain games designed to drive me insane a la Jigaw the serial killer?”

He frowned and I showed him the entry marked “dep. R. dais. 4-set.”

“That means depression-era daisy glass, four-piece set. It’s in a red box on the third shelf from the bottom in the special collection.”

“Well, it’s supposed to be on a FedEx truck on its way to Augusta, Georgia. You promised delivery by Friday, which is in two days. You put a reminder on a Post-it note that somehow ended up on the bottom of my shoe. How has eBay not put some sort of skull-and-crossbones disclaimer on your sales profile?”

He sniffed. “There have been a few missteps along the way, but I always manage to keep the customers happy.”

“Well, those missteps are costing you a fortune in overhead, like the overnight shipping fees you’re going to have to cough up to get the daisy glass to Augusta,” I said.

“Since when did you become little miss office manager?”

“If there’s anything I learned from serving as an unappreciated part-time serf at Mike’s office, it was compulsive, anal-retentive control over paperwork flow. Your books are a mess. Just this morning I found a dozen payments missing on items you shipped months ago. You’re charging just enough to make an itty-bitty profit after shipping, the mortgage on the store, and overhead. And from what I could see, most of that comes from your direct antique sales to special clients.”

“You couldn’t have seen all that in one morning - okay, fine, it’s a mess. So, you think I should start charging more?”

“No, I think you should start keeping your books in order and cut some of your waste. Like the overnight fees, which I should mention, you probably want to run over to FedEx now if you want to make the afternoon delivery run.”

“Be my unappreciated part-time serf and run it over for me?” he implored. “There’s a shiny nickel in it for you.”

“No, you procrastinated your way into this bed, buck-o, you handle the shipping,” I told him. “But I will go through the rest of your quote - unquote files to make sure you don’t have any customer approval rating bombs waiting to go off.”

“You’re going to reorganize the whole thing, aren’t you?” he said, his voice fearful and small.

I thought about it and found that I sort of liked the idea of having somewhere to go every day, at least for a while, somewhere I could forget about Mike and Monroe and just devote myself to someone else’s mess. “Yes, I am.”

“But I won’t be able to find anything,” he whined.

“Do you know the alphabet?” I asked. He nodded. “Can you use basic reasoning skills?” He nodded again. “I think you’ll be okay”

“Lacey!” Vanessa Whitlock, a friend of our mother’s, came through the door, lugging what looked like a standard Black and Decker bread machine. She must have whipped it off the counter in her rush to get out of her house and to the source of fresh gossip. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Maybe I will go to the FedEx office for you,” I said quietly, peering down.

“Oh, no,” Emmett said. “I have to learn my lesson. You can mind the store for a while. Oh, look, more ladies coming into the store. It looks like they’re forming a line.”

“I hate you,” I muttered.

“You love me,” he said, turning on his heel to the storeroom. “New client paperwork is in the top drawer on the left. It’s called tough love, Lace. I’m ditching you because I care.”

“Emmett!”

But he’d left me, with a pack of gossipmongers gathering in the waiting room. And I was still wearing the damn yoga pants.

Emmett had thrown me in the deep end of the pool. And that pool was filled with sharks.

The Great Whites came in the form of church ladies, my mother’s bridge club friends, and wives of Mike’s clients. And they weren’t after my blood, just delicious bits of information about my appearance and overall mental state. They were all on my side, they assured me, and just came by to lend their support during my “trying time.” My mother’s golf partner, Mimi Becket, just couldn’t believe Mike was bringing “that awful woman” to country club events and expecting everyone to just accept her like one of their own. Jenna Upwell swore she and her husband only went out to dinner with Mike and Beebee to be polite, and that she was thinking of me the whole time. I emerged from this gauntlet of strained social interaction exhausted, with very little to add to the stock but a bunch of gently used kitchen appliances.

After ducking home to change into Emmett-approved office attire, I avenged myself in many, many ways, starting with a complete overhaul of Emmett’s “filing system.” I dumped his banker’s box of invoices onto the floor and used a hand-carved ivory walking stick to shuffle them around. Emmett was both incensed and horrified by my abuse of the stock.

By the time we closed, I’d almost gotten the invoices near some sort of order. Mama came barreling into the shop, clutching her handbag like a Spartan shield.

“Oh, crap,” Emmett muttered.

“Would you like to tell me why I had to hear from Betty Vogel that you’re back in town?” she demanded, stopping to give Emmett a quick kiss before continuing her tirade. “And why the whole of the Ladies Auxiliary seems to think you have a tattoo of a snake around your waist?”

Emmett snickered.

“Mama, I don’t have a tattoo,” I said, the picture of innocence. “But Emmett does.”

Emmett gasped right along with Mama. “How could you?” he spat, unconsciously rubbing at the little yin-yang symbol he’d had put on his hip in a drunken spring break debacle. “I swore you to secrecy!”

“You will never leave me in charge of reception again,” I told him.

“Agreed,” he ground out.

Mama exclaimed, “What is wrong with the two of you? Emmett, I didn’t spend fifteen hours in labor, passing your pumpkin of a head, for you to do that to your body! And Lacey, how could you move back to town without telling me?”

“I haven’t moved back, Mama, I’m just staying with Emmett for a few days while I figure some things out. Emmett, on the other hand, was drunk, and an art student from Atlanta convinced him it would seal their love.”

“Shut it,” Emmett warned. “Or I bring up the public yoga pants.”

I shuddered. “Agreed.”

“I thought you went to the lake to figure some things out,” Mama said, running her fingers through my hair, fluffing it up.

“Her problems followed her,” Emmett said. “Lacey is now dodging phone calls from men in two counties.”

“Monroe called?” I asked, my brow furrowed.

“Who’s Monroe?” Mama asked.

“Your voice mail was full, so he starting calling my cell,” Emmett said. “I assumed that since you let your voice mail fill up, you didn’t want to talk to him. I told him I didn’t know where you were.”

I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and saw that the battery was completely dead, which happens when you don’t charge it for three days. Monroe had called. And when he couldn’t reach me, he tracked down my brother. He cared enough to find me, which was more than I could say for Mike in the last days of our marriage. I didn’t know whether to be happy or annoyed. I settled for ambiguous and confused, with a teeny little spark of hope wriggling the weight loose from my chest.