The Nice Girl Gets Even novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Twelve Tenants

I went to the flower shop first thing in the morning.

The florist was sixty or so, with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair and green tape around two fingers.

She was building a centerpiece out of white roses and silver ribbon.

Silver.

"Can I help you, hon?"

"Is that for the Gaillard party?"

She smiled. "You know Margot?"

"I'm Posey Blanchard," I said. "I used to date Truett."

Her smile went somewhere else.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you're the toast girl."

I set my green ledger on her counter, open to the purple stamp.

Then I set down the list Emmett printed, with her address seventh from the top.

She read it with her glasses on.

Then she went in the back without a word.

She came out with a shoebox.

In it were three years of rent receipts on Gaillard letterhead, every one of them signed in loopy blue ink.

"She told me she'd take care of me," the florist said. "She said, I'll make sure your rent never goes up, sugar. Because we're friends."

She looked at the white roses.

"I've done every party that girl's thrown since she was twenty-two."

The barber on Conti Street didn't believe me.

He's eighty-one.

He listened to all of it in his own chair, with a towel around his neck.

Then he got up and went to his cash register and took out a cigar box.

Carbons. Thirty-six of them, in rubber bands.

"I keep everything," he said. "My wife kept everything. Your grandmother kept everything. That girl's people don't keep anything, because somebody always brings 'em more."

He gave me a free trim before I left.

I didn't need one.

I let him.

The bakery on Dauphin Street had a line out the door again.

The baker was my age, with flour up to her elbows and a toddler asleep in a playpen behind the counter.

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