Free Stripped Down by Anne Marsh Page A

settling the estate of the woman who all but raised you?”
    I don’t like the guilt or panic that shoots through me, an itchy, sickening coil of unwelcome emotions. I can’t explain why I hadn’t come, why I hadn’t been ready. Why I couldn’t face the empty house, Angel, or any of the pieces of the life I had in Lonesome. Explaining that would mean explaining all the broken pieces of me, and most days I just want to forget.
    Plus, if I’d started any one of those tasks, I’d have been that much closer to failing. To not getting it right. So I’d waited. And then waited some more, until I’d failed anyhow and could stop worrying.
    Second chance , I remind myself.
    “Maybe I just wasn’t ready until now,” I suggest, as if I hadn’t had lists of tasks to check off and a timeline for doing so. As if I hadn’t frozen in panic and done nothing. Sweet procrastinator, I can almost hear Auntie Dee whisper. Someday, you’ll figure it out, get yourself started .
    I inked a little pink and purple poppy on the inside of my wrist for her. She loved the bright orange California poppies that peppered Lonesome in the spring, but she’d always wanted to try the exotic kind from the seed catalog.
    Angel doesn’t turn, but his big body screams frustration. He isn’t buying the line I’m selling. He’s always has been good at recognizing bullshit.
    “Not ready.” His voice is too quiet. “Well, that’s a hell of a thing, Rose, when you’ve been asked repeatedly to come on up here, and you’ve never said why you couldn’t. What did you think was going to happen? We’ve all been cooling our heels waiting for you.”
    I stare straight ahead. His voice holds the quiet disappointment, the disapproval I expect. I’ve never pleased him, have I?
    “I should have explained.” Like always, he’s right. I should have. Of course I should have—and, instead, I’ve procrastinated. Waited, like always, until the last possible moment. I tried college and dropped out. I became a tattoo artist in San Francisco, and then I lost the reality TV show that was supposed to make me my seed money for a shop of my own. I failed to come back for Auntie Dee in time.
    Failure, failure, failure. I should make that my next tattoo.
    When I don’t explain now, he waits me out, letting the silence stretch between us.
    “But I wasn’t ready, okay?” I won’t cry. Instead, I blink furiously, wanting to curse him but bobbing in place instead.
    “Hell, Rose.” He tightens his grip on the wheel. “We would have been happy to wait for you to be ‘ready’—you know that. But, darling, you have to either show up or call.”
    “You just want to tear down the house and use the land,” I accuse.
    “I do.”
    He doesn’t bother sugarcoating his intentions, just hits me low and hard with the truth. A truth that isn’t going to become reality if I have my way.
    “What if I don’t want to sell it?”
    “What else are you going to do with that piece of property? You’re obviously not the settling-down type, Rose, and it takes cash to run a place like that. A steady income.”
    I’m working on that, although he doesn’t know it. He’ll find out soon, though, because Angel owns most of Lonesome. Auntie Dee’s is the only place I can open a tattoo shop because Angel owns everything else, and I can’t afford the rent anyhow.
    “You don’t think I could do it? What if I want to fix the place up, make a home for myself here?” My heart beats a little faster at my own audacity.
    Angel sighs roughly. “Some dreams don’t come true.”
    I hate that, like always, he’s right even if he has no way of knowing that I’d been hoping to make a success of myself, then come home to care for Auntie Dee and carve out a better life for both of us in Lonesome.
    I just expected to do so before I lost Auntie Dee.
    When we pull up ten minutes later, Auntie Dee’s house seems unchanged, heat-soaked and dusty and horribly, deeply familiar. It’s almost