all).
Gingersnap responded by sulking out of the house to pout in the barn. Max’s nose-in-the-butt greeting earned him a swipe across the nose, but he didn’t seem offended.
Gabriella and I agreed that Champagne Toast was too stuffy a name for such a raggedy guy. Champ sounded silly. Pagne sounded like “pain.” Toast? Hmm. “Hey, Toast,” Gabriella said.
The cat snarled at Max, ears flat, the name making no apparent impression.
WHEN DAVY TOLD ME BOBBY’S BIRTHDAY PARTY HAD BEEN moved to Tanti Baci, the news leveled me. I’m not sure what I’d pictured—that the party would be canceled altogether, or that Mimi would have a family-only gathering in Columbus? But imagining people gathered to celebrate the man who’d just been an utter shit to me and my daughter made me feel kicked to the curb.
Davy had tried to convince Big David not to make the cake after all, but Big David felt he had to—he’d committed to it months ago, and it was his business after all.
On the phone with Davy, I couldn’t disguise the hurt in my voice. I sniffed, amplified in his ear, and in just the right way, apparently, because an hour later, he and Big David were at the farm, Ava in tow, bearing ice cream—a pint for each of us.
Gabriella groaned and said, “I need to study!” as if they were torturing her, but she sat on the kitchen island to eat straight out of her pint.
“By the way, your goat is out,” Davy said. “She’s standing on your mailbox.”
I let them pamper us. I opened my ice cream, now perfectly soft. Davy remembered my favorite flavor—caramel with almonds. I tried not to think about eating ice cream with Bobby on our first date. Who were we? Who were those people?
Ava, immaculately made up and dressed, as always—she never looked like someone slowly losing her mind—ensconced herself on the couch. To my amazement, Champagne Toast loped in and curled up next to her. “Gerald!” Ava cried. “What’s this absurd contraption?”
We all looked at one another, curious. Ava didn’t comment on the fact that the cat was missing a leg and had a line of stitches marching like blue ants across his shaved shoulder.
Ava spooned the cat ice cream from her pint. She scolded him for bringing a mole into her bed. “Oh! My skin just shivers thinking of it, you naughty thing!”
Big David shrugged and said, “We never had a cat named Gerald. The memory must be from when she was a kid.”
The cat fished his way into Ava’s purse, pulling tissues and a compact from it, proving to be quite dexterous with his one front leg. I returned the items, then put the purse on the mantel.
“Well, the cat does need a name,” Gabriella said.
I told the story of his tag. “I was thinking of Toast.”
“Toast?” Davy asked. “Don’t you already have a cat named Gingersnap? And a horse named Biscuit? What is this? The all-carb barn?”
“All right, fine, he can be Gerald,” I said, laughing. “Well, Mr. Gerald, what do you think?”
The cat blinked his celery eyes.
“It’s decided, then,” I said.
If only the rest of my long list of decisions could be so easy.
I STARTED SMALL, WITH THOSE DECISIONS. I OPENED NEW accounts of my own. I called Helen and asked for referrals for a divorce lawyer. I made an appointment with one for next week.
After school, Gabriella and Tyler showed up for work. I’d worried about hiring them both, since I didn’t want to deal with any romance drama, but they were great.
Davy, and Olive, and even my mother—in a rare break from Anderson decorum—had wondered if Gabriella and Tyler had sex (or, as my mother had primly asked, “Do you think they’re . . . active?”). I hoped not but hated the look on everyone’s face when I admitted that they probably did. “Come on,” I said. “We were all having sex in high school! And we were ‘good kids.’ ” I’d asked Gabriella, of course, and her eyes flashed with disdain, “God, Mom. No,” but I’d told the same lie to my own mother. Working with animals had made it easy to talk with Gabriella about sex and reproduction from the time she was a toddler.
I made sure she knew I didn’t want her to have sex yet. (But I certainly didn’t tell her that I’d had sex in high school!) I’d tried to be honest about how sex changed things, how there was no going back once you had it, how