Page 52 of Worth the Trouble

“You look tired, Cecelia.”

“I’m sleeping fine.”

He knew she wasn’t. She knew he knew. Eight years of reading rooms for him, and the one face she’d never been able to read was the one she’d learned it from.

He pulled the door shut behind him and started down the hall toward the elevators. She stood there with her card in the slot and the lock blinking green at her, and she had the whole length of the carpet to decide whether to let him go.

“Dad.”

He stopped. He didn’t turn around.

“Order the trout. It’s the best dish on the menu.”

His shoulders came down a fraction. That had happened once before, in a lawyer’s office, when she was six, and she hadn’t understood it then. The elevator opened for him. He got in without a word, and the doors closed. She went into her room and sat on the bed with her boots on for a long time.

“Whoever brought the black licorice,” Wendy said, “I want a name.”

“It’s a classic.” Faith kept pouring. “Not all of us were raised on gummy worms.”

“The lucky ones were.”

They’d come up the hall in a pack, all five of them, and the room had filled up with them. Boots by the door. Coats on the one chair. Wendy had kicked hers off before the door finished closing, which Cecelia was choosing to take as a compliment, and Rylee had taken one look at the wobbling coffee table and folded a sugar packet from the tray under the short leg without a word.

Now the bowl in the middle of it was a landslide. Gummy worms, peach rings, sour straws, those chalky hearts nobody admitted to buying. Rylee was on the floor with her back against the bed. Lydia had claimed the chair once the coats came off it. Wren sat cross-legged nearest the bowl with the concentration of a woman who’d come for the candy and would take the conversation as it came. Faith stood. Faith always stood.

“Forty-one,” Wendy said, to the room. “That’s how many lampposts there are between the bakery and City Hall. I know because I taped every one of them. Tripp says the council owes me a kidney.”

“The council owes you nothing,” Faith said. “You volunteered.”

“I was recruited. There’s a difference.”

“Who recruited you?” Wren asked.

“Councilwoman. Caught me at Cliff’s and said she’d heard I could talk anybody into anything.” Wendy bit a worm in half. “So I talked myself into forty-one lampposts. Joke’s on her.”

Cecelia laughed, and it surprised her, and Lydia clocked the surprise.

They talked about nothing for a while, which she hadn’t known she needed. Brent’s ride at the rodeo, which Faith had a great deal to say about. A calf at Sagebrush that had gotten into the tack room and eaten a saddle blanket. Whether the diner’s new pie was better than the old pie, which turned out to be a question with sides. Cecelia sat in the middle of it and passed the bowl when it came to her and let their talk run over her.

Then Lydia said, “So are you staying?” and the room went quiet without anybody deciding it should.

Cecelia turned a peach ring over in her fingers.

“I want to.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Lydia said.

“It’s all I’ve got right now.” She set the ring down. “My father’s lawyers have called twice. My father hasn’t called at all. I’m paying for this room on a card that has about a season left in it, and the only work I’ve ever done, I did for him.” She looked at the ring instead of at them. “I want to stay. Wanting isn’t a plan.”

“It’s where the plan starts,” Faith said.

Now. Say it now, before they made it easy for her again.

“I wanted to thank you. For the rodeo. You didn’t have to walk me in like that, and I know what it cost, and I haven’t said it, so.”

“You’re saying it now,” Lydia said.

“I’m saying it now.”