Chapter 7

“D e onde vo …”

“Keep going.” He waited.

“ De onde você…é ?”

“I’m from Chicago, South Side,” Granger answered. “That didn’t sound bad.”

My Portuguese was also not good, but I was trying. I wasn’t exactly sure how he’d managed to learn so many different languages when I was struggling with two. I did have my mother tongue down well but Portuguese was hard, even with my background in Spanish (as in, my ability to say “ lo siento ” didn’t seem to help at all).

“ Bem ,” he said, “ você quer um copo de água?

“Whatever you just said, I haven’t gotten there yet,” I told him. In the weeks since we’d returned from the wedding, I’d continued to study with my app to advance my knowledge. Granger had decided to learn also, and his way was listening to podcasts and music from Brazil. His way seemed to have worked better, but he did have the background of all those other languages. He also might have had a little more natural aptitude than I did.

“Ok, how about this: estás com fome ?”

“Can you repeat that?” I requested, and he did. I didn’t understand it any better the second time and although the app I was using did have a lot of positive reviews, maybe it wasn’t actually very helpful. Or maybe I just wasn’t devoting myself enough to it, because besides my language study, my summer had been busy. Mr. Campbell had fired his weekend help and I’d been stepping in to cover those days, as had Mina. We’d had some family issues, mostly centering around my brother Patrick. I’d been seeing Briggs, which was…well, I was seeing him. I certainly hadn’t been sitting around and waiting to get together with Granger again, or jumping up every chance I got to secretly check my phone so that my boss wouldn’t spot me doing it.

The days had slid past in a blur. Usually, I loved the summer but this year…anyway, now fall was at hand and it was almost over. When I thought about wishing the time away, though, I got upset. I’d been getting through all those days without being able to solve the major problem I was having which was that my boyfriend—

“I asked, ‘Do you want a glass of water?’ and, ‘Are you hungry?’” Granger translated. “You must be tired, because you dug your way through my yard.”

I looked around, feeling pretty satisfied. I hadn’t dug that much, because he had mostly wielded the shovel, but I had toted around bags of soil and many pots full of beautiful plants. Previously, his front yard had been a little sad. A professional way to describe it might have been “lacking in design,” and that was without a doubt true. Once I’d seen the state of things, like the dead grass, the hedge of overgrown yews that blocked all the light from reaching the front porch, the lush green of several poison ivy patches, and the dying honey locust tree whose thorns could have torn someone’s shirt off—once I’d seen all that, I’d suggested that I would be happy to help with some planting.

But first, we’d had to do some clearing, and that had taken a while. Granger was extremely busy and he hadn’t had much time to devote to weed whacking and tree chopping, but eventually, we’d accomplished it. Many of the yews had gone and we’d cut down other ratty, leggy shrubs. We’d removed the diseased honey locust and killed off the poison ivy, working until the yard was mostly bare. Then I’d sketched out a new plan on paper, which had changed some due to availability when we’d visited nurseries in the truck that he’d gotten running again. But eventually, we had laid out the plants, and then he’d dug most of the holes, and I’d broken up the roots and carefully lowered in all the beautiful specimens. And it looked amazing!

“Are you clapping?” he asked me. “Are you giving the yard a round of applause?”

“The yard, and us,” I said. “It was a lot of work, but I’m so happy with how it turned out. Are you?”

He tilted his head, studying the changes, and he was quiet for long enough that I spoke up again.

“We got little plants and some of them will take a while to grow,” I told him. I’d selected the smallest sizes of most of them, only quarts or one-gallon pots, because I wasn’t sure how much money he had to devote to this project. He hadn’t complained about prices or how much we were spending but the man had recently opened a restaurant, after all, and before we’d started this project, his house had appeared more than a little downtrodden. It sure didn’t seem like he had money to burn.

“When they fill in, this space will change even more,” I continued. “And when things start flowering, there will be so much color. I chose varieties that bloom at different times, so you’ll have something pretty here until the fall, and then the leaves will change. In the winter, you’ll enjoy those nice Michigan hollies, cranberry viburnum, and witch hazel…but of course, if you don’t like things, we can change them.” I would do it by myself since this had all been my idea and I’d made him believe that I was capable of making it nice.

“It’s such a difference that it’s hard to describe what I think,” he finally said.

