Lance hesitated. “We don’t do leather.” Living in rural Ohio, we’ve made some compromises. A vegetarian lifestyle is possible, but it would be hard to maintain. We ate chicken when it was ethically farmed. More rarely, we ate beef. But by and large we avoided animal by-products.
The manager chuckled. “It’s called pleather. No cows were harmed in the customizing of this vehicle.” His manner was calm, and only his eyes gave away his sudden worry at Lance’s hesitation.
“Until I read otherwise, pleather is fine.” I opened the passenger door and slid in beside my husband. “It’s every bit as low-slung as the ad made it sound.”
Lance’s arm paused on its way to plug the key into the ignition. “Which one of us was doing research by lusting after sports cars?” he asked me.
“I never said I didn’t bring up a couple on the Internet, too,” I protested. “But I did a little more looking into what I thought we might actually be buying than you did.”
Lance slid the key home and turned it. The car sprang to life in an instant, where, even on a good day, the primate-mobile had to turn over a couple of times before it rumbled on. “Listen to her purr.” Lance stroked the dash.
Getting the cars home turned into something of a three-ring circus. I drove the minivan back to the house willingly enough, then rode with the top down beside Lance to return for our truck. Back at the dealership, he seemed to think he got the convertible again, even though I hadn’t had a turn at all behind the wheel.
“Share and share alike.” I told him. “Move.”
He stayed put, but I refused to get out of the car on my own side. We might have remained that way for much longer, but we had forgotten the spare keys to both new cars, and as the dealer lured us out to get them, I snatched the convertible fob out of Lance’s hand and popped myself behind its wheel.
“Hey!” Lance protested.
I turned on the engine, rolled up the windows, and put up the top. Lance stood helpless outside the vehicle, trying to pop the locks with the spare keys. However, as I had learned the time I locked myself out of my previous car while warming it up one morning, those key fob beepers don’t work once the engine is actually running. I beamed at my fuming husband as I adjusted my seat and the mirrors, then I made a great show of smoothing down my hair and blew him a kiss. I rolled down one window as I drove past. “See you at the house after I grab Tasha,” I said. “Remember, we’ve got to put those beds together today.”
I put down the top once more as I exited the lot. Behind me, Lance was shouting, “Damn it, Noel,” but the rest of whatever he wanted to tell me was lost to the roar of the wind in my ears as I hugged the road on the drive to Christina’s.
Natasha flew out her friend’s front door. “You went! You went! You went! I didn’t think you were ever going to go. Do you know how hard it’s been to keep it secret? And how did you get your hands on the convertible? I thought Lance would hide the keys for sure.”
“He may yet, so we better enjoy our ride.”
“Ha! You can hide this set first.” She bounded around the car once, inspecting it before she jumped in. “Note. Pleather interior. You are totally not to take small people in your gorgeous car and get it all junked up. That’s what the minivan’s for.”
“If you think I’m junking up any cars, you don’t know me. I kept my last car so clean I wouldn’t let Lance in unless he took off his shoes or put down paper first.”
“Noel,” Natasha said with mock solemnity, “you have tons to learn about parenting.”
What a difference this was from the young woman who had come to live with us a couple of months ago. “Did you figure out a disaster management plan?”
“Yup.”
“And it is?”
“Close ranks.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning since now all my friends know, I don’t have to hide it from them anymore, and if anybody else tries to bring it up, we band together and ignore them.”
“Not a bad plan.” Three months ago, she hadn’t had any friends. “You seem to have bounced back pretty well. I was worried about you this morning.
“If it had happened in June, I’d have still been trying to hide from everybody. And that was my initial reaction. I wanted to crawl under a rock. But it makes such a difference not having any secrets. Gary used to harp on about how I liked it, and how bad it would make my grandparents feel to find out. But once they found out, all any of us cared about was the other ones being alive.” Suddenly, her joy at the car diminished. “I want to go home, Noel. You have no idea how much I want to go home. I want to go back in time and erase June completely.
