Kat's Nine Lives

by Laina Villeneuve

  At the front door Wendy tried the knob, but the door didn’t open. She tried the lock, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kat said, suddenly next to her. She grasped the handle and the lock below and swung the door open. “I thought you were going to have dinner here. They scared you off, didn’t they? Because they are weird. My family is weird.”

  “Not at all. There’s a bunch of stuff I have to get done at the restaurant tonight.”

  “I think you’re lying to make me feel better about having a weird family.”

  “Not everyone is a liar.”

  Kat growled at her, but she smiled. “I’m going to let you get away with it because I really need your help hanging those lights.”

  “It will be my pleasure.”

  Kat cuffed Wendy’s shoulder. “Quit talking like my father.”

  “He’s a character.” Wendy set her bags in the back seat.

  “Go. I have to deal with them.”

  “I thought you had to move your car,” Wendy said.

  Kat seemed to study her as if she was trying to decide whether to call Wendy on her teasing. Suddenly, Kat’s arms were around her. She tensed for a moment before returning the hug. Kat loosened her hold and said, “I do, but I wish we could have had dinner just me and you and the tortoises again. The mac-n-cheese looks delicious.”

  “I hope you enjoy it.”

  “If it didn’t look so good, I might just jump in your passenger seat and avoid all of that.” She waved her hand in the direction of the house.

  “So I wasn’t imagining that it got tense in there.”

  “No, not your imagination.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve put you in an awkward position.”

  “Funny. I was about to say the same thing. Do you really have time in your life to help hang lights?”

  “I absolutely have time. We should probably start earlier, so we don’t have to work in the dark.”

  “Works for me. See you next week.”

  * * *

  Kat was certain that her family thought something was going on between her and Wendy. She hoped that Wendy had not been aware that her family had been talking about her. They were still talking, and they would keep talking as long as she was outside, and the longer she was gone, the more they would think that they were right.

  The last of the sunlight angled through the trees bathing the backyard in a golden glow. She noted it to pass on to Jeremy and Evan. If they got married by the arbor at just this time, they would have a natural spotlight.

  Time for Kat to be in her own spotlight. She bit the bullet and went inside. “You guys are all so busted.”

  “Because we started without you?” Travis asked. “Gramma said it would be okay.”

  Kat couldn’t remember the last time she had seen more than one person seated at the kitchen table at the same time. The sight should have made her happy. The sturdy oak table with its four matching curve-backed chairs had been the center of her childhood. Family and friends had gravitated toward it and years of resting their elbows while they visited had worn the black and gold stenciling along the edge thin. Instead, she felt more frustrated with them than she had in a long while. “Because you scared off my friend.”

  “You didn’t have to come in. You could have stayed out in the cottage doing whatever you were doing,” her mother said.

  “What were you doing?” Travis asked.

  “Talking to my friend about Jeremy and Evan’s wedding. She’s the caterer.”

  Her mother took a bite of chicken and smirked. “These breasts are so tender.”

  Kat clenched her teeth so tightly her jaws ached. She refused to engage in her mother’s innuendo. This was precisely why she kept her friends and family separate.

  “Is she really a lesbian?” Travis asked.

  So she’d been right about the topic of conversation. “Yes, she is.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “Wendy and I are friends,”

  “You were in the cottage for quite some time,” her father said.

  “Grandfather says she likes you.”

  Kat grasped at a way to divert the conversation. “Jeremy and Evan want to do a candy cottage.” She couldn’t help thinking about how, had she stayed, Wendy would have seen her gift for half-truths in action. “Wendy said it would be nice to have light out there. Do we have any Christmas lights that we can string in the cottage?”

  “Inside or outside?” he asked.

  “Both.”

  “You were quite flushed for talking about lights,” Millie said.

  “Mom!” Kat shot a look at Travis and then at her mother. “Why are you still downstairs?”