“Could you try, though? Because it feels as if you don’t—”

“I didn’t know it could be like this. I bought this house, moved in, and then I never touched it. It looked just about the same for all these years, except that spiny plant got bigger and I couldn’t go within ten feet of it.” He glanced around again. “It’s so different, and it’s really good.”

I breathed out a quiet sigh of relief. “Good,” I echoed. “I could also help you paint your front door, or your whole house, if you want. I helped my sister Sophie do hers. Brenna says it’s totally the wrong shade, but I told her that Sophie likes it and she’s the one living in it.”

“I don’t know much about colors.”

“Well, we can look at your sign to give us some guidance. You’re a Taurus, and that’s one of the reasons that having all these plants is a good idea,” I explained. “It’s an Earth sign like mine,” I explained further, when he clearly had no idea what I meant. “So we might be able to leave the body of the house this same white, but I think the door should be green. We should ask Brenna, because she’ll definitely have an opinion and she’s very good with color, herself.”

“A green door,” he mused. “That sounds all right.”

“Good,” I said again, feeling another rush of pleasure. I wiped my dirty hands on my jeans. “What did you say about eating?”

“Come on inside.”

I had been in there once before, the first time that I’d come over and seen the neglected front yard. It had been just after the wedding, when we’d met to go running together again. The interior was much the same as it had been on that occasion. I’d just been talking about my sister Sophie’s house, and Granger’s was reminiscent of that—which was not a compliment, unfortunately. The last time that Nicola and I had been over at Sophie’s, our big sister had asked if a squatter had moved in. It was one of the reasons that they hadn’t been speaking but I understood Nicola’s concerns, however badly she had phrased it. Sophie’s place also needed work.

Anyway, Granger’s house was furnished with things that weren’t exactly normal for a residence. Like his chairs—they were industrial, but not with the modern, shiny quality that appealed to Juliet. No, they were more like he’d taken castoffs from a restaurant supply store and had placed them in his living room. They would have been better in his kitchen but there was no table to pull them up to. That room was almost completely bare, with nothing to indicate that anyone used it except for the metal coffee pot on the stove.

Sophie had also decorated her house with uncomfortable stuff. In her case, it was furniture that she’d found for free on the street, but they weren’t the antique and vintage pieces that Brenna liked. No, it was just junk. Disgustingly, my sister’s items had the added elements of undetermined stains and maybe bugs. Granger’s chairs might have been uncomfortable but at least I felt I could sit down in them. I wouldn’t have risked using hers.

A layer of dust did cover most surfaces here, though, including over the countertops and the floor. In his defense, I didn’t think that he was actually home often enough to keep things clean or even use them. When I’d first gone to wash my hands in the powder bathroom off the hall, the water from the tap had sputtered and then come out orange with rust because it had been so long since anything had passed through the pipes.

He had seemed almost surprised by what was in his house when he’d shown me around. “Looks like another guest bedroom. I guess I could use it for that,” he’d remarked when I’d opened a door and questioned what he planned to do with the empty space. There were a lot of those, because this was a good-sized house but it was almost totally unfurnished, and he seemed so unfamiliar with it. According to the property records and his own statements, he had lived at this address for several years, so I didn’t really understand. And it was such a beautiful place that I’d loved it on sight, and I couldn’t imagine not keeping it up—but he seemed didn’t feel that way. I found it odd.

Maybe it was a little odd that I was here looking around in the first place. Since the wedding where we’d reconnected, I’d seen Granger a few times over the past weeks. He’d suggested that I come by to run and afterwards, we’d sat together on the front porch behind the unkempt yews on some of those uncomfortable chairs that he’d carried out from the living room. It was very casual. Every time I’d seen him since had been, too, and of course I wasn’t formally keeping track of how many times we’d met up this summer.

But I did know that it was seven times, including once when we’d gone back to that bar in the Cass Corridor for a beer, the time that I’d measured and then sat on his porch again to draw up a landscape plan, twice more to clear the yard, when we’d had a coffee at the usual place I went to with Juliet, a meet-up for dessert at his restaurant late one night, and finally when we went to the nursery and did the planting today.

It was really nothing, just a loose connection between people who only got together occasionally and did some gardening as a team. After all, as I’d told both Mina (when she’d frowned) and Juliet (when she’d raised one eyebrow), “Granger Moore and I are only friends. That’s what we both agreed to. Friendship.”

