And I thought, maybe Mag had been right.
Maybe what Lottie wanted for us wasn’t about her looking after her boy.
Maybe it was about her guiding me to what I needed to see about my life, my place in it, what I deserved and the people around me the way they should be seen.
The bad.
And the good.
And the hope.
And the fact I deserved a time like I just had with Mag in his kitchen.
And I deserved a guy like Danny Magnusson in my life.“Okay, well, apparently, this jackhole didn’t have it out for your shoes, which I gotta say is too bad because no one needs this many pairs of Chucks,” Ryn declared, standing in my bedroom with one of my navy Chucks held up in one hand, one of my burgundy Chucks in the other.
“Chucks are timeless,” Hattie chimed in.
“Agreed,” Ryn replied, finding the mates and returning them to my shoe shelves in the closet. “But there’s not a single high heel in this joint.”
“I only wear heels when I strip,” I told her.
Ryn looked at Pepper, openly befuddled, and asked, “Is that even possible?”
“Don’t ask me,” Pepper replied. “I had to buy under-bed storage so I had more space in my closet for my heels. The bitches at DSW send me birthday cards.”
I looked to Hattie and laughed.
This had happened to me a lot that day.
Laughter.
Including during brunch, something that Mag alternately teased, joked and audaciously flirted his way through, to the point my sides hurt from laughing so hard.
It was kind of our first, real, official, going-out-somewhere-together date.
And it was the best I’d ever had.
On that happy memory, Mo strolled into the room and pointed at a box that I’d gone through that Ava and Lottie had filled with decimated knickknacks.
Perhaps it was the girls (and Smithie) being so generous, therefore I knew the road to restoration would not be as painful as I thought.
Perhaps it was my epiphany that morning, with the various and sundry ones I’d been having the last few days.
Perhaps it was because I was in the best mood I’d been in for as long as I could remember.
But there was no mourning, just an understanding that the box was filled with nothing but what was now garbage. Understanding that Mo had carried a great many boxes of the same down to his truck.
All those little bits and bobs I’d collected over the years held no meaning to me anymore.
They were just things I’d bought along the way to make my space pretty.
And I wasn’t going to thank whoever did this for the opportunity.
But, silver lining…
It felt fitting that, where I was now, how I felt now, about a lot of things, that I had the chance to start from scratch.
“This for the heap?” Mo asked.
“Yes, Mo, thanks,” I answered.
He bent, hefted it up and looked to me. “The bed of my truck is filled. Lottie and me are takin’ it to the dump. We’ll come back and get some more of the furniture. Yeah?”
Obviously, Mo and Lottie showed as well to help.
“Yeah, Mo, thanks again,” I replied.
He jerked up his chin, disappeared, Lottie appeared in his place and it struck me again how perfect they were for each other.
She was a little thing, slender, slim-hipped, slightly above average height, lots of blonde hair, and even in a sweater and jeans and minimal makeup, she was top to toe feminine.
And Mo was tall, broad, bald and aggressively masculine.
Even in a lineup with choices, I’d pick those two to be together.
So maybe, the world just worked as it should.
Maybe, out of the crap, goodness rose up, and you just had to be aware enough of what was going on around you to see it.
I mean, they used manure to fertilize plants and flowers.
Was I right?
“We’ll swing by Fortnum’s on the way back and bring coffees. You girls in?” she asked.
“Totally,” Hattie said. “Do they do chais there?”
“Tex would disown me if I asked for a chai,” Lottie declared. “Runner-up?”
Hattie shared her runner-up and we all gave our orders (mine, it went without saying, was the Textual).
Lottie took off.
And Pepper got up from the ruins of my mattress to show me the picture of a couch she’d pulled up on her laptop.
It was orange velvet, had a slight curve and tucked upholstery at the back rest that gave it a ruched look.
It was the bomb.
I then saw the price tag, and it was also an eighth of the money they’d given me last night and I was mentally budgeting about half of that for a new sofa.
“You absolutely need this,” she declared.
How would Mag feel about an orange-velvet, curvy couch?
“Babe,” the man in my thoughts called, and I looked to the doorway. “Pots and pans proved indestructible, those are put away. Your plates and shit are mostly a wash, though a couple of cups withstood. And your vinyl was a mess, but I sorted it and most of it survived. Your Fleetwood Mac Rumours was cracked and Pearl Jam Ten was scratched, which sucks. But the rest is good, so I boxed them. We’ll haul them to my place.”