The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,121

I lost a horse, I gained a dog.

OLIVE HATED LYDIA. “SHE’S AGGRESSIVE. SHE FINISHES your sentences. I hate that. She bosses him around and he takes it. And she has a huge ass.”

“Oh, stop it. I bet she does not.”

“Honest to Christ. No lie. You could serve tea off her ass.”

I asked Gabriella about that later, waiting patiently until the topic of Lydia came up without my leading. “Olive said she had a really big—”

“Butt?” Gabriella volunteered. “It’s ginormous.”

I was intrigued by this big-butted, allergic, aggressive Christian pudding maker. If she hadn’t been drunk, then this took a bit of reckless daring I couldn’t help but admire. Taking on a wildly brooding man, probably an alcoholic, with an ex-wife, an angry teenage daughter, and a frosty clan of Italian women all crossing their arms over their considerable chests. She’d sense the whore Olive called her even if no one so much as breathed it aloud in her presence.

Surely they couldn’t really have known each other for only two days.

“NO, IT WAS TWO DAYS. THEY BOTH LIVE IN DAYTON, BUT they didn’t meet until Vegas,” Mimi said as I sat in her kitchen, making plans for Olive’s wedding shower. Since it looked as though Olive and Nick were really, truly getting married, in spite of their frequent arguments and shouting matches—and since I no longer had Moonshot to keep me occupied at home—I knew I’d better get down to it and do what a maid of honor was supposed to do.

I knew Mimi would take over, but I’d made peace with that, deciding to embrace it.

I vowed to treat interactions with Mimi like a dance, like when I’d had to dance with Big David in salsa class. He was clunky, bless his generous, good-sported heart, and when he said, “I’m an oaf,” I remembered thinking, That’s it. That’s the perfect word. But if I stayed open and present and really focused on following, we could pull it off. Maybe not graceful, maybe not beautiful, but what anyone could recognize as a dance.

I decided to let Mimi lead and to be the most gracious of followers.

Mimi made me a glass of espresso, and we planned the shower while she made some “gravy.” Mimi wanted me to host the shower at the farm. I tried to convince her to have it at her house, since most of the female relatives lived in Columbus, an hour’s drive away. “Plus, won’t that be weird for everyone?” I asked her. “Since Bobby doesn’t live there anymore?”

She stopped chopping an onion and pointed the knife at me. “You belong to this family, Camden. Even if you end up marrying that fucking Indian, you belong to this family.”

A sincere laugh escaped me, its echo bouncing in the kitchen. Mimi looked startled.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m not marrying that fucking Indian.”

“Oh. Well. Whatever you do, you’re Gabriella’s mother, and you belong to this family.”

I took it. Just follow. Just follow. “Thank you,” I said.

She continued chopping, then asked, almost shyly, “What happened to the Indian?”

I looked out her window at the gray mounds of snow melting in the rain. “It just . . . it just didn’t work out. I’m not looking to replace my marriage quite so quickly.”

“Don’t take too long about it or you’ll wind up old and alone like me.”

I bit my lip. Just follow. “Old and alone sure beats lonely with the wrong guy.”

Her expression made it clear that she thought I was nuts. Fucking nuts, if she’d said it aloud.

DUBEY CONTACTED COLLEEN JEWELL ABOUT ANOTHER salsa class—he said that was just the thing I needed to distract me from missing Moonshot. He called the Davids, Hank and Helen, Nick and Olive, and Aurora, inviting them back. He asked me to be his partner again. “So, I didn’t scare you off?” I joked. “Trying to pin you down for a Valentine’s date?”

“I don’t think there’s much of anything you could do to scare me off,” he said.

Again, the flutter.

“So,” I said, “am I allowed to say I’m dating you?”

“You’re allowed to say whatever you want.”

“But are you okay with that?”

“I’m okay with what we’re doing. More than okay.” That made me happy. But then he said, “I don’t think we need to call it anything in particular.”

ONE DAY I GOT AN E-MAIL FROM GINGER AVALON. JUST seeing it sent me into a frenzy—had she changed her mind? Was she willing to sell him? Oh, shit, where would I get that kind of money? But the