They’d had different responses to that statement.

Mina: “Good, because I would hate to think that you were stepping out on that nice young man of yours.”

JuJu: “Why, Addie? Dump Briggs and move on with the bear!”

It was, of course, a lot more complicated than either of them knew. Things with Briggs were extremely difficult at the moment; they had only incrementally improved since the night several months before when I’d tried to break up with him. He was still so angry with me (and so was his mother and her mean little dogs). I couldn’t do anything right with any of them, ever, no matter what I tried.

He’d gone crazy that night, but it might have been flattering. It might have been because he didn’t want to lose me, right? But he’d insulted my family, my intelligence, and my looks—and then he’d put his hands on me and scared me so much. There was absolutely no spin that could have made it positive, not in any way. Since that night, he had also continued to act as if he didn’t even like me, and—

“Addie.” Granger’s hoarse voice saying my name cut into my reverie. “Do you want to order something? It doesn’t look like I have anything to eat here.” He gestured to the fridge that he held open, and the only thing inside it was a bottle of mustard and a fortune cookie. He picked that up and frowned at it. “Crazy that this would get moldy even sealed in a wrapper and sitting in the cold.” He considered. “I can’t really remember when I ordered Chinese food.”

“It must have been a really long time ago because I didn’t think those ever went bad,” I commented, and then looked down at my stomach. Despite my increased exercise, it was still a definite bulge under the zipper of the shorts that my sister Brenna had seen and deemed too hideous to wear on any occasion, even if it was just gardening. I hadn’t let her know that I was putting them on today. My sister Nicola was curvy, too, but hers were in all the right places, the ones that men were interested in (breasts, hips, butt). Mine were there but also everywhere else, and I didn’t need to put more food into that bulge or any of the other ones.

The moldy fortune cookie was turning my stomach, anyway. “Now that I think about it, I’m not very hungry,” I said, “but I’ll hang out if you want to eat.”

“I have to get to the restaurant soon so I want to take a shower,” he answered, which made my thoughts turn to an X-rated place: the place of Granger nude, wearing nothing but rivulets of water and a few bubbles of soap.

“Do you want something cold to drink instead?” he asked. “You’re really red in the face.”

“I’m flushed,” I corrected. It was the image of him naked that had done it, not the late-summer/early-fall heat and the planting we’d been doing. I had imagined his bathroom not as a normal place with a tub and a toilet, but more of a tropical setting with black lava rocks where he would stand under a waterfall surrounded by green vines and hibiscus flowers. He was naked but with his back to me and then I started to imagine him slowly turning, tossing back that white-blonde hair and—

“Addie?”

I needed to put my thoughts in order, since that was the second time he’d had to call my attention to reality. The reality was me in dirty, unflattering shorts in a dirty, empty kitchen, and the man standing across the room from me was neither naked nor the man that I was still dating. That person was Briggs, the one I would be seeing later today.

“You go ahead and take that shower,” I said, bravely looking at him straight in the face as I suggested it and not turning red, and probably not even flushing. “Let the water run down, rub a loofah all over…” Stop. “You can do that, and I’ll go home and clean up there.” It was definitely not a sexy tropical scene in my apartment. The bathroom had small showerhead that constantly dripped, when it was on and when it was off. Of course, I’d had something close to a real waterfall last year. It was due to broken pipes, though, and there hadn’t been any hibiscus flowers or tropical breezes flowing through when I’d had to leave the window open for weeks to dry things out.

“I don’t know how to thank you for all the work that you did here. I don’t know how I roped you into it,” Granger told me as we walked toward the door.

“It was so fun,” I told him honestly. Besides getting to draw my own plan, to pick out plants, to work outside—well, I’d also been hanging out with him when I did those things. That was why, when we’d met for the beer again and he’d mentioned something about the dead plants in his front yard, that I’d jumped in with the idea that I might have been able to make some improvements. “I think it looks amazing, and you can let me know if you want to do any painting because I’m happy to help with that,” I continued.

“I’m not going to hit you up to get more of my house projects done,” he said, and shook his head.

