Page 11 of Dear Debbie

Yes, of course.

“Again, I’m so sorry about this, Debbie,” she says. “As an apology, we would be happy to sign you up for three months of a free subscription to Home Gardening. We would need your credit card, of course, but you could cancel it anytime after the free trial. Although most people love their subscription and continue it for years.”

I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t want a magazine arriving at my house with a big spread showing Jo’s garden.

“So,” Nita says, “can I transfer you back to my receptionist so she can take your information?”

“Sure,” I manage.

But then the second Taylor Swift starts up again, I hang up the phone.

I sit there at the kitchen table, staring at the now full coffeepot. I’ll have to pour it down the sink. Jo and I have had a healthy rivalry over our gardens for years, but I never thought she’d stoop so low. I want to believe there’s an explanation that doesn’t involve her stealing my magazine spread right out from under my nose.

The aroma of brewed coffee fills the room, but the only thing that might make me feel better right now isn’t coffee. I need a stiff drink.

I’m not much of a drinker, and neither is Cooper, but I still have a bottle of expensive pinot grigio that my neighbor Rochelle gave me for Christmas last year, knowing that whatever I gave her wouldn’t be as nice. I haven’t managed to crack it open yet, but this seems like a good opportunity.

We keep the bottle of wine in the cabinet over the refrigerator. I have to stand on my tippy-toes to nudge it open, and I grasp the bottle in my right hand. I’m not a huge fan of wine, and I recognize that chugging wine in the middle of the morning is a slippery slope, but I try not to think about it. It will numb the pain of the phone conversation I just had.

The first thing I notice about the bottle of wine is that the cork has been dislodged. That’s not so strange though. Maybe Cooper had a glass at some point. Although when I hold it up, the bottle looks completely full. Did someone open the bottle, then fail to drink anything?

I pop out the cork and don’t even bother with a glass. I swig the wine straight from the bottle, not taking time to swish it around my mouth and savor the fruity undertones or whatever. I just want the pleasant numbing buzz.

Except when I take a swallow of the wine, I get a big surprise. There are no fruity undertones or pleasant numbing buzz. There’s nothing.

It tastes like water.

I stare at the bottle in confusion. Did I somehow read the label wrong, and it’s actually sparkling water? But this doesn’t taste like sparkling water. It tastes like something out of the tap.

I shift over to the sink and tip the mouth of the bottle until the contents pour out. I would have expected a pale straw-colored liquid to flow into my sink, but instead, the contents of the bottle are mostly clear. Someone drank my wine, then replaced it with water so I wouldn’t know.

Who would’ve done something like that?

With the jolt of one hundred percent certainty, I know who it must have been. Zane. Lexi’s boyfriend.

I already knew that kid was bad news, and now that little creep is actually drinking our alcohol on top of everything else. Of course, if I say anything to Lexi, she’ll deny it. She thinks her boyfriend walks on water. All I can do is make sure there’s no other alcohol in the house for him to steal.

I had been anticipating the pleasant buzz of being slightly drunk. But now that possibility is off the table, and I can’t stop fuming about what just happened to me. My garden was supposed to be in a magazine spread. It was all booked, and somehow, my neighbor stole it from me.

Well, she’s not going to get away with it. I’m going over there right now.

8

Jo Dolan and I live on the same block, but she is on one end, and I am on the other. The ground slopes upward, so if you considered our block to be a hill, I would be at the top of the hill, and she would be at the bottom. Jo says she doesn’t walk that well anymore, which is why she doesn’t often come up the hill to my end of the block.

Looks like she made an exception when Nita Geisler was here.

I don’t bother to change out of my dress, but I do kick off the uncomfortable heels I’ve been wearing and trade them out for a pair of ballet flats that I bought on sale, two for the price of one. I tried to give the other pair to Lexi, but she looked at me like I was offering her poison, so I ended up keeping them both.

And then I walk the block down the road to Jo’s house.

Her house is nothing special. Like a lot of the properties around here, including my own, it’s old. It was likely built in the late 1800s but renovated on the inside, although not very recently. The outside is painted a dull gray color with the trim painted a slightly different shade of gray. It’s the sort of house you could walk by a hundred times without noticing it.

Except for the spectacular rose garden.

It’s beautiful. I have to give her that. She’s got roses that are yellow, red, light pink, and white. They line the edges of her yard, sprouting vividly colored flowers that I can see from halfway down the block. She works hard on those roses, but that said, it’s a rose garden. Of course they’re going to be beautiful.

Jo brags that her house still has the original door that it was built with. Hingham has a long colonial history, and a lot of the houses were built back in the nineteenth century, although more recently renovated to include luxuries like electrical outlets. My own house is about the same age as Jo’s, but much of the original woodwork has been replaced, including the doors. I can’t say I’ve shed any tears over not having a two hundred-year-old door, but this one does have a large ornate bronze knocker. I opt for the doorbell.