The Nice Girl Gets Even novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Clause

Emmett shows Posey her right to buy the building by Fat Tuesday, Truett comes asking her to apologize to Margot, and Emmett finds Gaillard's records list her school as vacant for three years.

"What mistake?" I said.

Emmett Merrill looked past me into the ballroom.

"Can I come in? I'd rather not explain your lease on the sidewalk."

I should have said no.

He was Margot's brother.

But I was standing in my bare feet with an eviction notice in his hand, and I wanted to know.

I let him in.

He stopped just inside the door.

The wood floor my grandmother laid in 1971.

The mirrors down the long wall.

The upright piano with the cracked middle C.

"It's smaller than I remembered," he said.

"You've been here?"

"Once. Four years ago. You signed your lease at that card table." He pointed. "You brought a pound cake."

I did not remember him at all.

I remembered the pound cake.

The back door banged open.

My aunt Gussie came in with two coffees and her reading glasses swinging on their chain.

She took one look at Emmett and the paper in his hand, and set both coffees on the piano.

"Oh, hell no," she said. "You get off my niece's floor."

"Ma'am, I'm not serving her."

"You're holding a paper and wearing a vest. You're serving somebody." She grabbed the broom from beside the coat rack. "Out."

"Aunt Gussie, he's a lawyer."

"That's worse."

Emmett stepped behind the piano.

He didn't look scared.

He looked like he was trying hard not to laugh.

"Mrs. Blanchard, I wrote your niece's lease. There's a clause in it my sister forgot about. I came to read it to her before Monday."

Gussie lowered the broom about an inch.

"What clause?"

He pulled a folded copy out of his back pocket and laid it flat on the piano lid.

"If Gaillard ends this lease, for any reason, Miss Blanchard has the right to buy the building first. At appraisal."

"How much is appraisal?" I said.

"Six hundred and forty thousand."

Gussie sat down on the piano bench.

"Lord Jesus."

"Closing by Fat Tuesday," Emmett said. "And once you say yes in writing, nobody puts you out before then."

I did the math standing up.

I had forty-one thousand dollars in a savings account.

It had taken me nine years of teaching cotillion to get there.

"Why is that clause even in there?" I said. "Gaillard's lawyers don't do favors."

He folded the copy back up.

"Somebody should have a way to keep a place like this."

That was all he said about it.

I looked at the mirrors.

My grandmother taught in them for fifty years.

I learned to waltz in them standing on her shoes.

"I'm not going to beg Margot for a lease," I said.

"I wouldn't," Emmett said.

"I'm going to buy it."

Gussie looked at me over her glasses.

Then she grinned with all her lipstick.

"Well, all right then."

Somebody knocked on the glass.

It was Truett.

He had a dozen red roses in one hand and a coffee in the other.

The coffee had MARGOT written on the cup in black marker.

I opened the door.

"Pose." He held out the roses. "I didn't sleep. Can we talk?"

"Good morning," I said. "Those are lovely."

"They're for you."

"And the latte?"

He looked at it.

"She's in the car. She wanted to come in, but I said let me."

I looked past him.

Margot was in his passenger seat with the visor mirror down, putting on lipstick.

"Look," Truett said, lowering his voice. "She cried all night. She feels terrible. If you'd just call her and say you're sorry about the toast, this whole thing goes away."

"The notice, too?"

He blinked.

"What notice?"

Emmett held it up from across the room.

Truett saw who was holding it, and his whole face changed.

"Emmett? What are you doing here?"

"Reading," Emmett said.

Truett turned back to me.

"Okay. Okay, that's a work thing, I'll look into it. Margot's probably just reorganizing. But the toast, Pose. You humiliated her in front of eight people."

"Nine," Gussie said from the bench. "Counting the waiter."

I took the roses.

I smelled them, because they were roses and it wasn't their fault.

"Thank you for these, Truett. And thank you for coming all this way to ask me to apologize. That was very thoughtful."

He smiled.

He thought he'd won.

"So you'll call her?"

"No, sugar. But I'll write you a lovely note."

I closed the door.

Gently.

My grandmother taught me never to slam one.

Through the glass, I watched him stand there with Margot's latte, and then walk back to the car.

Margot rolled her window down and said something to him.

He shook his head.

She looked straight at me through the glass and smiled.

Then they drove away.

I put the roses in the mop bucket.

"Ma'am," Emmett said quietly.

He hadn't moved from the piano.

He was looking at his phone, and he wasn't trying not to laugh anymore.

"You said you've paid your rent every month."

"Every month for four years. By check. With a note."

"To Gaillard."

"Who else would I pay?"

He turned the phone around so I could see the screen.

It was a county property record with the Gaillard Properties seal at the top.

Halfway down was my address.

1420 Government Street. Carriage house.

And next to it, in capital letters, the same word for every year since the year I met Truett.

VACANT.

"According to the company my sister works for," Emmett said, "nobody has lived in this building for three years."

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