Ok, but I hoped he would keep texting me. He sent funny messages, short and pointed and sometimes hard for me to decipher, but I loved getting them. “Barometer’s falling,” he had noted, and it had taken me a little while to figure out that he meant that it was going to rain, so it might not have been a good day to start clearing the yard. My grandparents had one of those old-fashioned instruments hanging on the wall of their cottage up north, but I’d never known what it was for. “Hand size?” he’d asked in another message, and it wasn’t until we’d met up later that I learned it was because he’d bought me thick work gloves. I really, really treasured those them.

But now, it was time to get out of here. He was checking his phone and frowning furiously, which didn’t bode well for how things were going at the restaurant. “Have a good night at Amunì,” I said. “I hope everything works out with the new server you hired.”

“Me too. Otherwise, I’ll be back in the waiter game.” He didn’t sound enthusiastic or hopeful about the evening, but I was crossing my fingers for the best.

He walked me out to my car and I eased my dirty body into the driver’s seat and waved before I took off down the block. I really would be getting in the shower, the drippy and non-tropical one, because I really was supposed to see Briggs tonight. He’d been gone for a few days on a work trip to Midland and he’d taken his mom with him as a little vacation, but they were due to come back shortly. I’d stayed at his house as requested in order to keep an eye on things, but I hadn’t completed every item on the list of chores that his mother had left out for me. I imagined that I’d be hearing about that when I went over to see him, and I wasn’t looking forward to any of it.

I wasted so much time getting ready that I was practically running late when I finally left my apartment. I wasn’t actually late, but Briggs had a thing about time that was exactly opposed to my sister Juliet’s problem with it: while she was chronically late, he was chronically early. That was a problem just as hers was, because he expected the world to operate on his schedule instead of the one that the rest of us followed. Like, he got pretty angry when he couldn’t immediately take his seat in the stadium when we went to a game because the doors weren’t even open yet, and he didn’t like it at all when we arrived at a restaurant well before our scheduled reservation and we couldn’t have our table since it was full of other diners who were still on their salad course.

“On time” for Briggs meant at least a half an hour before something was scheduled, and I wasn’t going to make that tonight. Instead, I rolled up and parked in front of his house at exactly the hour he’d scheduled for me and then, even though I knew how mad he would be about my tardiness, I still didn’t get out of the car. He would have been mad anyway, I figured, because he always got upset about traffic and he was never pleased with the meals he’d had while away, either. He also had a lot of problems sleeping (which made him very cranky) because the mattresses in the motels he stayed in were never up to par. He really, really wouldn’t have like the twin bed that Brenna and I had shared during Liv’s wedding weekend. Actually, after the reception, I hadn’t slept much at all. I’d been staring at the fire sprinkler in the ceiling above me and smiling as I remembered the night of dancing and…

That was strange, I thought, as I forced myself back to the present. I looked closely at the house in the fading sunlight and realized that his car wasn’t here. When he parked it in the garage, he always pointed a spotlight at the door in order to deter thieves (although as I’d told Granger before, this was a low-crime neighborhood). But the light was still off…and then I also realized that the only lights inside their houses were the ones that I had left illuminated, as specified in their detailed instructions for me as the temporary caretaker. It was funny that they hadn’t turned on more since they’d been home.

But were they even here? I rechecked my messages and saw there hadn’t been anything from him in hours, not since he’d reminded me earlier in the day that I was not to set the heat above sixty or the air conditioning below seventy-five degrees no matter the exterior temperature, and that under no circumstances was I to open the windows—that wasn’t due to worry for my safety, but because he didn’t want me to allow mosquitos into the house (yes, he had screens but he and his mother didn’t trust them). I checked the housesitting instructions that he’d sent before he’d left on this work trip and they definitely stated that they were due to arrive today at five pm, which meant, of course, that they should have been here at four-thirty or earlier. But four-thirty had come and gone, as had five.

So, where were they? It wasn’t like him to be late, but I had to admit that I was very glad about it. He hadn’t caught me being late myself—well, on time, but it meant the same thing to him. I thought that it would also give me a lot of secret satisfaction on the next occasion that he chastised me for my tardiness. I would remember this evening and how he didn’t have a leg to stand on.

