The Solstice Kings - Kim Fielding Page 0,3

all sorts of plant friends.”

Leaving Miles here in his depressing apartment. Alone and going nowhere.

With a deep sigh of resignation, he picked up the phone and dialed his mom.

2

Deedee held the lavender in the crook of her arm. Lovingly, like a parent might hold a toddler. Miles thought the plant looked perkier already, although that was surely a trick of his imagination.

“This is a mighty big change of heart over the other day, honey. What’ve you spent the past couple of days doing?”

Miles straightened one of his paintings on the iron fence before sitting on his stool. “Moping, mostly.”

“How’d that go?”

“I’m good at it.”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to pick up and leave for good. You could go visit your people and then return. New Orleans’ll still be here.”

“I know. I just…. It’s time to move on. I don’t usually stick around as long as I have.”

“Itchy feet, or searching for something? ’Cause it’s no use running off if you’re trying to escape yourself.”

He nodded. He’d learned long ago that he was stuck with Miles Thorsen for good. “I mostly used to move around because I ran out of money. I’m sort of almost there now. But… I don’t know. This city reminds me too much of Andy.”

She made a dismissive sound and carefully set down the lavender near her coffee mug. “Maybe you’ll get to missing us once you’re gone.”

“I’ll miss you for sure, Deedee. And the city. But I doubt I’ll be back.”

“Where will you go?”

He shrugged because he didn’t know. California? Florida? He’d been trying to imagine himself in various places, but nothing appealed. Hell, maybe he’d just hop on a convenient bus and see where it took him.

A gaggle of tourists came by, and Deedee played something jazzy and upbeat. They took videos of her on their phones and dropped coins and bills into the violin case. A tall woman with multicolored hair browsed Miles’s paintings. “I love this one,” she said, smiling at a depiction of a cypress tree strung with Mardi Gras beads.

“Normally it’d be two hundred.” It was one of his larger works and had taken him over a week to paint. “But for you, how about a hundred?”

Sold.

Several other people bought that afternoon too, all at deep discounts, and he drew half a dozen caricatures. By the time the sun began to set, his wallet was full and his stomach empty. And sixteen paintings remained.

“I don’t know what to do with them,” he told Deedee. “Maybe I should just toss them.”

“You will not!” She glanced at the lavender, then up at the darkening sky. “I’ll keep ’em for you.”

“You can sell them if you want. I don’t care.”

“I’ll keep them for you.”

He abandoned the stool and easel, which weren’t in great shape anyway, and tucked paper and pens into his bag. He and Deedee assessed which paintings they would carry back to her place; the rest he tucked away in the praline shop for her to collect later. His storage fee was paid up for another two weeks.

Together they took a streetcar to the Garden District, where Deedee lived in a house she’d inherited from her mother. A black-and-white cat blinked at them from a chair on the front porch but didn’t bother to get up. “He ain’t mine,” Deedee explained as she unlocked the front door. “But he sure does like that chair.”

While the outside of her house was painted orange and green, the inside was more sedate in creams and pale blues. Miles smiled when he recognized a painting over an armchair. “You really did hang it up.”

She rolled her eyes. “Said I would, didn’t I? Now bring the rest over here.”

At her direction, he tucked the canvases into a closet that was otherwise full of board games and boxes. He watched as Deedee set the lavender on the kitchen sink windowsill, in between an aloe and a pot of basil.

“I always did like lavender,” she said. “My gra-mere used to make lavender wands to put in our dresser drawers. It’ll get plenty of sun right there, and I’ll move it outside in a month or two.”

“Thanks, Deedee.” He made an awkward move toward the front door, but she caught his arm.

“Oh no you don’t. You’re going to sit down and have a nice supper with me. Say goodbye properly.”

His heart, which had felt shriveled and icy for too long, warmed a little. “Okay.”

Deedee was, by her own admission, a terrible cook. But she was handy enough with