Everett holds up his hands in contrition as he slowly backs outof the room. Then he reaches back through the wall to give her a double thumbs-up.
“Everett just came in and—”
“Time for more bullshit now. Got it.” If Everett’s sudden appearance weren’t enough of a cold bucket of water on the moment, the derision in Charlie’s voice certainly is.
She buries her head in her hands. “Sorry, sorry, I... I shouldn’t have—” Although she’s not sure if she’s saying she shouldn’t have mentioned Everett or that she shouldn’t have kissed his naked back.I kissed Charlie Waybill’s naked back. Holy shit.
“Don’t you think I feel it too?” Charlie asks abruptly, less irate and more... pleading? “Of course I... I feel whatever it is between us. But I don’t trust it, I can’t. Because I don’t trustyou. And I think you understand that. So please don’t... please don’t test me.”
“I wasn’t. I swear, I wasn’t trying to—”
“You should probably hand me the ice pack and...” He spares her the words, but she knows they’releave me alone.
So she does.
25
Thanks to Yolanda and Penny’s assistance in getting the word out through the Balasana mailing list and social media, tickets for Saturday’s goat yoga event sell out within seventy-two hours of Gretchen posting the link on Gilded Creek’s nascent Instagram (two hundred followers and counting!). Yolanda tells Gretchen to open up a few more spots to allow some of the waitlist to register, and those fill promptly too. As Gretchen hoped, the farm is set to make a nice chunk of change off city folks’ love of doing bougie things in the countryside.
Since the weirdness in the kitchen, Charlie has again attempted to avoid Gretchen. This time she agrees that it’s for the best. She isn’t sure she could handle a third round of his rejection. That last one was... oof.
She didn’t realize it was possible to be this despondent while dressing baby goats in tiny sweaters, but she’s certainly managing it. Sleepy Jean lets out a surprisingly loud bleat when Gretchen wrestles her into a neon-pink and mustard-yellow polka-dottedone. “You are gonna be an internet sensation, SJ, I know it,” she tells the black-and-white goat, who is already triple the size she was when she was born two weeks ago.
While chasing one of the more ornery kids into the pen surrounding the little stone outbuilding where they’ve decided to keep the babies today instead of bringing them to their moms, Gretchen spots Charlie on the farmhouse’s porch, crunching into an apple.He can see right through me, and what he sees is that I’m my father’s daughter, deep down. All this time she’s tried to tell herself she’s different from the man who raised her, better than him, but is she really when she’s allowed her desire for Charlie—for his body, but also his approval—to overshadow saving his life?Maybe I do lie to myself after all.
“Are you almost done?” Everett asks, standing with one foot tapping impatiently half-inside a large oak tree’s trunk.
She straightens the wonky red sweater (probably one of Charlie’s) she put on the kid whose paper collar labels him as Waluigi. “That was the last one. What’s up?”
“Have you gone up the driveway today?”
“No, why?”
His crooked smile stretches across his blue-white face. “I gotta show you something.”
Together, they head over the little hill and down the gravel-and-dirt drive toward the main road, joined by one of the barn cats that’s recently appointed Gretchen as its favorite provider of chin scratches. She has to admit that being chosen feels pretty great.
“Can’t you just tell me?” Gretchen asks, one eye on the cat weaving in and out of her legs to avoid tripping. “I still have a ton of stuff to finish up before the event, and Yolanda just texted that she and Penny will be here in twenty minutes.”
Everett shakes his head. “No, no, you have to come see.”
A few yards later, he stops abruptly and motions with his head in the direction of the old broken-down seed drill and the dead tree. Gretchen follows the gesture and sees...
Flowers?
She approaches the formerly unsightly hunk of metal to find the open top filled with dark, moist soil, in which is planted an assortment of pansies and petunias. Nailed onto the tree’s stump is a piece of wood, painted white with large, black block letters:gilded creek goat farm.Underneath, slightly smaller:est. 1793.
Gretchen sucks in a breath. “Charlie did this?”
“Must’ve,” Everett says.
“But when?”
He shrugs. “Overnight, I would imagine.”
“But... why? What does it mean?”
“Geez, enough with the questions. I’m very smart, Gretchen, but I don’t knoweverything.”
