“You got our hopes up for no reason,” Tallulah sniffled self-righteously.
Ginger tried to speak, but they both got up and flounced out of the room.
“Damn it,” Ginger said unhappily. “I know that I’m right. He’s not dead.”
“I have news that might cheer you up,” Marigold said. “Not professor-related news, but still…”
Ginger peered at her closely. “Oh my God, you’ve got that I’ve-just-had-multiple orgasms look about you. Henry forgave you and you had makeup sex. In the middle of the day. Only a complete floozy does that. I know from personal experience.”
“It’s even better than that.” Marigold was glowing with satisfaction.
“Better? What’s better than you and Henry and makeup sex?”
“Winifred and the handyman. Sittin’ in a tree.”
“Okay, explain this to me, without the use of nursery rhymes. I could desperately use some good news.”
“Yesterday Winifred came to ask me if there was any hope for her and the handyman. I looked in her future and saw Winifred crying in her room and the handyman driving off in frustration.”
“Okay. And this is good news because?”
“I was about to tell her that, but then I thought about what you told me. Winifred was asking me for a reading, in her own barely comprehensible geek speak, because she was afraid that it wouldn’t work out. She was afraid that they were too different. And you were the one who told me that when you expect the end of a relationship, you end up unconsciously sabotaging yourself.”
“True.”
“So I asked her if she wanted it to work out with him, and she said yes. I asked her what she saw as the potential barriers to it working out, and she told me. Then I told her to pretend she was writing a thesis on why it could work out, and to come up with solutions to all of the problems that she found.”
“And?”
“And then I looked into my crystal ball again and I saw them, I am not kidding you, with wedding rings, and each of them holding a twin baby in their arms. And I told her it would work out. And this morning she told me that apparently you don’t have to connect intellectually with a person to be happy, as long as you connect emotionally. Well, she said it much geekier, but that was pretty much the gyst.”
Her smile grew mischievious. “And she had bite marks on her neck this morning. And her shirt was buttoned up wrong.”
Ginger gasped. Winifred was an obsessive neat freak. “It must be love!”
“I know, right?” Then her face fell. “But Ginger, if I can affect the outcomes of my readings, than I’ve ruined relationships for no reasons. I’ve broken up people who might have gotten married! Oh, my God-“
Ginger quickly made a shushing motion. “Don’t do that to yourself, Marigold. There’s no guarantee that you could have talked those people into trying to work things out. Most of them probably would still have probably gone on to ruin things for themselves, and you know what? People can survive a breakup. The question is, what are you going to do with your new found powers, now that you’ve found a new approach to your love readings?”
“Well, Henry would like me to stay here and give things between us a try. And Winifred told Imogen about how well things worked out with my reading, and Imogen spread the word, so I’m getting a lot of requests.”
“Would you miss New York?”
“Sure. But it’s not like a prison sentence. I can visit. And there’s things that I like about it here, too.”
Marigold looked at Ginger through narrowed eyes. “And you’re staying, right? Because you’re not a complete fool?”
“It’s not that simple,” Ginger said.
“This is ridiculous,” Marigold grumbled. “What does that bitch of a council member think that she’d get if she broke up you and Sheriff Hot Stuff? It’s not like he’s suddenly going to turn around and marry Portia.”
“Maybe she’s fooled herself into thinking that might happen. Or maybe it’s just spite; if Portia can’t have him, she doesn’t want anyone to have him.”
“Maybe.”
The next day…
At 11 a.m., Ginger glided to a stop on the street in front of Willie’s house and parked Imogen’s pickup truck behind a patrol car. There were dozens of cars there already.
Everyone had congregated behind the house. As she strolled up, she could hear country music blaring from a boombox, and a happy babble of voices. There were easily a hundred people there.
As she walked up to a table laden with plates of corn on the cob and biscuits and bowls of fruit, she was surprised to see Cletus and his younger brothers and sisters there, sitting cross-legged on the grass hunched over their paper plates. Their faces were smeared with barbecue sauce and there were piles of gnawed bones on the plates.