“Wonderful!” Peggy turned and went to her recliner. On the end table next to it was a notebook, which she picked up, opened, and made a mark in. “That’s two. Only three to go!”
“Three?” Lorna frowned, trying to remember.
Peggy looked at her notes. “I have the boyfriend, Mrs. Tracy, and Mr. Cho.”
The boyfriend.She’d forgotten about Brett Miller. She’d forgotten she’d told her mother about Brett.
“And then you’re done!” Peggy chirped. “I can release the trust to you.”
“Yes.” Lorna tucked her hair behind her ear. Funny, she did notfeel excited by the prospect of having the money she needed to buy Nana’s house. She felt a bit ambivalent about it. That trust... something felt very wonky about it.
Maybe it was because there was an unanswered call sitting on her phone from Mr. Contreras. He’d phoned yesterday, but she and Bean had been practicing her fall, and she hadn’t called him back. She had a good idea what he wanted—he struck her as the kind of guy who, once he had some sort of deal, was relentless. She didn’t understand why she felt so reluctant to call him.
Maybe it was because she didn’t want to hurt Seth and Bean, and she could feel that coming.
Chapter 24Lorna Now
“Hey there, big spender,” Mr. Contreras said the next morning when Lorna made herself return his call. “How’s that offer coming along? I got a developer knocking at my door.”
Already? “It’s coming, Mr. Contreras.”
“Yeah, this guy, he’s going to raze the house and build an eight-unit condo complex. He can make bank with that.”
A spark of rage shot through Lorna. She couldn’t trust the man to tell her the truth. “There’s not enough room for that on this lot.”
“Sure there is. You squeeze them in and up. But if you don’t like that idea, get me that offer, sweetheart.”
She hated that he called her that. He seemed to delight in making her uneasy. “You will have it,” she said firmly.
“When?”
She glanced at the clock, as if that would tell her anything. She would just have to speed up her apology tour. “Two weeks,” she said.
“Sooner’s better,” he said, and hung up.
Jerk.Lorna looked at the codicil list. Mr. Cho, her first employer, was next. He’d owned Cho’s Drugstore, where Lorna had worked when she was seventeen. Brett Miller was listedafter that, but those two regrets had technically happened at the same time. She figured Mr. Cho was the more complicated apology for a lot of reasons, and Brett was... Well, Brett was the easy one.
In Lorna’s junior year of high school, she’d had her first boyfriend. Not Brett. If she was being honest, she probably wouldn’t have looked at Brett had it not been for Luke Brown. Luke was her first love, the senior Lorna believed would be the last guy in all of Austin to fall for her. She was as tall as he was. She was not popular and was considered too brusque by some. Luke had blond hair, a dimpled smile, and a baseball physique. All the girls drooled around him.
“He’s totally into you,” Lorna’s friend Mariah had whispered one day, her voice full of surprise.
“Why me?” Lorna had asked nervously, not knowing what to do with this information. It defied all teenage logic. But Mariah was right—Luke kept coming around and flirting, suggesting they go to her house after school.
It hardly took any persuading for her to take him home. She reasoned it was safe enough—the house was big, and the chances of him running into Nana were almost nonexistent since she rarely left her rooms those days. Mom was working. Kristen had been recently discharged from county jail, which she’d been sentenced to for public intoxication, but was rarely home. And when she was, she kept to her room.
Or so Lorna had thought. Because Kristen did manage to slink around when Luke was with her, sliding into a room like a cat. She liked to make fun of the “lovebirds” or tell Luke he should comb his hair. Luke would say she should comb her hair (he was not the best with clapbacks), and they would continue to banter back and forth until Kristen slid out again, on her way to a job or to meet yet another guy.
In the heady three months that Lorna and Luke were an “item” (at least according to Mariah), Lorna believed things were finally turning around for her. While it was true Luke avoided her at school—he said he had to hang out with his friends or they’d be mad—he came to her house almost every day. In her mind, that made him her boyfriend. That year, she had Luke, she got a job at Cho’s Drugstore, and she made the volleyball team. All was right with her world.
But then Nana died. They found her in her chair, stone-cold, an unopened bottle of vodka at her feet.
“Wow,” Kristen had said, her voice full of shock. “She died before she got to drink it.” Only Kristen would see that as the tragedy.
After Nana’s death, which was probably more shocking than it should have been, given her health trajectory, Lorna had moved in something of a fog. She went to school, went to work, laughed with friends, hung out with Luke, pretended like nothing had happened. In a way, it felt like nothing had happened. She’d mourned the loss of Nana long before her death—in the last two years of Nana’s life, she was usually too drunk to be present for her grandchildren.
Lorna tended to stay away from home when Luke wasn’t there, and especially when Kristen was around, because Kristen and Mom still argued all the time.
Kristen took Nana’s death the hardest. Lorna remembered Kristen cleaning out the front salon for the memorial. She vacuumed and polished the furniture and brought in flowers and displayed framed pictures of Nana as a young woman and a young wife. There were other pictures, too, photos of the family from a happier time. Kristen, Lorna, and Nana under the oak tree in the backyard. Kristen and Lorna doing gymnastics on the lawn while Nana proudly looked on. Mom, Nana,Kristen, and Lorna arranged on the stairs, dressed in their Easter finery. The four of them again, but with Dad, too, gathered for Christmas around a dining table that was groaning with ham, potatoes, cranberries, and green bean casserole. Lorna as a toddler being held by Nana and beaming up at Kristen.
