The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay Read Online Free Page B

life. The art will fit in my hatchback, with the suitcases, I think. That means the rest has to go into storage or into a new place asap. A new place. When I look around at my battered thrift-store pots and plates—the same things I took with me to college, by and large, I think maybe it would make more sense to start fresh. If I had any money to start fresh with.
    Still, most of this is not worth the cost of storage, and since I won’t be able to afford first and last months’ rent until after April, what doesn’t fit in my car doesn’t have a place to go. I pour myself a juice glass of wine and start dividing the keeps and the giveaways.
    As my body works on sorting, my mind works on my next steps. I could go home. My stepbrother and his wife live together in my parents’ house two hours west of here. Charlie runs our dad’s Dairy Dame and Carrie does the books. We have a muddled history. Before Carrie, Charlie needed constant handouts to stay above water. Every time I had a dime, he asked for five cents. But Carrie is the opposite, responsible to the point of rigidity. I should be grateful to her for stopping the hemorrhaging, but now Charlie and I hardly have reason to talk at all. Whenever I call, the first words out of his mouth are always, “Who died?”
    Even so, they have to take me in on account of me being family. But Carrie will expect me to work behind the counter to pay my way. I can just imagine what Mitchell will say about his girlfriend selling milkshakes and slushies. I suppose I just won’t tell him.
    I won’t need pots and pans at my brother’s house—or my dignity—but Charlie and Carrie will need some warning. Three days should do. I have five more days in this place, so that gives me maybe two more days to think of a better plan, and, if I can’t, three days to gird my loins that I am moving home.
    What will I need for five more days? I am no kind of cook. In half an hour the room is down to a microwaveable bowl for soup, a mug, a spoon, and my bread knife. Four cabinets and three drawers of silverware, dishes, gadgets, and Tupperware is whittled into one solitary box. What doesn’t fit, goes to the curb.
    The fourth and final drawer in my kitchen is where I’ve stashed “important” paperwork for the last decade. Basically every time I have a tax return or health insurance statement or paid credit card bill, I put it in there. I can probably throw away half of it, if I just sit down and face the pile. One glass of wine into the packing process, I can think of no better time than now.
    I refill said glass and make myself a little plate. Good bread from the bakery, topped with cheese and fruit. It is, with a spread like this, impossible to feel poor. After savoring a couple bites standing up, my food and wine and I sit down together on the kitchen floor for a spell to deal with the mess of my life.
    *   *   *
    Twenty minutes later I find it.
    It’s in a manila envelope—the same one it came in ten years ago. It says:
    State of Nevada, IMPORTANT, OPEN IMMEDIATELY
    and the minute I see it I think, Oh no. Like I’m watching it on YouTube, I remember that day, the day that envelope came. I had been back from Las Vegas for a month, and the whole ridiculous trip was already a distant memory. Renee and Nic’s wedding was the very next day—so it must have come on a Friday. Back then I waited tables on Thursday nights at a long-defunct club renowned for its uptown martinis and downtown waitresses. Almost all of us were artists, waitresses, or novelists. Or wanted to be. The owner told me to look “edgy, but no tattoos.” I’ve always been more Nashville than Flatbush, but he seemed happy enough with that.
    Bartime was 3:00 A.M. , but we didn’t always go home. There would be these boys there, boys just waiting for the last call to bring out the big guns. I was twenty-two and nursing a