I waited for another moment and then felt a terrible fear that he’d actually told me to meet them somewhere else and that somehow, the message had been erased or maybe he’d only mentioned it in conversation and I’d subsequently forgotten. I tentatively texted, “Hey, were we supposed to meet at your house? I’m here.” I waited for an answer and didn’t get one, which was also odd. Unless he was with a client, he almost always got back to me as soon as my message went through. I knew that he wasn’t in a work meeting because he put those in our shared calendar, something that had made me feel important before, like I really shared his life. Now, the reminders of his schedule only annoyed me and I’d taken to putting my own plans into another calendar which I didn’t share. That was where I’d noted my visit to Granger’s house today.

Ok, maybe Briggs was stuck somewhere that had poor service and he and his mother had decided to do something else, like stay another night away. In that case, how long did I actually have to wait around here? Was there a time at which I could safely decide that I’d done my duty and then I could leave? I sighed, because the answer was probably no, and he would get angry if I weren’t here no matter when he actually showed up himself. That made me furious too, and I was thinking that people who were late only did it because they thought that their time was more important than yours…before I remembered that he’d said that repeatedly about JuJu and each time he had, I’d wanted to pinch him.

I got out of my car, figuring that I would look around a little and maybe I could go inside. I remembered the day, two years before, that Briggs had given me the code to his door for the first time so that I could house-sit when he and his mom had gone to Kalkaska. I’d thought that it was a major relationship milestone, until later he’d let it drop that he’d given me a guest code that he’d later deleted. He did the same thing every time I stayed over to help them out, but if he hadn’t been back yet, then the old code would still work.

It did. I let myself in and then called his name, even though I didn’t think he would answer, and I walked slowly through the rooms that hadn’t changed since I’d left them that morning. I went next door to check his mom’s house, too, but it was empty and free of the smell of fresh urine that arrived whenever her dogs did. They’d gone to stay with Briggs’ aunt and his cat was being boarded, and none of them were around. The mail I’d collected was still in a neat pile and the list of cleaning chores that I hadn’t done was still placed squarely in the middle of her kitchen table.

I went back over to Briggs’ house and sat on his itchy couch, which felt a lot like a cat scratching post (except his cat was always kept in his mudroom). Where was he? He could see my location on his phone but I didn’t have access to his, and he hated when I called him. By this point, more than half an hour had passed since I’d arrived on time so technically, he was an hour behind schedule. I did call but it went right to voicemail, and then as I sat debating whether to leave a message as his recorded voice told me exactly how to do that, my phone rang with another call and I quickly hit the screen to answer.

But it wasn’t Briggs. “Addie? This is Patricia Skurwysyn,” a loud voice announced. “I am Briggs’ paternal aunt. That means that his father was my brother.”

“I understand,” I said, but I didn’t understand why she was calling me. I’d heard of her but we’d never met, since I hadn’t met anyone in his family except for his mother.

“Briggs and my sister-in-law Suzann gave me your number,” she explained. “They wanted to be sure that I had a reliable contact in case something went wrong with my CPAP machine for sleep apnea while they were away. ”

“I don’t know much about sleep apnea—”

“There’s been an accident,” she informed me.

I tried again to explain. “I’m so sorry that they thought I could help you, but I really don’t know anything about those machines—”

“From your flippant tone, I assume that I’m the first person to contact you about this.”

I was thinking how funny genetics were; Briggs’ father had died many years before, but talking to this lady was almost exactly like talking to my boyfriend and now I saw very clearly that their personalities had definitely come down through the Skurwysyn side. “I’m not trying to be flippant,” I told her. “I understand that it must be really scary to have breathing problems, especially at night, and I wish that I could help you. I’m sorry that I can’t.”

There was a silence that went on for long enough that I checked to make sure that the call hadn’t dropped. “Ok, I’ll let you go,” I told her, which was what Mina said when Mr. Campbell’s very distant cousin called her to try to weasel out information about when he was going to die. That was the only one of his relations who would stoop enough to talk to the “help,” and she did it for the most morbid reason around.

“I’m sorry to tell you this,” Aunt Patricia said and she did sound slightly sorry, which was a change from her previous tone of irritation. “On their way back to Detroit this afternoon, Briggs and Suzann were involved in a fatal car accident.”

“Briggs killed someone while he drove his mom home?” I gasped. He was always so careful—especially when he had precious cargo like her in the passenger seat. He went five miles below the posted speed limit at all times! He counted to ten at every stop sign, one-one thousand all the way up to ten-one thousand, and he did the same when the light turned green, too, no matter how much other drivers behind him honked. “What happened?” I asked this woman. “Is he in jail? Is his mom getting him out?”

