Black edges into my vision. “Excuse me?”
“If you were seeing Addison Potts while you were engaged to Naomi, I don’t want to know about it. Didn’t get a good look at her yesterday, but some of your mother’s friends did. Urges are a powerful thing, son. Especially if she grew up to look anything like her mother.” He sets down the remote with a firm clunk. “But seeing a woman like her again will lead to political ruin. If the press is suspicious now, just wait until they dig up the past. They’ll pounce on the fact that she’s a relation to the Clemons family. Eventually there will be uncomfortable questions about who fathered her. It could go national.”
“First of all, I’m not living my life for the press. Second, don’t refer to Addison as a woman like her.” My hands curl around the chair arms and squeeze. “What the hell does that even mean?”
“Careful, Elijah. You were less offended when I called Naomi some woman.”
The truth of that is like a bucket of cold water to the face. Jesus. My father is trying to be helpful and I’m ready to go a round over a perceived insult. Over a girl I’ve known for one day. Letting go of the chair, I stand up and pace to the window, looking out over the church-steepled skyline. “Yesterday was the first time I met her. I didn’t know she was Naomi’s…cousin.”
My father sits back. “All right, that’s good. There’s probably some way to prove that.”
“She was in New York until a couple of weeks ago.”
“Already have someone working on gathering dates and details.”
I grit my teeth to keep from demanding he call off his efforts. Addison just lost her grandmother and had her life transplanted in a new town. Any kind of investigation or media interest could disrupt it even more. “I want them off her trail. I want her left alone.”
“Then you better do the same.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Addison
Look at me. So firm, juicy & mayoral. You want this.
A vote for Du Pont is a vote for this sweet, sweet junk, girl.
—Twitter @DuPontBadonk
I heft the sack of puff paints and ribbons onto my shoulder and lumber up the stairs, attempting to slip my apartment key out of my shorts. There is one thing I didn’t consider when I took over Jingle Balls from my grandmother. Eventually we would run out of merchandise. Including myself, there are two employees. I take the weekday shifts. Darlene, a college student transplant from Virginia, does nights. And an elderly gent named Terry with a fondness for mesh tank tops handles weekends.
When the supplies started to run low, I called everyone in for a meeting, only to be informed my grandmother did all of the designing herself. Where? I’d asked, in a hysterical, high-pitched voice. To which I was greeted by identical shrugs. I returned home that same evening to find the guest room closet packed to the rafters with tubs of glitter, hooks, bulbs, paint, ceramic statues and price tags. An entire vocation crammed inside an advertisement for the Container Store. Of course this is the one closet I hadn’t opened yet.
As I sat in the wobbly metal chair in Jingle Balls, inventory thinning around me, I had to make a decision. Do I shut the operation down and bail? Go back to Brooklyn and hope my stabilized apartment hasn’t been rented out yet (keep dreaming)? Or do I get my ass in gear and start making some fucking decorations?
Sitting on the floor of my bedroom learning how to operate a hot glue gun on that first night, I started thinking. My grandmother was an ambitious woman. A woman who wanted the whole wide world decorated for the happiest time of the year twelve months out of twelve. It surprised me that she was happy confining those dreams to Jingle Balls. What if she hadn’t been happy with it, though? What if she’d wanted to expand and never got the chance?
That question has remained with me all week and the more I create, the more I’m infected by the holiday spirit I used to have—in grudging teenage fashion—when my grandmother was still alive. I’ve even started having these crazy, ridiculous daydreams about a decorating business. Store windows, residential houses, municipal buildings. December would be a mad rush, but wouldn’t it be satisfying to decorate an entire town?
Whoa there, I’d told myself. Learn to operate a glue gun first.
Once I did that, the rest came easier, until creating the decorations became fun. And before I knew it, there was enough inventory to last another two or three weeks at the market. Meaning…I would be staying at least another two or three weeks.
But my decision to stay in Charleston had nothing to do with Elijah.
Nothing.
I haven’t seen him since the morning I dropped him off at the storage locker, anyway, and the message is loud and clear. We were a one-night stand. Of friendship. Even though I expected nothing from him, his impromptu press conference outside City Hall set loose a little bubble of hope inside me. It floated and floated for days, before popping. It turns out he wasn’t that glad he met me, after all.