Prayer by Susan Fanetti

that he was being intentionally mean. Rather than continue the pointless and increasingly insulting discussion, Katrynn went to her front door and opened it. “Goodbye, Atticus. Good luck with your book.”
     
    He smacked her ass on his way past. “Too bad. You’re a half-decent fuck. Bye, Kitty.”
     
    When Katrynn closed the door, she had a sense that she had dodged a bullet. She almost thought she might owe John a thank you.
     
    No. No, not that.
     
    Even Atticus had respected her enough to say goodbye.
     
     
    ~oOo~
     
     
    After Atticus left her apartment, her life, and Quiet Cove, Katrynn changed into jeans and a turtleneck sweater and drove home.
     
    Home was Welcome, Connecticut, a quirky little town just southeast of Hartford, where she’d been born and raised. The drive from the Cove to Welcome was less than two hours, if traffic was good and Katrynn followed posted speed limits. On that Sunday afternoon, traffic was great—and Katrynn rarely followed posted speed limits.
     
    Her parents were…unconventional. Dana, her mother, had had several million, at Katrynn’s round estimate, different jobs. Bill, her father, worked as a plumber, when he was home and working. But he had trouble staying in one place for long, so for months-long stretches of every year Katrynn could remember, her father had been absent from her life.
     
    Somehow, Dana was okay with that. And Bill was okay with coming home after one of his wanderings and finding a different man in his house and his bed. Sometimes, the different man would hang around a while, and all three of them would be together.
     
    Unconventional. Yet Welcome was the kind of town that made a lot of room for unconventional people, so home had always been full of friends and neighbors.
     
    For Katrynn, that had always been her family, and she loved them. Even once she’d realized the extent of their unconventionality, she’d been comfortable with it, shrugging off any comments from her peers. That got a lot harder to do when she became a teenager, and it was even harder, as an adult, to bring people in from away to introduce her family, so she rarely did that. But she loved them, and they were who they were.
     
    She herself wasn’t nearly as weird as her folks, and she didn’t want a life for herself like theirs. She had been happy to get her own place and her own things and be a little bit normal, yet there were things about her parents’ lifestyle she admired. Every day was a new adventure for them. They were both vagabonds, and they’d cobbled together a life that gave them what they wanted and needed.
     
    Her older brother did not have the same sanguine attitude. They had named him Evelyn, after the British writer Evelyn Waugh, and they called him Evie. But Evelyn had not been a common name for a boy in a long time—maybe never in the US. That had not gone well for him in school, and no amount of insisting that he be called by his middle name, William, had had any effect. Katrynn thought that his name, more than any other oddity their parents had presented, had soured her brother on their family.
     
    Her name was a tad unusual, too. She had grown up correcting people who wanted to put an ‘H’ after the ‘T’, or who wanted to stress the first syllable rather than the second, and she expected that she would spend her life making those corrections. But her name issues were inconveniences. No one had bullied her because her name wasn’t exactly normal. Her brother, on the other hand, had had a really hard time.
     
    He’d gone to college in Texas. He still lived there, and in the more than thirteen years since he’d left, he had been home four times. He and Katrynn kept in touch, mainly online, and he sent cards and gifts home, but he rarely made the trip back east. He was Will Page now everywhere but at home, even Katrynn called him Will, but he was still bitter about ever being Evie.
     
    Katrynn thought he was missing out. While he had run