Pasties and Poor Decisions by Molly Harper

Author:Molly Harper [Harper, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781641971867

She wanted to wallow. So badly.

Ana had wanted to crawl under her borrowed covers and cry out her hurt and horror and the bone-deep betrayal into a pillow. She figured she’d earned the right, but amongst Irma Gustavsson’s pearls of wisdom were several sayings about feeling sorry for yourself and crying over spilled milk. She wondered what pithy advice her mother would have had about spilled cheater fuck-face husbands who lured one’s daughters out of extradition territory with free first- class flights and unlimited room service.

So instead of wallowing, she slipped into the nicest of the cashmere sweaters she’d shoved in her duffle and into the Eddie Bauer down jacket she’d found at a…internal sigh…consignment store in Grand Rapids. It was as light as a croissant, but was a definite improvement over her too-thin trench. She let her anger propel her down the sidewalk to Main Street, around slushy islands of ice frozen to the concrete. The forecast might not have called for snow this late in March, but Ana could smell it on the wind—a sort of sixth sense all islanders developed that never left her, even when she lived in New York.

She glanced toward Fitzroy’s Pub as she passed, spotting Ned standing behind the bar, pouring pints for the crowd cemented to the barstools. With little else to do in the winter, the pub was one of the main social outlets for locals. Tom Fitzroy had resisted putting in a TV for games up until Ana left the island, but she could see ESPN playing on a wall-mounted big screen through the window. Ned and Nell had to wait until Mr. Fitzroy passed, which was…not at all surprising.

A strange pang of loneliness hit her right in the gut as she walked by, feeling very separate from the warm cheer inside the pub. It made no sense. She’d rarely spent time at Fitzroy’s when she lived on the island. She’d been too young and Mr. Fitzroy couldn’t stand her, what with her “dangerous ideas” about living off-island. Maybe it was because she passed without Ned so much as looking at her. Which was ridiculous, because they’d spent weeks together in the house without Ned so much as looking at her or speaking beyond the instructive grunts. Ned might be willing to fix her house, but he wanted nothing to do with her beyond barely civil conversation. She needed to stop looking to him for notice or…companionship…or anything beyond carpentry. If she did, it would be twice as hard for her to leave again. It had been hard enough the first time.

Her boots crunched over the snow as she approached the Espoir Island Public Library, a tiny cement block building that shared walls with the county courthouse, for heating purposes. They’d only built it in the 1950s because the old library burned in an incident involving old books being stored near a coal furnace…which should have surprised her more, but it never had.

It was very intimidating, walking into that humble little building.

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