I threw my hands in the air and stomped into the back to rearrange the armored mice.
A few weeks later, shortly before I was done with summer break, he informed me that he had come around on evolution.
“What?”
“Thinking you must have been right, Carrot.” He nodded. “Seems like we must have evolved.” He waved a finger at me. “Only thing that explains Bigfoot, isn’t it?”
I stared at him. I did not even know where to begin.
“Yep,” he said, taking my silence for agreement. “Bigfoot’s the missing link, all right, so you figure we gotta have a chain in order to have a link missing. I’m gonna update the sign in the prairie dog case.”
He smiled at me beatifically and I went and got him the sign from the prairie dog case so that he could remove the words of the Reverend Smiley. Even at sixteen, I was learning that you had to pick your battles.
Eighteen years to the day after Uncle Earl accepted Bigfoot into his life, my marriage ended.
It would be a better story if I had walked in to find my husband, Mark, in bed with my best friend and dramatically told him to never darken my door again. But it was just two people who got married too early and had a long, slow slide into comfortable misery. I can’t even say that it was my idea. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that I could leave him or that he could leave me, and it was rather surprising to find out how wrong I was.
I felt a lot of panic because I had no idea how I was going to support myself—he had the better job, with health insurance—but the rest of the emotional stuff got a lot easier.
He offered me the house, which I couldn’t have afforded to keep. I declined.
Which is how I found myself, at thirty-four, staring down the barrel of moving back in with my parents.
I love my mother. I cannot live with her. We are too much alike. If you have ever seen those photos of two deer who get their antlers locked together during a fight, dragging each other around until they both starve to death, you have a pretty good idea of how my mother and I get along.
Our optimal living distance is about two hundred miles. This is close enough that, in an emergency, I can drop everything and get out to see her, but limits random visiting. Since we are both aware of the whole locked-antlers problem, we can manage short bouts of family togetherness, then retire back to our respective corners to recover.
Moving back in with her was a more upsetting prospect than the divorce. Freelance graphic design just doesn’t pay a lot, though, and it was going to take me months to save up a deposit on an apartment. I actually contemplated lying and saying I was living with a friend and moving into a room at the YMCA, but it turned out that even the Y had a waiting list.
Jesus Christ.
So I packed. I had a pretty good system: pack for an hour, cry for five minutes, pack for another hour, rinse, repeat. I was grimly throwing my books into boxes—I was taking the Pratchett, dammit, and he could buy his own—when the phone rang.
It was Uncle Earl.
That in itself was unusual. Uncle Earl liked the internet a lot, but he wasn’t great on the phone. He called on my birthday every year, but that wasn’t for months yet.
“Hi, Uncle Earl. What’s up?”
“Hi, Carrot. It’s your uncle Earl.”
“Yes, I…” I closed my eyes and leaned against the bookcase. Pick your battles. “How are you doing, Uncle Earl?”
“Me? Oh, I can’t complain. The gout came back last month, but the doctor’s a real nice lady. Museum’s doing well.”
I realized that I’d derailed him and waited.
“Heard you were having a rough patch, Carrot.”
“Well, these things happen.” I had an immediate urge to downplay the divorce, even though I had been sobbing furiously about an hour earlier. “I’ll manage.”
“I know you will, hon. You were always tough as an old boot.”
From Uncle Earl, this was highly complimentary. I laughed. The tears were still a bit too close, so it came out strangled, but it was a laugh.
He hemmed and hawed for a minute, then said, “I’m sure you’ve got plans already, but I wanted you to know, I cleaned out the spare room at the museum last year.”
“What?”
“The spare room in back,” he said patiently. “Next to my workshop. I know your mom’s probably real excited to have you back home”—this was a profound lie, and we both knew it—“but you know, with the gout, I don’t get around as easy as I used to right now, and if you wanted to stay here for a bit, I thought I’d offer.”
“Uncle Earl.” I could feel the tears starting up again and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“It’s no trouble,” he assured me.
“I would love to stay there,” I said, all in a gasp. My mother lived sixty miles from Hog Chapel. My ex-husband had visited the Wonder Museum once and told me the place was “kinda freaky,” so all my memories of the Wonder Museum were good ones, without him in it. I could wander around the dusty cases and pet the stuffed grizzly and make the armored mice reenact the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
Hell, I could actually catalog the damn collection and earn my keep.
“Really, Carrot?”
“Really.”
“Great!” I think he might have been as surprised as I was. “Then I’ll get some new sheets for the bed. Just let me know when you’re headed down.”
I thanked him a few more times and hung up, and then I cried on the bookcase for a while.
When I finally stopped, I wiped my eyes, then I took all the Lovecraft and the Bear and left Mark with the Philip K. Dick because I never liked androids anyway.
CHAPTER 2
I moved into the Wonder Museum on a rainy Monday afternoon.
The museum is closed on Mondays since Uncle Earl stays open all weekend to cash in on the tourists. Hog Chapel would love to be like the town of Southern Pines, an hour east, but can’t sustain quite so much quaintness. There’s one famous golf course that brings people in, and a retirement community for wealthy seniors, who bring their grandkids into downtown on weekends, but that’s about it for big money. The rest of the population is mostly tiny organic farmers looking for cheap land, and extremely earnest hippies who want to talk to you about biodiesel.
Every now and then the small-business bureau suggests changing the name from Hog Chapel to something more enticing, but it never passes. Who wants to live in Pinestraw or Pine Needle or Happy Pines or Sunset Pines anyway?
As it is, downtown Hog Chapel can reliably sustain one coffee shop, one diner, a hardware store, and two junk stores with pretensions of being antique shops.
The Wonder Museum does okay. Uncle Earl bought the building dirt cheap decades ago, so while it’s not a cash cow, it doesn’t have many expenses. It’s sandwiched between the coffee shop and a boutique clothing store. The boutique clothing store goes out of business approximately once a year, whereupon someone buys it, changes out the name and the scented candles, and proceeds to gently lose money for another year.
When I drove my aged Subaru up, the boutique was named Glad Rags and had a mannequin dressed like a flapper. Judging by the signs advertising 30 percent off everything, I expected the shop would soon be changing scented candles again.