“But not all of it. I want to take away all the bad stuff and hang on to the part when it was all over, where Gran said, ‘Honey, I knew something was going on. I thought it was drugs, maybe Stan and I were taking on somebody who had a habit we couldn’t touch.’ She found out I was a child porn star, and all she said was, ‘Thank God it wasn’t drugs.’ And Stan was the same way.
“I feel bad for Layla. I want to help her if I can. It’s kind of stupid, but if she hadn’t done what she did . . . keeping my friends in the dark was the last wall. I wouldn’t have told them. Not in a million years. They’ve only been my friends for a month or two, and only because of the slam thing.” Slam thing . . . yes. The poetry group. I still wasn’t sure I believed in that completely. “And I felt the same way as I used to about Gran and Granddad, afraid of what they’d say when they found out. I mean, they barely know me, too.
“But instead of messing everything up, it made us all closer. It made me feel like one of them. It made me . . . don’t freak out, okay, but this morning was the first time I didn’t wake up and wonder, even for a few minutes, where you hid the wine in the new house. And that was before I got the disc back.”
“I’m glad, Tasha.” I didn’t want to say too much. Natasha was rarely this open. However, when she had been silent for several miles, I deemed it time for a change of subject. “But you can’t keep reporting our every want to your grandfather! It’s getting outrageous the things he’s doing for us.”
Natasha smothered laughter in one arm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t. But it’s so funny. Was Lance pissed? Did his face turn purple?”
“Yeah. Right up until the second he saw this car.”
“Ha!” she crowed. “I knew it! I knew he wanted the convertible.”
“Didn’t everyone? My point is, your granddad is generous, but he doesn’t have to buy our friendship. He hears everything you tell him as something else to shop for.”
“Would you relax?” said Natasha.
“You of the four anxiety medications.”
“I know. I’m a total spaz, too. And anyway, I’m not guilty here. Or mostly not, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“After you told your sister you were adopting, she called me up and asked if you were still . . . how’d she put it? ‘Rattling around in that heap of a truck.’ It sent me into a major panic attack, because I don’t have a safe word with her, and she didn’t want me to tell you a thing, and I had to hang up and call your mom and make her call your sister to make sure it was for real, because it was such a good idea, and she knows you better than I do.”
“Wait, back up,” I said, when I could get a word in edgewise. “Marguerite wanted you to get your grandfather to buy us a sports car?”
“No, no, no. She wanted you to have the minivan. The convertible was your dad’s idea.”
“My dad’s idea? Natasha, how much of my family is in on this? They know how uncomfortable Stan’s gifts make us feel.”
“Yeah, but see, they knew you and Lance would wind up getting the sedan, and Marguerite knew the sedan was stupid. And your dad felt bad for not being more excited. Plus, everyone is still bummed your car burned up, and everybody has heard Lance talk about this car.”
“It’s more like salivate. But Natasha . . .”
“Chill out, Noel. Listen, this
is how it’s going to go. While I’m with you, you’re right there in the front of Granddad’s mind. And he has got almost nothing to do in the hospital. He can’t send clowns and teddy bears to the children’s wing every day, and you know he totally would, right? Anyway, when he gets home, he’ll have all his stuff to keep him busy again, and I’ll be back at home. It’s not like he’ll love you any less. I think he’s kind of substituted you for your friend Art in his heart, and once that wears off, he’ll have found a new place for you to fit. But he won’t be thinking of you all the time, and then he won’t dump houses, and cars, and . . . I should probably warn you there’s a treehouse kit coming from Columbus . . .”
“A what?”
“Yeah. For Sara and Will if they ever get there.”
“They’ll get here, Natasha,” I told her as we turned down our street. “They’re coming tomorrow.”
“What?” With the top down, I felt pretty sure the whole neighborhood could hear Natasha shriek.
“As long as our assembled friends and family don’t have something drastic to tell us.”
