hope you can make it :)

q: what do you love about yourself? q: what don't you love about yourself?

[pattiwagon]

#PATTIWAGON. patricia moyer of w.idow's bay. sideblog to @widwer.

this is patricia. she's in her 40s (she's 40). she works at the w.idow's bay town hall with tom loftis and she gives away free books in her free time out of her truck, "the pattiwagon." boogeyman-escaper. elegant party-thrower. well-adjusted individual

technically voice-testing. bear with us.

[taiturner]

Stop making this about you. It's not about you! I'm sorry, but I am not the reason that you don't have any friends. It's because you're fucking insane. Okay? Your little party? It almost killed everyone. And now you've ruined book club.

WIDOW'S BAY, 1x08 "Your Baggage"

[printedblues]

he doesn't like the way she's thinking. slowly his hands melt from his face to go palm-up on his desk. his knuckles thud soft against the desk mat.

"ho-how many? tastings? are there more than one? we do-we do it once. do you mean how many cakes? i-i don't know, a million. once. and then we decide. but!" one hand points: there's that look on her. he has to catch it. she's threatening to inflate and make this more of a patricia-thing than it needs to be. god, why is it always the finger and the hand with this one? "no. no. bev is on that, the-the food. he knows my. particularities. okay, look. table cards. ta-table cards. can you do that? if you're so worried about the guests. let them sit. wouldn't it be so nice to let-let them sit?"

he scrambles for a pen that still works. it takes two or three tries. bending over her torn note page, he screws the top to ready it and peeks up at her through his lashes. trying out a new, funny voice,

"can i put ya down for tables?"

[pattiwagon]

the voice doesn’t affect her one way or the other. she stares at tom as she has from the minute she walked in, as though they’ve never had anything so serious to discuss. a little bit like she always does.

“i don’t think that’s a word.” she doesn’t specify—“particularities” stands out, though she knows it is a word—which indicates that her goal is to get in his head, not to issue a genuine correction. a challenge, for tom, to reflect and comb through his ramblings, if only to allow patricia the time to arrive at her decision.

“you know you’re going to have to be involved, tom.” in the tastings, in the party-planning, with the flowers. it would sound meaner if she didn’t know him. it’s a half-hearted rebuke, anyway, because she feels nearly sufficiently catered to.

place cards she can do. place cards she can envision.

she nods sharply. “put me down for tables,” she says. “and please tell your fiancé i’m grateful to him for remembering me. i mean—” she’s faking an unsettling laugh, but her eyes say homicide. “he hardly even knows me.”

[printedblues]

for that beat, he feels as though a fly is ready to come down and settle on his eyeball. biting at the tail end of her bestowed curse, "you're invited! okay? you-you're invited. please come. i'd love— sorry. i'm so sorry. of course. you're invited."

he's jittery because she has a point. about the forgetting, and about the guests. before he can think it through, he pushes all his need for agency into his pointer finger and goes click. the webpage on his screen starts to reload. great. that's all three minutes lost. throwing his hands into the air behind his head like he can somehow grab the past mid-air and bring it present—this movement, too, he aborts mid-term—he crash lands his face into his hands over the desk.

through his fingers like a muzzle, "i'd appreciate it if you didn't call my upcoming wedding off-putting, patricia. i mean, clearly that-that's some bad omen in itself. look. listen. why don't you—wuh-would you like to be in charge of flowers?"

[pattiwagon]

she doesn’t wobble, but she does consciously reduce herself to a new voice, recognizing the severity of tom’s overload and accepting, with some degree of detachment, that a drawn-out tantrum is unlikely to cut through. “it could put him off,” she mumbles, as if she can’t tolerate the idea of him resting assured.

flower girl? no. he means arrangements. is scent a choice factor? because that’s the only thing she can picture herself committing to: smelling them, smiling at the florist, and leaving by accident without declaring a preference. then she can’t go back. she’ll need to outsource.

and what if they’re wrong? they’ll forget immediately if they’re right, remember forever if they’re wrong. ‘patricia was in charge of the flowers,’ they’ll say. ‘we didn’t know that chrysanthemums meant death.’

“how many cake tastings will there be?” her chin drops once, then again a little further, as it occurs to her that tom probably doesn’t know. “and for the food. are you trying all of the locals?”

[printedblues]

the options are between the internet browser's spinning blue loading wheel and patricia's unblinking blue-greys. to start he flickers back and forth. but in that sense, patricia is unfortunately magnetic. tom holds his breath while waiting for what's coming: no longer does he trust her particular sense of urgency. she might be looking for another round about the brushed steel bottom of the community kitchen sink.

so much so that he's about ready to defend the slime. but whatever defenses he's loaded up falter immediately.

"wh—"

he finger-dances the note closer. what other englishmen. he's going to get him for this.

"oh please. that's. you-you're obviously invited. come on." she doesn't look impressed. "do you see patricia engagement party as a reminder on the board behind me? no. and. you know why? because if i make a-a point to invite you here, i'll have to invite," his voice lowers to a stage whisper, "rosemary. and-and you know what happens then? the whole wedding's off. because then i'll have to drown myself. in the ocean. —you don't think i have a million things to do?"

[pattiwagon]

no sympathy for the rosemary dilemma. in fact—in fact, why shouldn't rosemary be there? has tom not taken into consideration that rosemary will never drop the subject if she is not there? never mind that they're vaguely allied against her. she should probably be there.

her arms unfold and fall to her sides. even when she's confrontational, it suits patricia better to assume an unnatural idle: legs strong against the ground like she wants to kick through, and her upper half unbound, ready to be jolted into animation like a rag doll.

"and i'm the millionth, tom?" her hair swings across the tops of her shoulders as she gesticulates, starting with the whiteboard. "i don't remember seeing 'propose to beverly' on your list but you didn't forget to do that." she thins her lips by pressing them together and nods, briefly but emphatically, at her own as-yet-unmade point. "i see what's important. do you see what's important? because, you know, a wedding without guests. he might find that off-putting."

steelier still, "like a—" it takes her a beat to find the word. "portent."

[pattiwagon]

@printedblues.

she stares at him for too long before speaking. in fairness, though, he stares back. only tom does it with expectation. tom does it with his eyebrows dancing on the end of marionette strings.

“beverly called.” not the office. her.

with one heavy, graceless step, she’s closed a good portion of the remaining distance between herself and tom’s desk, though she still has to stretch and lean to smack her page of handwritten notes atop it.

“i guess you weren’t going to invite me to your engagement party.” the paper reads: beverly (or other englishman?) beverly says tom forgot. “he did.” her eyebrows can go up, too, even if it means she’ll also be crossing her arms. “so. i’d like you to explain that.”