Excerpt
Books & Bewitchment
1.No matter how bad my day is, someone in a book has it worse and will still get a happily-ever-after eventually. Maybe that’s why I read so much. It gives me hope—and an escape. If my life were a book, right now I would probably give it two stars. “The main character, Rhea Wolfe, has no agency,” the review would read. “What does she actually want? No one’s life is that boring. And her pet cockatoo, Doris, sings too many show tunes. Did not finish.”
At least that’s how it feels to me.
Almost like I’m always waiting for the story to start.
Like I’m longing for something I haven’t found yet.
Then again, I’ve lived in the same place my entire life, and for the last four years, most of it was spent sitting at the front desk of Buckley Insurance.
“Mail for you, hon,” my boss says, dropping a slender envelope on my desk. “Probably shouldn’t be having your mail sent here to the office, but I’ll let it go this one time. And about your raise request . . .”
I perk up.
“We’ll talk later. After lunch.” He winks and waddles into his office.
The screech that follows does not startle me. “No, Horace! Lordy! That boy’s a mess!”
I look up at the pink-and-gray rose-breasted cockatoo bobbing her head from her perch atop an elaborate cage across the office lobby and say, “Hush, Doris. You know he hates that.”
Doris chuckles and mutters, “Oh, poor Horace,” in the voice of my boss’s dead mother, her original owner. Horace—Mr. Buckley—hates this bird as much as he loved his mother, and that’s why caring for her takes up more of my time than keeping his books and answering his phones. Honestly, I don’t mind. She’s better company than him, any day, and somehow she causes me fewer headaches. After several disastrous holidays and one destroyed taxidermy bear at his hunting lodge, Mr. Buckley asked me to keep her on the weekends, and then the weekdays, and now she’s just with me all the time.
Once his door is closed, I set aside the envelope, cheeks burning. I’ve been working for Buckley Insurance since college, and though Mr. Buckley—I’m not allowed to call him Horace, even if the bird can—sounds cheerful and kind, he’s going to turn down my request for a simple ten percent raise, I can just feel it. The man delights in finding fault with me, but the benefits are good, and my paychecks are always on time—in part because I write them. That’s one of the few perks of being his only employee. I also have plenty of time to read when he’s out golfing and the phone isn’t ringing. This morning, he’s watching me like a watery-eyed hawk, so I can’t open the envelope or I’ll get dinged again.
When I’m running out to get Mr. Buckley’s daily burger and fries, I see a little lump in the middle of the road and slow to a stop, putting on my hazard lights and hitting pause on my audiobook. Hoping I’m not attempting to save a child’s kneepad yet again, I hop out of the car and pick up a box turtle, who’s heaving himself across the asphalt and doesn’t stop waving his legs even when he’s clearly off the ground. I know turtles only want to go one way, so I carry him to the other side of the street and carefully place him in the scrubby grass, nestled among cigarette butts and soda bottles. He doesn’t even pause, just keeps waddling bravely on. You’ve got to admire that.
I’m dusting my hands off, feeling pretty happy about my good deed, when I hear a siren and turn to find a black SUV aiming for me, lights flashing. And since I live in my hometown, I know this is not a coincidence and that I’m not about to receive a medal of honor on behalf of reptiles everywhere.
“Oh, lordy,” I mutter.
I go sit in my car, knowing this won’t be good. The officer pulls in behind me but doesn’t exit his vehicle. My window is already down, my license and registration ready. But this, sadly, is no meet-cute. More like an avoid-ugly—because I’d like to avoid it, and it’s about to get ugly.
I wish we could just get it over with, but after five minutes, he hasn’t even opened his car door. Still, I know better than to drive away. I’m not surprised when a tow truck pulls in behind the black SUV—but I am disappointed.
Billy Wayne gets out of his tow truck, blond hair billowing in the sun, and gives the officer a high five as he walks over to my window. “You bein’ a bad girl again, Rhea?” He pulls down his sunglasses to wink at me with the prettiest baby blues in Cumberville, Alabama.
