Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
They passed a hand over their face in a phew gesture.
“So my queer ass married this random, left town, made him divorce me, and now I wouldn’t cross the state line if all Louisiana were on fire, thank you very much.”
“Well, there’s the water right there, so,” Veronica said.
“Exactly. I’d wade into gator-infested waters before stepping a toe into Tex-ass.”
“Are you from here?” Greta asked Veronica.
“I’m from St. Bernard Parish, yeah. But I’m a different person than I ever was when I lived there. Might as well be a thousand miles away.”
Helen high-fived her.
“Classic tale of quote unquote ‘boy’ realizes she’s a girl, girl tells parents, parents care more about preconceived notions and egos than about girl, girl leaves, and shit gets a million times better for her.”
Sitting there, surrounded by three people who all had families far worse than her own, Greta wondered if she was just ungrateful.
“How do you know if you’d be better off without your family?” she asked.
Helen refilled her cup, and Carys slid a warm hand on her thigh.
“I don’t think it’s so cut and dried,” Helen said. “Like, I still talk to my parents. They love me. They just have lives that aren’t the one I want. If they wanted to come visit me here, I’d be down. I just won’t go back there.”
“Yeah, it’s about choosing how you want the people in your life to make you feel,” Carys said. “You can decide you only want people in your life who make you feel respected, cared for, listened to. Then you communicate that to them, and if they repeatedly make you feel disrespected, neglected, or ignored instead, you stop giving them your time or energy.”
“Family’s hard because it’s rarely all bad,” Veronica said. “There’s all those pretty memories of good times too. Times y’all baked cookies or picked flowers or whatever shit white people do in Maine.”
Greta snorted, remembering times she really had baked cookies and picked flowers with her family.
“And it feels like if you cut those people off from your future, then you lose the folks who knew that part of your past,” Carys said. “But it’s not true. You keep those memories no matter what, because they’re yours. They don’t belong to the people you shared them with.”
Helen and Veronica looked at each other knowingly, and Greta got the distinct sense this was a conversation they’d had before.
“This is a thing, huh?” she said.
“Oh, honey. This is a thing,” Helen said, and Carys and Veronica nodded meaningfully.
“Do you not have queer friends or something?” Veronica asked.
“No, I do.”
Greta thought of Ash first. Then realized that most of the queer friends she’d made in college she only texted with on rare occasions. They’d lost touch because most of them hadn’t stuck around Maine after graduation. Or if they had, they’d stayed in Portland and rarely left.
“Well, maybe not that many,” she revised.
They sipped their drinks, and Veronica and Helen started talking about a mutual friend whom Helen had seen the other day and had an update on.
Carys turned to Greta. “Would you really move here?”
In the (admittedly short) time Greta had spent with Carys, she’d always seemed confident and breezy. But a note of vulnerability crept into her voice now. Her eyes looked uncertain but hopeful. Heat flushed through Greta. Had Carys been playing it cool only because Greta was leaving soon? Had Greta’s concerns that she was rushing into things by imagining moving here been unfounded?
Greta twined her fingers through Carys’. “I really like it here. And…um…” Her heart started racing and she could feel heat move from her chest to her neck. “Like, no pressure, obviously, but I really like you, and…”
Carys smiled, showing her overlapping front teeth that Greta loved. “I really like you too, Greta.”
The flush spread up to Greta’s cheeks, and she ducked her head. “I’d have to find a job and a place to live and…move… I don’t know. It’s a lot. But maybe?”
Carys nodded, smile dimming a touch. “Well, if you start really thinking about it, let me know. I’ll get on the queer phone tree and find you something.”
“There’s a queer phone tree here? That’s amazing!”
Helen, Veronica, and Carys laughed.
“It’s not really a thing. It just feels like it is,” Carys clarified. “This is a small-ass town.”
Veronica and Helen nodded.
Greta looked around at the sprawling city, the new friends she’d made, the woman she was quickly falling for.
“It feels pretty damn big to me.”
Chapter 13
Truman
Truman stood under the hot water and cursed his existence. Well, wine’s existence.
“Stop buying wine and there won’t be wine to drink,” he told himself logically. But the words hurt his head, so he decided not talking was best for the moment.
In fact, after several days of nonmiserable having a purpose that had interrupted his original plan of sulking all alone, he was right back where he started. He was toweling off and contemplating simply crawling back into bed and continuing his interrupted self-pity when his phone chimed.