  “I told you! Your father didn’t know whether to take the food out of the oven,” she said with exasperation.

  “We tried to text you, but you didn’t answer,” Travis said.

  Kat fumbled her phone out of her pocket. They had texted her? How had she missed that? She swiped her phone and frowned at the text.

  “They wanted me to go out there, but I was like, you don’t interrupt people in the stone cottage.”

  “Travis! What do you know about the stone cottage? No. Don’t tell me what you know about the stone cottage.”

  “If that wasn’t the rule, there would be no Travis,” Millie said.

  “I did not conceive Travis in the stone cottage. We are so not talking about this right now.”

  “You keep telling yourself that,” Millie said. “Get some dinner. You’re letting it all get cold, and it’s delicious. If you’re not kissing that woman, you should be.”

  Kat sent a not in front of Travis look to her mother as she grabbed a plate.

  “What?” Millie said out loud. “Travis knows some women kiss women. Years ago, I—”

  “We really don’t need to go there!”

  Travis looked from his mother to his grandmother and pushed out his bottom lip. “Leo’s aunt is gay. Can you please spoon me some more mac ’n cheese?”

  “There’s a reason we stopped having family dinners,” Kat mumbled to herself. She wished that Travis and her mother had opted to eat in their rooms. With them at the table, she couldn’t get away with serving herself and leaving the room, so she dug in, accepting that there was no escaping her family.

  Chapter Five

  The week passed as slowly as 405 traffic on a Friday night. Kat left work early, securing a volunteer to answer the phones until the office closed at five. She changed into her version of work clothes—jeans and an old concert T-shirt—and sat in her pink bedroom where she’d spent twenty-two years before she’d moved out to play house with Jack and raise Travis. She had her wedding album on her lap fingering the edges of its thick pages.

  An email from Evan about how to display the cake in the dining room prompted her to pull the album from the bookshelf. She stared at the happy couple on the cover. Jack had made a dashing groom in the classic black tux. His face had been thinner then, or his goatee had given his face more definition. As a bride, Kat had looked like a princess in her white lace dress her hair in banana-curl ringlets. The veil floated behind her as if caught in a breeze. The perfect couple. The perfect day. She smiled remembering the photographer’s frustration with her veil. He was the one who wanted to catch it in motion, and it did give the photograph the magical air he had wanted.

  Too bad the marriage itself hadn’t been magical. Had it not been for Travis, it never would have happened.

  But she was pregnant and had married the perfect man, a lawyer with the corner office that afforded the house and car all her friends envied. He was funny and patient, the very definition of a great catch.

  She’d held on for as long as she could, ignoring the lack of chemistry. At first she had convinced herself that it was her inexperience that made her so uncomfortable when they had sex. Too soon, she could blame her morning sickness. But after years of feigning interest and pleasure, she had actually been relieved when Jack suggested they branch out
with other sex partners.

  If only he hadn’t insisted that they both do so. She should have been honest with him about how she was perfectly happy to opt out completely. She didn’t need sex to be happy. She had her family. She had Travis. He was her magic. She reached for his most recent class picture, a flood of pride and awe at how beautiful he was. The hair that typically flopped in his eyes was brushed to the side, and he’d smiled for her. How dare she wonder what life would have been like had she not gotten pregnant? She closed her eyes, yet the image remained clearly in her mind’s eye. As hard as the photographer had tried to hide her baby bump, Travis was there, evident in the stretch of fabric across her belly and the roundness in her face.

  And behind the trunk of the palm tree, Miranda, tucked safely out of sight. Kat’s chest felt tight. She hadn’t thought about Miranda in forever, yet she’d been hiding there every day. Nobody even remembered who tossed the veil for the photograph. It was Miranda. When the enlargement had hung above the mantel in their fancy house, no one recalled her part.

  They didn’t know about the kiss.

