He grinned. “That and ads with curvy girls in bathing suits.”

Annajane stood up. “I better get going. I’ve still got to finish packing and, I suppose, start looking for a temporary place to live, at least until I figure out my next move.”

“Think about what I said, will you?” Mason said, touching her arm lightly. “I think you’re on the right track with your ideas about returning to our original brand message. If I can just get Davis to listen, I think he’d realize it’s brilliant.”

“Maybe,” Annajane said. “I will say that if he’s dumped the ad agency, he’s gonna have to come up with a new summer campaign in a big hurry.”

“One more thing,” she added, her hand on the back door. “I bumped into Celia as I was sifting through that file box I just mentioned. She urged me to throw all of it in the Dumpster, and not to bother you with any of that old crap, but I told her you might like it for the company archives. There are a bunch of the old original Quixie bottles, too, the ones with the ribbed glass…”

Mason looked horrified. “You didn’t throw them out, I hope.”

“Nope,” Annajane said. “I put it all in a new box and stashed it in the trunk of my car, just in case.”

“Great,” he said. “I’d really like to see those ads, maybe use them to persuade Davis it’s time to go retro. Hell, maybe we’ll even resurrect Dixie the Pixie.” He did a mock leer at Annajane’s legs. “I’ll bet you’d still fit in the suit. And the Fourth of July is just around the corner. Right?”

“No. Frickin’. Way,” she said succinctly. “But maybe Celia would like to wear it.”

28

Pokey picked up a plastic tub of winter clothing and balanced it on her hip. Annajane swiftly snatched it away from her.

“No lifting! Folding, packing yes, lifting no. How many times do I have to repeat myself?”

Pokey stuck out her tongue and took the tub back. “Don’t you think that little chunk o’ love Clayton weighs waaay more than these clothes? I tote him around all day long, just like I toted Petey when I was pregnant with Clayton. Relax, will you? I’m pregnant, not crippled.”

Annajane looked around the loft at the barely controlled chaos. It was Wednesday morning. She was dressed in the only clothes she hadn’t packed: a bleached-out Durham Bulls T-shirt and a pair of ratty cutoff jeans. Pokey wore an oversized blue and white oxford cloth dress shirt she’d borrowed from her husband and a pair of stretchy yoga pants. They’d been packing all night.

“I’ve got to be at the lawyer’s office in three hours,” she reminded her friend. “And the movers I hired still aren’t back from the storage place to pick up the second load yet. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be out of here by noon.”

“You will,” Pokey assured her. She held up her cell phone. “I just texted an SOS to Pete. He’s sending over a truck and a couple of the guys from the furniture store to give us a hand. This is the last of your clothes to go into storage. So if you’ll just get your rear in gear and pack up the clothes and toiletries you need for the next month or so, I think we’ve got it licked.”

“You really think so?” Annajane pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m so overwhelmed I guess I can’t see the forest for the trees.”

They heard a horn honking out on the street, and Pokey ran to the plate-glass picture window and looked out. “See here? Pete’s guys just pulled up, and your movers are right behind them. Why don’t you grab some clothes and head over to our house? The boys won’t be back from Pete’s mom’s house until two. You can get a shower and change into some halfway decent clothes and still have plenty of time to get to the closing. I’ll stay here and supervise. You know how I love to boss around men with trucks.”

“That would be great,” Annajane said. “Are you sure Pete’s okay with me staying with you guys for a couple of days? Just until I find a place of my own? I mean, I really could go to the Pinecone Motor Lodge…”

“Pete probably won’t even notice you’re there,” Pokey said. “With everything going on at the new furniture store, he barely notices I’m there half the time. You, on the other hand, will probably get tired of the wild bunch way before we get tired of you. The boys are superexcited you’re coming. Denning even offered to let you sleep in his tree fort, which is saying a lot. You know he’s pretty antigirl these days.”

“That’s the second best offer of a crash pad I’ve had from a member of your family in the past couple days,” Annajane said drily.

“Fascinating! Who made the first and best offer?” Pokey asked.

“Sophie did. I stopped by to check in on her after she got home from the hospital Monday. She heard me telling Mason my tale of woe about having to move out of the loft early, and she just piped up and invited me to sleep in her daddy’s room.”

“She didn’t!”

“Oh yes, she did.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Pokey snickered.

They heard footsteps in the stairwell, so Pokey opened the door with a grand sweep, and the room began to fill with men and furniture dollies.

“Okay, then, I’m outta here,” Annajane told Pokey. “Just as soon as I find the carton with all my clean underwear.”

*   *   *

At eight that night, Annajane wearily dragged her suitcase onto the front porch of Pete and Pokey Riggs’s cheerful pale blue Dutch colonial revival home. She opened the heavily carved mahogany front door with her hip and walked in unannounced, letting the door bang behind her.

The sound of a television echoed in the high-ceilinged hallway. She stepped out of her shoes and left them on the worn rug at the foot of the stairs.

“Is that you?” Pokey called from the direction of the back of the house. “If it is, come on back. We’re in the den, and it’s cocktail time.”

Annajane made her way toward the den, stepping over a spilled box of Legos, a green rubber dinosaur, and an enormous cardboard box of Pampers. She found her best friend sprawled out on her back on an overstuffed bottle-green damask sofa, with her bare feet resting in her husband’s lap.

Pete Riggs stood up and gestured toward a silver cocktail shaker resting on a tufted leather ottoman in front of the sofa. “Care for a martini?”

“I would kill for a martini,” Annajane said gratefully. She slumped down into a wing chair and looked around the room suspiciously. “It’s awfully quiet around here. Where are the heathens?”

“It’s grown-up time,” Pete said, handing her a pint Mason jar. “Hang on a sec,” he added, plunking an olive into her drink. “Now you’re ready.”

“The rule around here is, everybody under the age of eight has to be in bed by eight,” Pokey said. She was noisily slurping on a large chocolate Blizzard. “It’s the only way we keep our sanity.”

Pete rejoined his wife on the sofa. “So—did your closing go all right? We were starting to get a little worried when we didn’t hear from you earlier in the day, but Pokey didn’t want to jinx things by calling you.”

“We closed,” Annajane said. “There was some minor panic when one of the loan documents still hadn’t arrived at noon, but by the time we finished signing all the other paperwork, the courier had arrived with it. I’m no longer a homeowner.”

“You’ll find something else just as nice,” Pokey said. “Here in Passcoe—right?”

Annajane sipped her martini appreciatively. “I guess. Susan Peters showed me three more listings this afternoon. That’s where I’ve been all this time.”

“And?” Pete asked. His red hair shone dully in the light from a pair of antique brass sconces on the wall behind the sofa, and, close up like this, Annajane noticed with a start that he was beginning to get just the slightest hint of silver around his temples and paunch around his midriff. He wore a pink button-down oxford cloth shirt, rumpled khaki slacks, and oxblood penny loafers with no socks.

She was struck by how much he’d changed since the first time Pokey brought him home to meet her family. Pete Riggs was a twenty-four-year-old stud, a rich, cocky kid from Charleston, who’d started on the varsity golf team all four years at Wake Forest, and he was enrolled in grad school when he’d met Pokey and gotten her pregnant right before the end of her senior year at Chapel Hill.