I’m done letting Ford take over my life and do all kinds of nice things for me, when he doesn’t care about me the rest of the year.
You know… as soon as I finish inhaling the entire box of pumpkin funnel cakes. One does not just let pumpkin funnel cakes go to waste.
He’s my friend and my boss. My one-month-a-year friend. It is what it is, and that’s fine. But letting him take over like this every year is not good for my sanity. It gives me hope. It makes me want to find the closest notebook and doodle Sidney Prescott on every page, no matter how many times I tell myself that I stopped feeling this way about him a long time ago.
This is the year I finally put the last nail in my coffin of hope. I don’t need him to take care of my life. If I can do it on my own eleven months out of the year without him, I can damn well do it for the one stupid month he’s here.
“Dumb bitch, dumb bitch, dumb bitch.”
The tinny, robotic voice coming from my living room makes me slowly turn my head in that direction, while everyone else in my kitchen laughs.
“Who in the hell added a new phrase to my cat’s talk buttons?”
Everyone continues to chuckle while I glare at the black cat in the other room, with her paw still resting on one of the many, multicolored buttons grouped together on the floor in the corner, waiting for her moment to call me a dumb bitch again. Yes, I taught my cat how to talk using battery operated, recordable buttons she can press when she wants to tell me something, and I can’t understand meow.
I am a single woman, living alone, and when my family isn’t here to annoy me, it can be quite lonely at times, okay?
“If you’re going to teach your cat how to talk, at least make it exciting.” Penny rolls her eyes, basically admitting this was her doing. “Treat, outside, and pet me are entirely too basic.”
“Dumb bitch, pet me,” my traitorous cat adds to prove Penny’s point, stepping on the newly added pink button and then the old blue one.
“Can we get back to the important matter at hand, please? Kenny, go arrest Ford for ruining October,” Aunt Dawn tells the man with a pat to his shoulder, while I wander over into my living room to do my cat’s bidding before she calls me another name.
“I can’t do that, ma’am.”
“Then get the hell out of here!” Ginger points to the door. “We’ve got felonies to plan.”
With that, Kenny jumps up from the table, taking his cup of coffee with him and promising me he’ll return the mug after he washes it.
“I’ll stop by the station before work and take care of those charges from last night,” I tell him after giving my cat a few head scratches, hoping I have enough money in my account to cover everything.
Kenny pauses in my open doorway when he starts choking on the sip of coffee he took.
“Oh, it’s fine.” He chuckles, wiping off the coffee that dribbled onto his chin with the back of his hand, not meeting my eyes as he stares down into his pumpkin mug and shuffles out onto my porch. “No rush. Take your time. Or, you know, don’t even worry about it at all! It’s fine. Come up, don’t come up, whatever. Okay, gotta go!”
With that confusing exchange, Kenny is quickly slamming the door closed behind him.
“That was weird,” I mutter, making a mental note to stop by the station anyway.
One of the best things about Kenny is that he’s pretty much left to his own devices as far as keeping the residents of Harvest Grove in line. The County Sherriff Station that every town reports to is over fifty miles away, and they only send someone out here to check on things a few times a year. Kenny, his father before him, and his grandfather before him are the only reason no one in my family has ever done real jail time over the years, and we don’t have real arrest records. Along with half the town, although my family definitely gets to benefit from this little perk of being friends with the Stuart family more than others. As long as no one in Harvest Grove actually murders someone or causes anyone real harm, Kenny and his predecessors have always been pretty good about “losing” the paperwork for minor offenses. And as long as the Tanner women remember to pay their fines, we will never have to know whether or not we look good in an orange jumpsuit.
“We need to leave too. We’ve got a meeting with a potential client for FMI who seemed very interested in our October bonus package.”
Watching Penny and Ginger get up from my table, I don’t even bother wasting my breath lecturing them. Fuck Men Incorporated, shortened to FMI for obvious marketing reasons, is a private investigations business the two started the day they turned eighteen. Well, the day they legally started it. Under normal circumstances, I would be incredibly proud that these two young women became entrepreneurs at such an early age, obtaining their PI licenses in record time. But these are not normal circumstances, and Penny and Ginger are not normal people. The October bonus package gives clients the opportunity to not only catch their lying, cheating significant other in the act, but to also get a little revenge on them. The October bonus package pretty much pays for all of the girls’ expenses for the entire year it’s so popular. It’s also the reason I find myself spending more time than usual with Kenny in jail or running away from something on fire.
Fucking October bonus package….
I manage to shove my mom and aunt out the door along with Penny and Ginger with minimal arguing, when Callie’s phone chimes from her hoodie pocket.
“Shit. Marcus needs to leave for work. Put your shoes back on and come say hi to Casper before you take your nap.” Callie finishes off her coffee and sets her mug in my sink. “I want to hear every single detail of Ford’s yearly rescue mission from last night. Including but not limited to how good he smells, how much hotter he got since last year, how fabulously he wears a flannel, and how wet you got when he called you babe.”
“Absolutely not” is my immediate reply, even as I’m joining her by my front door and turning around in a circle when I don’t see my Converse where I left them. “And he wasn’t wearing a flannel, so there.”
God, he really does wear a flannel quite magnificently—you know, when he’s not ghosting you, Sidney! Snap out of it!
“Not gonna deny the babe thing then?” Callie smirks.
I ignore her while I give up trying to figure out where my shoes walked off to, opening the closet in my entryway where I keep the rest of them. I could easily refuse to go over to Callie’s house, but I get puppy kisses from the five-month-old Great Pyrenees she and Marcus rescued, and I feel like I’m going to need them today. Although I use the term “puppy” loosely, considering Casper is seventy pounds and knocks me on my ass to give me those kisses as soon as I walk in their door.
“I’m not going to confirm or deny anything, because Ford is just my October friend. Stop trying to make something happen that isn’t going to happen.”
“I forgot how much I missed your laugh.”
Shaking Ford’s voice out of my head from last night, I stare down at my closet floor and my completely empty shoe rack.
“Where in the hell are all my shoes?” I mutter, really not needing anything else to piss me off at this moment in time.
My phone chimes from inside the box of severed heads still sitting on my entry table, and I lean over and grab it, muttering a whole bunch of curses when I see a text from my sister.