“Who?”
I pointed to the front of our house. Besides the new minivan and the primate-mobile, Trudy Jackson’s beat-up sedan was parked on one side of the street, and my parents’ car was on the other. I couldn’t have told you who I wanted to see less.
“They could have heard the good news and be stopping by with congratulations.”
“And scientists might have found life on Mars and be getting ready to hold a big news conference at our place. Come on, let’s see what’s up.”
I parked my new car and closed the roof, my euphoric mood dampened by our guests’ arrival.
CHAPTER 12
“Mama, it’s fine.” I passed my mother a mug of the coffee Lance had been brewing in my absence. I ticked gourmet coffee beans off the list of things I could expect not to afford in the near future. Lance and I have always lived on a budget, but we were about to develop economy in untold quantities.
“It’s not fine, and you know it.” She collected my sugar bowl and resumed her seat beside Trudy. They had the same stylish pixie haircut, Mama’s in her appalling shade of yellow, Trudy’s in a more sedate brown. Although Trudy looked much younger, in reality she was, like me, fighting the gray one bottle of dye at a time. Mama had long since given over the battle and gone, if not punk, then at least neo-grandma.
My father, who already had his cup but hadn’t bothered to sit down, patted my shoulder. “I think what it boils down to is this. You’ve never made a quick decision in your life. You analyze and think things through. Marguerite’s always been our impulsive daughter.”
“I don’t think Margie has done a single impulsive thing since she and Dag eloped.” In fact, I had been one of the few attendants at her courthouse ceremony some twenty-two years ago. She had taken her own relative lack of a proper wedding as license to fully plan Lance’s and mine this past June. Good thing, too, or it probably wouldn’t have happened.
Still, I understood my father’s point. I was briefly engaged to Lance’s brother. After that ghastly relationship ended, I moved on reluctantly to dating Lance. Then, Lance and I were a couple for some time before we got an apartment, let alone a house together. It was hard to believe we would soon be putting it on the market. Even when Natasha went home, we would never have room in our old place again. Now, not two full months after a wedding ten years in the making, we were becoming parents. It was a lot to process.
“Noel, can you give us a hand down here?” Lance called from the basement, where we had stored the things we weren’t yet ready to unpack. He and Darnell were down looking for our table leaf. In its current arrangement, the table barely seated four. It would be crowded with seven today, even when we added the extra two feet. Starting tomorrow, we would be seating five regularly. The leaf wouldn’t be coming out anytime soon after we got it in.
“What do you need?” I was already halfway down the stairs.
“This thing is completely buried.”
I joined my husband and realized Darnell wasn’t helping him at all but was, in fact, standing in another empty room of the basement murmuring on his cell. By the time tonight was over, our office would be there, and we would have taken down the bunk bed and transformed it into twin beds, one in Lance’s and one in my former office. Part of me hoped to get Art’s job purely because it was nice to have my own space.
I cocked my head and shot a wordless glance between my husband and our agent friend. And Darnell was a friend. Trudy, too, as frustrated as I might be with them right now. They had volunteered undercover at our sanctuary for a long time, and we considered them more than acquaintances.
The table leaf was not buried at all. It was leaning neatly against the wall. Before I could ask what was going on, Lance said, “Trudy and Darnell want to tell us something, and since your folks are here, they’d like to tell them too. Only . . .”
“Only we can’t pass wind without getting official clearance.” Darnell joined us. “Yeah, it’s okay. Let’s move this thing.”
“Does this have something to do with Natasha? Because the less my mother knows about her, the better.” Mama already pitied and babied Tasha entirely too much. The girl would never get any peace from my parents if they knew the full extent of what she had been through.
Darnell shook his head. “It’s your kids,” he said. “We’ve been waiting to find out they would be coming here before we moved forward.”
“With what?” I was surprised by the edge in my voice and the accompanying protective clutch in my chest.