There was another silence. “I begin to understand the view of my nephew and sister-and-law. They always said that you were vacuous.”

I understood quite clearly that she was insulting me. “I’m going to hang up,” I told her directly, but she kept on talking as if I hadn’t said a word.

“Are you being purposefully dense? I said that they were in a fatal car accident. Briggs and Suzann are dead.”

I couldn’t seem to find my voice so this time, I created the silence. She filled it.

“They were returning home when they were hit by a large truck. The driver claims that Briggs turned in front of him, but that can’t be true. He was such a careful driver, especially with such precious cargo. The truck was heading to a nearby avian sanctuary with a cargo of rescued animals,” she said calmly. “Briggs and my sister-in-law were killed instantly, and unfortunately, the birds fed.”

I was having a very hard time understanding anything this woman was telling me. “Briggs is dead? Are you sure?”

I heard her exasperated sigh, loud and clear. “Their names have not been released but soon enough, you will be able to verify the circumstances of the accident for yourself, if you’re able to navigate the internet in even a rudimentary way. Post-crash, the pieces were brought—”

“The pieces?” I interrupted. “Pieces of the car?”

No. No, that wasn’t what she meant. She meant that the truck involved in the collision had been carrying Rüppell's griffon vultures, a name which she spelled out for me. She then explained that those birds were large-sized obligate scavengers, and that term meant that they fed exclusively on carrion. The truck driver had run away, the cages had broken open in the accident, Briggs had the top down on his convertible because his mother liked to tan, and the road was rural and without much other traffic. Before anyone called the police and before first responders arrived on the scene…there had been some eating.

“It’s very unfortunate,” Briggs’ aunt said, which seemed to me to be a large understatement. But I was also thinking that none of this was true. Either it was a big joke that someone was playing on me, or I was dreaming.

“It’s very unfortunate,” I repeated mindlessly.

“Yes. Those birds are critically endangered, and most flew away before they could be recaptured. If they can’t be found, there’s little chance that they’ll survive a Michigan winter.”

I had to hang up. There was no way that this could be real, but I was going to use that internet thing she’d mentioned to prove to myself that Briggs’ aunt was nutty—honestly, she had to have been really sick to tell such a story. “I’ll let you go,” I repeated, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Before I could let that happen, though, she wanted to tell me more about how there would be a delay prior to the funerals because the bodies wouldn’t be immediately identified and released.

“The authorities will need to perform a thorough investigation and they won’t confirm anything, probably not until they compare dental records. Then, of course, I will pursue our legal avenues. When I say ‘our,’ I’m only referencing the Skurwysyn family,” she clarified. “You and Briggs were not married and had no issue, so you would not be a party to any proceedings or settlements.”

“I’m hanging up,” I announced, and did. With my fingers shaking, I searched for traffic accidents and avian sanctuaries in mid-Michigan. I read for a while with mounting agitation, and then I called my sister.

“No, that’s made up,” JuJu said when I told her. “Addie, come on. That’s not true.”

I’d made it home after looking through everything that I could find. Yes, there was an animal sanctuary that was near a route they could have taken, and yes, there had been a fatal accident reported on a rural road nearby. There were no details on names of the victims, their ages, or even their sex. While I read, Aunt Patricia Skurwysyn had been texting me, too, and asking for information like the door code to Briggs’ house. She had wanted to know if either he or his mother had a safe, and if so, did I know the combinations because she hated to have to pay someone to force the locks.

My disbelief had started to morph into a shocked realization that her story might have been true. I’d run upstairs to my apartment and then, for some reason, had gone into my bathroom. I was now sitting fully-clothed in the tub, still searching on my phone. The more I read, the more I believed it. “Look it up!” I insisted to my sister. “It’s on news sites now, just stuff about anonymous victims.”

“This is ridiculous. Vultures?”

“Juliet! Unless the state police are just making a really out-of-season April Fool’s—”

“Ok, hold on,” she interrupted, and I listened to the faint click from her nails as she typed. Then she breathed, “Holy Mary. I’ve never even heard of that kind of bird! Who is Rüppell?”

“He’s a German naturalist, but that’s not the important part. I think Briggs is dead!” I put my hand over my eyes, like I couldn’t stand to see the truth or something.

