have a very serious, very lucrative opportunity for you.”
“What are you, fucking deaf? I said I’m not interested! Get the hell out of here!” I yell, unable to hold back. I left Hollywood a long time ago, and just the idea of going back makes my skin crawl.
She recoils at the harshness of my response, but I don’t fucking care. If she’d have gotten the point the first fucking time, I wouldn’t have to yell so goddamn much.
I breeze past her and head inside, slamming the back door shut behind me—for the second time today.
Bailey whines, but he doesn’t leave her side.
I shake my head as I head toward the kitchen to brew a fresh pot of coffee. The pot gets the brunt of my anger as I slam it around the sink and stove like a ping-pong ball. It’s only after I’ve calmed down enough to actually put the water on to boil that I look out the window. The princess is down by the water—as is my fucking dog—and she’s wrestling with a kayak that says Earl’s on the side.
Of course, fucking Earl Harry helped her…he sees tits he’s never seen before and goes weak in the knees.
Watching her struggle to wrangle the thing like a fucking mouse in a pit of snakes makes me wonder how in the hell she managed to kayak herself across Mud Bay and up the river without falling the fuck in the water in the first place.
I grit my teeth as a pang of guilt over knowingly putting her safety at risk makes my temple throb. The sun’s already set, so there’s no way she’s going to make it back down the river and across the bay before it’s pitch-dark—the kind of dark she’s never encountered in her life, I’m sure. Around here, there’s nothing but whatever moon we’ve got and the stars in the sky.
And tonight, there’s not even that. Rain’s supposed to be moving in within the hour.
I war with myself as she finally manages to climb back inside, a dangerous rock of the boat making her brace herself against the sides and crisscross one of her hands over her heart. Bailey barks from the shore, and she uses the oar to push herself away from the rocks and back out into the flow of the river. She’s sucked up in the current pretty quickly, headed back for the bay whether she’s ready or not.
Bailey looks up at the house and barks, imploring me to make the decision we both know I should. My teeth ache as I clench my jaw.
“Son of a bitch!” I yell, grabbing the pot off the stove and dropping it into the sink with absolutely no fucking finesse before turning off the burner. I storm over to the door and grab my rubber boots, yanking them on angrily. With a snatch of my hand, I snag my raincoat off the hook, shove open the door so hard it slams like a clap of thunder behind me, and head to grab my goddamn gear.
So much for relaxing.
Billie
I’ll look at a lot of things—naked penises, weird YouTube videos, that Dr. Pimple Popper show, even though it makes me sick—but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially when it’s a steel horse a la “Wanted Dead or Alive” and the very difference between life and death.
“A single moment can change everything,” Momma used to say. “Sometimes it’s for the good. Sometimes it’s for the bad. Sometimes it’s for reasons you can’t understand. And, sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’ll lead you to somewhere—to someone—you never saw coming.”
A soft smile from a stranger at the Stop N’Go? That’s how she met Daddy.
Impulsively calling in to a country music station and winning a trip to Vegas to see Waylon Jennings? That’s how she got pregnant with my older sister, Birdie.
Not by Waylon Jennings, mind you, but Daddy.
Uncontrollable laughter in the middle of a fancy Italian restaurant? That’s how she landed her one and only acting gig. A part in a TV show, she was a waitress in a diner. One episode. One scene. And only one line. “Whatever you do, don’t order the meatloaf.”
But my granny, well, she had a slightly different view on luck…
“If you’re a Harris, you’re either cursed, or you’re one of the luckiest sons of bitches alive. There are no in-betweens. No simple lives. We’re complicated country folk, and we’re either flying high or flat on our asses.”
I used to think my momma was