  Kat hadn’t allowed herself to think about that kiss for years. Thinking about it released butterflies she’d stowed away deep inside. They zipped about her body so viscerally that Kat felt dizzy. She shouldn’t be surprised. Not with the way she enjoyed flirting with Wendy when she catered at the church. She couldn’t help it. Wendy was such fun, so much herself. Her confidence was magnetic.

  And she likes you, the butterflies whispered.

  She can’t, Kat answered internally. She shouldn’t.

  Then you have to stop flirting with her. Unless you’re attracted to her.

  I’m not, Kat snapped at herself.

  Keep telling yourself that.

  Hearing the tone of her mother’s voice, the butterflies abandoned her, leaving her stomach as heavy as lead. Wendy was due any moment, and here Kat was talking to herself. No time to look at how she and Jack had staged their cake, she shoved the album back onto the bookshelf and scowled into the mirror on her bureau. She parted her hair down the middle and pulled half over each shoulder into farm-girl braids, letting her mind wander back to Wendy and her dark curls, now worn longer than in high school. A smile came to her face remembering Wendy’s wild hairstyles, the way she’d shaved it close on the sides and left perfect floppy ringlets in the front.

  Movement on the patio caught her attention, and she pushed back her curtain to get a better look. “Crap,” she mumbled seeing her father heading to the cottage with Wendy. She jogged down the stairs to rescue Wendy.

  “Hi,” she said when she reached the cottage, breathless, she told herself, from her pace across the yard, not from the sight of Wendy in cargo pants and skin-tight spandex shirt. She looked good enough to eat. Ready to work, Kat corrected her thoughts, unable to afford such a distraction.

  “Your dad said we can run an extension cord from the pool pump.”

  In fascination, Kat listened to the two of them plan to run the power through the trees to camouflage them and avoid tripping hazards. Wendy stood close to her dad, who was smiling, something she’d never seen with Jack. He had always found her dad to be “too intense,” and she was used to him avoiding Clyde. Wendy and her father worked together as if they’d known each other for years. Suddenly, she was aware of how quiet it was, and expectant looks from both him and Wendy clued her in that she had missed something.

  “You know where the lights are in the basement?” he repeated.

  “Oh, of course.”

  “Do you require assistance?”

  “Wendy and I can manage,” Kat said, leading the way back to the house.

  Wendy glanced back at the hedge that hid the cottage from view as if checking on the conversation they had left suspended the week before. Would she want to return to her lies of omission? She wasn’t sure what it was about Wendy that compelled her to tell the truth, but she was in no way prepared to explore the things that Wendy had referred to as “doozies.” She focused on the task at hand. “We have a ton of Christmas lights, and they are all white. White lights are classier, according to my dad.”

  “I am in total agreement,” Wendy said.

  Kat laughed.

  “Why is that funny?”

  “It’s not really funny. Jack hated white lights and always had the exact same negative things to say about my father’s decorations. Sometimes I thought they chose opposite of each other just to see who I would side with.”

  “I don’t compete,” Wendy reminded her.

  “Pity you don’t because you would totally be winning if you did.”

  “What’s the game?”

  “Competing to be the favorite, of course.” By the kitchen table, she opened the door to the basement. “Lucky for us, Travis is at school, so it’s safe to descend.”

  “What happens if he’s there? Does he defend his territory in scary ways?”

  “I just don’t need to know what teenagers do in their own space.”

  “Got it!” Wendy waved her hands as if to say she needn’t hear more.

  “Lights,” Kat said. She descended the stairs trying not to feel so aware of Wendy behind her.

  “I can’t believe you have a basement. Who has a basement in Southern California? I’ve never been in a house here that has one before. I still can’t get over how you grew up here!”

  “You’re nice to focus on that instead of the fact that I’m living here again. My friends enjoy pointing out how depressing it is for a forty-year-old to be living with her parents.”

  “Your friends say that? But you get to live here. I don’t see how anyone could pass that up.”

