The Belle and the Beard, Kate Canterbary [fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

can shake open a trash bag, snap on the gloves, and get down in the dirt. For the past decade, my style of problem-solving and my record of getting it done every damn time meant my job security was never in question. I was the irreplaceable right-hand woman.

Until five days ago.

So, I forced open another door, scrubbed another wall, filled another trash bag. I hadn't slept more than a handful of hours all week but I was good at this. If I kept going, I'd find the way through. I'd figure it out. If I kept my eyes ahead, I'd nail this situation the way I nailed everything.

It had always been this way. Always problems, issues, tragedies, disasters, dramas. One lined up behind the other. It had been this way when I was a small child spending summers with Midge while my mother worked her ass off to keep the wheels turning. There was no time to examine these things, no time to deliberate over them or file them into any context other than the problem to solve today.

I didn't have to look back. It wasn't as though it would change anything. What was the point? I couldn't go back in time, couldn't erase the mortifying things I'd said on a hot mic, couldn't stop the dual train wreck of my humiliation—and termination—on live cable news, couldn't prevent so-called friends from turning their backs or colleagues from blacklisting me. Couldn't prevent others from blowing up my phone with messages of support and thinly veiled requests for more gossip. Couldn't even shut up the cable news bookers determined to get me on-air again so I could dump out the whole teapot on what it was really like inside a pointless bid for the presidency.

The only way out was through.

Pay the bat guy, call a plumber, scrub the ceilings. I was going to figure this out the way I figured everything out, and I had some money saved. I could get by for a bit before things grew hairy.

I could stay here at Midge's cottage and clean up two years' worth of avoidance while the news cycle beat my gaffe-turned-scandal to a pulp. It would take a few months and a good, humble comeback story—or someone else stepping in something far worse than a few unsavory complaints about my former boss, the senator from the great state of Georgia and hopeless presidential hopeful, Tyson Timbrooks. In this sense, it was nothing more than a waiting game.

Scrub the floors. Empty rotten food from the cupboards. Plug in my toaster oven.

All I had to do was get through.

Falling asleep should've been easy. I should've been comatose the minute my head hit the pillow but I was too tired to sleep. I hated trading in these extremes but it seemed to be my way. So hungry I lost my appetite. So stressed I was calm. So angry I came off happy.

And now, some thirty hours since the last time I'd slept, I couldn't keep my eyes shut. I'd filled eighteen trash bags and sanitized the cottage from top to bat-loving bottom. I'd hauled every sheet and towel, every tablecloth and curtain to the laundromat and made lists of everything I had to do while the spin cycle shook the machines.

I stocked up on food and supplies after getting turned around several times on my way to the grocery store. Then I got turned around on my way back. Say what you would about Washington, D.C. but at least the streets made sense.

I made Midge's home as habitable as any place with flickering lights and a shortage of hot water could claim to be, and I'd made a comfortable space for myself in the den. Midge's room was still musty from the roof leak, but more than that, I didn't feel right taking her room. The den had always been my room and I wasn't ready to change that.

After all that work and everything I'd slogged through this week, I should've been dead to the world. But I couldn't push all the way to the far edge of this extreme and let myself rest. I was a few months away from turning thirty-six and I still couldn't make responsible choices for myself. My body didn't know how to do that because I always pushed myself past the point of listening to my needs and now I had to push myself out of this point.

I called up a sleep story on my favorite relaxation app and I reached over, fumbling blindly for the tote I'd set near the trundle bed. My sleep mask and bottle of melatonin gummies were down at the bottom and I had to empty the whole bag to reach them.

Even with that attack squad, it took an hour and the creation of three more lists (Things to Review: House Documents; Things to Review: Estate Provisions; Non-Beltway, Non-Consulting Work Possibilities) to chill out enough to feel my eyelids droop. I was almost there when I fully recognized that my so-hot-it's-rude neighbor knew Midge.

I'd skated right past that detail earlier in the day and I'd filed him away as nosy, mansplainy, and built like a barn. Nowhere in my comprehension of that exchange did I connect the reality of him living next door to knowing Midge.

That wasn't even the whole of it. He understood she was serious about coming back as a ghost and haunting anyone who'd crossed her. He'd heard about her family—and that she didn't actually have a niece. He'd lived next door long enough to care about her.

This hit me right in the guilts.

Midge had asked me to visit every time we'd talked and I'd promised to try, though it was never a full-bellied promise. It was always the meager I'll see what I can do and I might have a long weekend coming up and we'll be in Boston for two hours for a fundraising dinner but I might be able to get away after.

My crowning achievement in life