“It says that they have to disinfect the road,” she mentioned, and made a disgusted noise. “It’s making me sick to read about it. When they say ‘biohazards,’ it must mean—”

“Juliet!” I yelped for a second time. “You’re still missing the point that my boyfriend is dead!”

“Oh, right. I’m sorry, Addie. Are you ok?”

No. No, I was not. I’d been crying on and off since the moment that I determined that Briggs’ aunt wasn’t some total nutcase and that she had been right, even in the detail of the name of the birds that had been involved. The ones that had participated in the…meal.

“Addie?”

“No,” I choked. “No, I’m not all right.”

“Ok, I’ll come over…oh, Nicola is calling me. That’s weird.” It was, because our oldest sister rarely contacted us, although she had been more communicative since she’d started dating her boyfriend Jude. “Hold on for a second because something might be really wrong.”

“Something more wrong than Briggs getting killed by vultures?” I asked.

“Didn’t they die from the car crash?” she reminded me. “The birds came after because they’re obligate scavengers. Hold on.”

I shook my head at her but a moment later my phone showed that Nicola was calling me, too. “Hello?” I said. “Did JuJu tell you?”

“Addie, Nicola has news,” Juliet spoke up quickly, and I heard Brenna and Sophie say hello, too. We were all on the line together.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Ok, everyone’s listening except for Grace,” Nicola said. “She lost her phone again, so we’re going to tell her when we talk to Mom and Dad.”

“Oh, something’s wrong,” Sophie said. “Nic! What? What’s happening?”

“Jude and I are getting married,” she said, and I heard her start laughing and from the sound of sniffling, also happy crying.

We all got that way, even Brenna very briefly, although I wasn’t sure if my own tears might have also sprung from a little bit of hysteria. Then we were telling her congratulations and how happy we all were, which I was, too, although I was also…

I was going to faint. I lay down and let the cold iron of the old bathtub shock me out of dizziness and I stayed there until I heard Nicola say something about “next weekend.”

“What?” I asked, sitting back up and holding onto the side of the tub to combat the reeling that the movement had caused. “Did you say that you’re getting married next weekend? Nicola, are you ok?”

“I know how this sounds,” she agreed. “I’m usually more structured.”

That was an understatement to beat all understatements. It was like saying, “Cookie Monster kind of has a teensy bit of sweet tooth, just a little.”

“What can we do?” Sophie asked.

“We’re not going to be able to stop her, even if the guy is boring,” Brenna said. She already sounded bored.

“Jude is not boring, Brat!” Nic shot back. “He’s wonderful. I love him, and you are all invited to our wedding next weekend in our back yard. The only thing I need from you is silence. You can’t tell Mom until Friday, because that’s when we’re going to their house to share the news.”

None of this made any sense except for Nicola’s last comment, because late notice gave our mother less time to intervene. I understood my sister’s position about that. My own position was currently flat on my back in the tub again, because this was all too much. “I’m not going to bring a date,” I said. That wouldn’t have been possible, not after the vultures.

Nicola was so happy that she didn’t even say anything about Briggs not being invited in the first place. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I love him so much,” she told us, in a tone I’d never heard from my stern, serious sister. It made me start to cry again, and given everything that had happened, I had a very hard time stopping. I had to mute myself because it turned into gasping sobs, so I curled up in my tub and dripped tears and snot and listened to my sisters plan and debate details, the same discussion I thought we’d have about my own wedding.

Instead, I was alone in a bathtub and the man I’d thought I would marry had turned into someone I didn’t like at all, and then he’d been eaten by birds. My sobs briefly turned into laughter and then switched back over to crying, because I was a total mess.

“I’m so happy for you,” Juliet told Nicola, and everyone said the same. I unmuted myself to add my own sentiments.

“I’m so happy!” I said. The words were accompanied by another sob, but luckily other people were also overwrought and no one seemed to notice. “I’m so happy,” I repeated, and that time I got it out without any crying. I closed my eyes and tried to think about flowers and cake rather than beaks and claws. I’d spent a lot of years creating a life that was uneventful and ordinary, a path that would progress without incident or interruption. Why did it have to change? When had it all started to fall apart?

“I’m so happy,” I repeated, and then re-muted myself due to crying.