LITMIR.BIZ

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“Not bad, just...aggressive.”

      She would have smiled if she had the energy. Instead, she put into words the worry that had plagued her the most in the past four years. “I should have tried another law school.” It was ridiculous. No other school would take her after she was kicked out. She swallowed the shame of it. Cheater—that’s what they’d thought of her. Heat rose to her cheeks. But she wasn’t a cheater, just a naive girl who’d been stupid enough to put her future in the hands of the wrong man.

      Cy laughed, a boisterous, rolling chuckle. “Right. You hated law school, remember? Even if the thing with Foster hadn’t happened, you spent every moment of the case-analysis lectures imagining what the room would look like with pine paneling and silk drapes.” He hopped down the steps, reaching for a leaf that graced the spotless front path. Not surprising. Cy could stay still for no more than three minutes, barring sedation.

      But law school was where the successful people went, the ones who were going to make something of themselves. The image popped into her head before she could stop it. Pike, the golden boy from high school. Privileged and perfect, or so she’d thought until the accusation from her father turned him into her enemy. Pike’s derisive laughter still rang in her ears from one particularly horrific day when her mother had shown up at the high school three months into Rosa’s freshman year, wearing only a bra and panties, clutching a bottle of whiskey and waving to everyone as if she was queen of the British Isles.

      Then, like petals borne away by a fickle wind, her high school friends weren’t her friends anymore.

      And Pike finally had his revenge.

      Rosa combed her hands through her hair and groaned. It wasn’t the time for a stagger down that blighted memory lane.

      The mailman pulled up and Cy trotted off to greet him, engaging him in conversation about their shared passion, the San Francisco Giants. There would be nothing but bills and a myriad of credit card applications, as if they needed any more opportunities to climb deeper into an abyss of debt. Cy thumbed through the stack as he came back up the walk, tearing open an envelope in that messy way that bugged her to no end. She looked at Baggy who now lay on his back, one eye fixed dreamily on her.

      “Baggy, I admire your ability to stay calm while all around you is turning to poop.”

      “Rosa,” Cy said, his eyes riveted on the letter in front of him.

      “Unless it’s a paying client, I don’t want to hear about it.”

      “Uh, I think you do.”

      She shot to her feet. “No, really, Cy. If it’s bad news, I just can’t take any more right now.” She began to pace. “I’ve got to think of a way out of this, or we’re flat-out ruined. Do you understand me?” An acrid smell drifted into her nostrils a moment before her brain filled in the pertinent details. Kitchen. Marinara. Stove. Burning!

      With a shriek she ran into the kitchen just in time to see the lid blow off the pot, showering the stove and Rosa with hot, red sauce. She did not have time to indulge the pain as the sauce ignited on the burner, followed by the potholder Cy had left too close to the heat.

      Smoke billowed. Sauce bubbled. Rosa scurried around, swatting at the flames with a heavy kitchen towel. When the fire was out, she turned wearily to her brother, sauce spatters on the front of her shirt, the smoking potholder in her hand. She stuck a finger in the sauce and tasted it. “You’re right. On top of everything else, my marinara is horrible.”

      Cy stood there, still clutching the letter, a look of complete shock on his face. “Put down the potholder, sis. You’re not going to believe this.”

      * * *

      ROSA WAS STILL in a cloud of disbelief the next morning as she guided her Nissan along Highway 92, Cy sitting next to her with Baggy curled across his lap. She relished the sight of the Pacific Ocean crashing against the rocky shore as they made their way to the tiny coastal town of Tumbledown, just south of Half Moon Bay. The population on the official sign read 314, but that had been erected before the birth of twin boys to the town’s dentist, she’d been told by her almost-aunt, Bitsy, the last time she’d visited. A miniscule country store served the basic needs of the seaside community, along with Tad’s Bait and Tackle, which also sold ice cream in the summer. Small houses in a variety of styles and conditions dotted the landscape. A series of ramshackle farms offered opportunities for city slickers to do everything from picking pumpkins to cutting their own Christmas trees, depending on the season.

      The faded, striped awning outside Julio’s Book Shoppe flapped in the breeze, just as it did in Rosa’s memory. She’d spent a summer crammed into the tiny shop with the corpulent Julio, working the counter and shelving books. Julio’s was likely the only bookstore in the civilized world where books were arranged by the author’s first name.

      “I nearly froze to death in Korea,” Julio proclaimed many times, wide face gleaming with sweat. “Did something to my brain. Since the fifties, I can’t remember last names for anything.”

      In Julio’s store, patrons would find Ernest Hemmingway’s masterpieces snuggled right up to Eugene Fitzwater’s Guide to Forest Mushrooms.

      She shook away the wave of nostalgia. “Are you absolutely sure about this, Cy?”

      “Like I said the first sixteen times, Rosa, I’m sure.”

      Her heart kept up its rapid staccato, as it had from the moment Cy told her the news. Her tiny decorating business, the humble Dollars and Sense Design, had won the lottery, or more specifically, the chance to enter the Great Escapes magazine contest. Ten teams, ten different locations and a budget of five thousand dollars. The winner scored a photo spread in Great Escapes and the gaggle of clients that would go with it.

      “Tell me again,” she said.

      Cy rolled his eyes and ran a hand through his mop of blond hair. “Bitsy called me three weeks ago and told me her very own Pelican Inn was one of the locations. She insisted that I enter our business in the contest and, whammo, a miracle occurred. We were actually selected.”

      Rosa shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

      “They probably liked the sappy emotional angle.”

      “What sappy emotional angle?”

      Cy raised an eyebrow. “We spent three years of our lives here when Dad went AWOL. Bitsy might as well be a relative.”

      Rosa nodded. No need to say the rest. They both knew Bitsy had had no business taking in two abandoned teenagers when their father took off, indulging in one of the strange fits of wanderlust that had seized him since their mother passed away at the beginning of their sophomore year. It was not the first time he’d left. Manny Franco might have been trying to escape the overwhelming responsibility of raising two motherless teens. Or it could have been an inability to handle his own grief. In any case, they’d awakened shortly after their sixteenth birthday to find a pile of money on the table and a scrawled note.

      Gotta get away for a while. Take care of each other. I’m sorry. Daddy

      A “while” had stretched into days, then into months and finally years, with only occasional phone calls and quick visits, their father’s behavior growing more and more bizarre with every passing year. His last text to Cy was six months ago, indicating he was in the Southwest fossil hunting in the desert with a bunch of college kids. It did no good to remind him he was an insurance investigator, not Indiana Jones. He’d lost something when their mother died, and Rosa was sure he would spend the rest of his life trying to find it.

      Bitsy should have called social services back then and reported Manny Franco for abandoning his kids. Her salesman husband, Leopold, was a constant traveler and a man who was never able to keep money in his pocket. Bitsy was responsible for a dilapidated inn with virtually no help from Leo. Even when he’d died five years ago, there had been no financial relief, no life insurance to ease Bitsy’s bottom line.

      Even so, because she’d been a friend to Katy Franco all those years ago, instead of making

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