“It won’t make sense out of context.” Since neither Lance nor I had picked up the leaf, Darnell hoisted it himself. As we mounted the stairs behind him, Mama’s voice drifted down to me. “. . . and I realized I was rejecting my own grandchildren!”
“Mama, it’s fine.” I collected her cup and the sugar bowl so the leaf could be put in.
“It’s not fine,” Mama continued. Daddy set his mug on the counter and crawled under the table to open the hinges for the leaf. “We’re both so sorry, loves. Here you are bringing me people still young enough to appreciate my sewing, and I’m acting like your sister did when she found out Rachel is a lesbian!” Everyone except Marguerite had welcomed her oldest daughter’s coming out. Margie still acted like it might be a bad dream she would wake from.
“If it’s the sewing that brought you around, I’m all in favor.” Lance joined my father, and they each pushed a different rusty hinge, both of which remained indifferent to their efforts.
“Yes! And common sense. Have you seen this week’s column?”
In truth, I had not. I usually scooped up the Free Press straight off the step to see what new advice Mama had to dispense, and which absurd questions she’d been mailed. But this week I had been so busy the newspaper sat neglected on the counter, where it had been moved in an effort to clear the overcrowded table to make room for everyone.
“You should,” Dad grunted from under the table. “Do you have anything to lubricate these?”
“Garage,” Lance said.
Both men came out from under the table, but neither left. Everyone seemed to be waiting for me to pick up the newspaper. It was out of its wrapper, and I realized belatedly Lance had read the column already, and Mama had known I had not when she asked. Instead of its usual polite square, “What’s Next Nora” was the headline story. Slow news week?
Dear Readers,
I have plenty of questions that want for answering, but all of them will have to wait. For once, I need your advice. I’ve gone and tripped on my own tongue, and I don’t know how to put it back in my mouth, so to speak. Recently, my middle-aged daughter and her husband told me they were adopting two children from the foster care system.
I should have been overjoyed! I’ve spent a great deal of time not harping on this particular child to give me grandbabies. Instead of cheering for such a wonderful revelation, I reacted as if the news they had brought me was
bad.
There isn’t any excuse for my behavior. I’ve been dreaming imaginary children for some time now, yet when they turned real, I reacted from a combination of gut fear and unreasonable prejudice. It was a full two days before my daughter’s words sank in. She was bringing me grandchildren.
My other daughter has children as well, but only two of them aren’t already teens. Here are little people, a pair of six-year-old twins, giving me back something I thought had almost passed forever. How could I not want them?
Yet that was exactly how I behaved. If my daughter had come to me pregnant, I’d have whooped and started planning the shower. But since she was adopting older children with special needs, I asked if she was out of her mind. Was it because these twins were six and not newborn? Because both children have autism? Was I asking such things because the children are biracial? Was I so prejudiced?
I don’t know why it took me so long to wrap my mind around that concept, but once I did, I felt like I’d swallowed a brick! I’ve broken my daughter’s heart, readers, and I need to know how to mend it. I’ve said words I want to swallow back. Please, help me make amends. Send your words to the usual address, but put the word “ADVICE” on the envelope.
Yours, Nora
By the time I finished, I had blown my nose at least three times on the tissue Lance provided. He was rereading over my shoulder with an arm around my waist. I didn’t cry, but it was largely because we had an audience. “Mama, has Margie been after you?”
“Yes. Her and my own conscience.”
“And don’t forget your Nana,” my father added.
Nana had been delighted by our news, and as she and Mama squabbled almost constantly anyway, I could imagine the sorts of things she would have said. “Then I guess I owe you an apology, too,” I said, “since I’m the one who accidentally sicced them both on you.”
“We deserved it,” said Daddy. “We both feel dreadful. We want to make it up to you.”
“You already have,” said Lance. “And I do not mean those cars.”
Daddy gave Lance a half-smile. “Let’s go get your oil. Your friends have something to tell us, and while you were reading they asked your mama and I to stay and hear.”
The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 12