“Billy, c’mon. You know damn well I was saving a turtle. Will you please tell your brother to back off?”
He looks back over his shoulder at the SUV and jerks his chin. His brother Jimmy—Officer Jimmy of the Cumberville PD—who hates me, by the way, gets out holding his phone up. Recording us.
Oh no—
Billy gets down on one knee outside my car door.
“Rhea Wolfe, we’ve been dating on and off since middle school, but I think it’s time we stopped with the ‘off’ part. Will you marry me?” He holds out a little white box with a ring in it.
A ring that is not my style and that is also several sizes too small.
“Come on, Billy.” I lean in close so maybe Jimmy and his phone won’t hear this part. “You don’t want to marry me. You just want to sleep with me.”
He wiggles the box back and forth. “Can’t it be both?”
I don’t even consider it. Not for a second. After our last breakup two weeks ago, I promised my sisters I wouldn’t sleep with him ever again, and I can’t imagine the hell they would give me if I ended up in Billy’s bed, much less wearing his ring. Cait says that after a month of dating him, I always end up acting like his mama, and I’d be fine with never washing his tighty-whiteys again.
Because here’s the thing.
We’re
terrible together.
I want to wake up at dawn for coffee on the porch while Doris sings bits of old musicals and eats her fruit salad; he wants to sleep in and get donuts at noon with his dog, Zeke, who can’t decide if Doris is an intruder or a squeaky toy and won’t shut up about it. I want to spend weekends tidying up the house and watching rom-coms about secret princes; he wants to go out on his cousin’s Jet Ski and drink a case of beer. I want to take a boiling-hot bath with a book and go to bed early; he wants to stay up until midnight lifting weights and fall into bed covered in sweat and smelling like greasy metal. And you can guess who ends up having to fold the sheets, recycle the beer cans, and vacuum the muddy pawprints out of the carpet.
We’ve tried everything—living together, casually dating, being friends with benefits. But it always ends up with him raising his voice, Doris screaming, and me crying, swearing that all the roses and chocolates in the world aren’t worth finding his whiskery shaving scum in my sink and realizing, as he and his friends watch football in my den with their work boots on my coffee table, that we’re just not compatible.
“I think that’s a bad idea, Billy,” I say with the sort of smile that says I’m sorry about it.
He pushes his sunglasses on top of his beautiful hair and stands up; he never has taken rejection well, not since I first dumped him in tenth grade. “Oh, come on, Rhea. You got to settle down. You’re only twenty-six, and you’re starting to look like a librarian. I’m right here, and the clock’s ticking, girl.” He snaps the white box shut and jiggles it in his hand.
“I love librarians.” I sigh and put my hand on his just to stop the jiggling. “Billy, come on. It’s the same old cycle. We get together, we have fun, we break up. Do we really need to go through that again? Aren’t you sick of finding the same cardboard box full of stuff on your doorstep?”
“I don’t want to break up anymore. I want to settle down, Rhea. I want the kids and the baseball games and the fence and a golden retriever—”
“Zeke would kill it.”
“Fine! No yellow dog! But don’t you want all that other stuff, too?”
God, it doesn’t even feel like a proposal. It’s just a last-ditch effort. His heart’s not even in it. He just wants to be taken care of.
Before I can come up with the right answer that’s sweet but still assertive, he snorts. “You don’t even know what you want, do you? You just know it isn’t me.” Shaking his head, ring box in his fist, he turns his back and stomps over to his brother, pushing the phone down and whispering fiercely. Whatever he says to Jimmy, it’s not good. After giving me the finger, my ex-boyfriend hops back in his tow truck and peels out at a speed that would have any other cop salivating. Instead, Jimmy puts his phone away and saunters over to my window, his sunglasses hiding his eyes but not his frown.
“License and registration.”