  “Pretty much everyone would pass it up. Living with your parents doesn’t scream ‘I’m a successful adult!’”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Kat motioned to the right. “Past the shower curtain is Travis’s domain. The lights are on this side.” She stepped into a small room and pulled the chain on the above fixture for light. “Now we play shuffle the boxes until we find the one with lights in it.”

  “How does your son feel about living here?”

  “It beats having to share a living space with his best friend since his dad is shacking up with his best friend’s mom.” She lowered her voice and leaned close enough to Wendy that their shoulders brushed. “He gets grossed out by their groping and kissing. Honestly, it’s not fair to anyone the way they hang all over each other like teenagers. Gross. And he’s almost as in love with this house as you are, so the transition hasn’t been that tough for him.”

  Wendy was quiet for so long, Kat turned to look at her. “What?”

  “Nothing…Everything you rattled off…That’s a lot to take in.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You didn’t know about the whole best-friend-sleeping-with-my-husband thing.”

  Eyes wide, Wendy said, “Nope.”

  “Sorry. Somehow I forget to edit when I’m around you.” Kat turned back to the boxes weighing whether to let the subject shift or say more.

  “You shouldn’t have to edit around friends.”

  Kat hmphed. “I lost my friends in the divorce.”

  “I can see where it would be tough to stay friends with someone who slept with your husband.”

  “I didn’t care that they were sleeping together. It got awkward when they fell in love, and I felt bad for the kids, but by then everyone knew that Jack and I weren’t happy, so there was no use lying anymore,” Kat confessed, setting another box behind her. The stack grew as she checked the contents and moved to the next one. She glanced at Wendy. “TMI?”

  “No, not too much. I didn’t know whether it would be tacky to ask how you found out about them.”

  “Oh, I knew beforehand. We were all friends. Jack and I met Patrick and Ember when our kids started kindergarten. Our boys grew up together, and we knew each other really well. Then Jack wanted to know Ember better. My therapist had been encouraging me to come out of my shell, so I said why not and agreed to a spou
se trade.”

  “How’d that work out for you?”

  “Obviously it didn’t! My therapist was aghast when I told him and said he had meant something like taking up a musical instrument. That ended up working a lot better. I bought the drum kit out there and started practicing with Travis.”

  * * *

  Wendy stuck her head out of the little room. She hadn’t seen a drum kit when they had descended the stairs.

  “Do you still play?”

  Kat looked sheepish. “Not for ages. What’s fun for a thirteen-year-old is death by embarrassment for a seventeen-year-old.”

  “What does Travis play?”

  “Guitar.”

  “It sounds like an awesome thing to do with your kid.” Kat had rarely talked about her family during their brief encounters at the church. It didn’t surprise her to find out that Kat was the kind of mom who got involved with her kid.

  “I tried.” Kat sounded wistful.

  “It’s super cool in my book. Play me something!”

  Kat scrunched her nose and shook her head. “That was a different lifetime. I’m sure they’re covered in dust.”

  “I think this is one of your lies and that you still rock.”

  Kat plunked two boxes on the stairs. “Can you get one?”

  “Sure.” She followed Kat up the stairs and out to the cottage.

  “Travis is the one who rocks. I do my best to keep up. Where did my dad say he’d have the extension cord?”

  “I’ve got it here,” Wendy said. She tried to pull one string of lights from her box and came up with a huge tangle of wire and glass bulbs. “Yikes!”

  “Let me see if this box is better,” Kat suggested. She pulled on a strand and had the same result. She started to tease one away from the rest, shaking and tugging at it. “Once we get one free, you can hang it while I work on another.”

  “You think we can loop it on the bushes to get to the roof?”

  “I’m just technical support. You’re the one with the vision.”

  “And you’re just doing your best to keep up?” Wendy said wryly.

  “If you heard Travis play, you’d understand.” Kat lit up. “You should hear him play. Wait! Are you busy tomorrow afternoon? He’s playing!”