“Yup. I was on my way to where I’m going and you guys were right here, so I thought I should stop,” she babbled, coming down off the porch. “Not that a drop-in of such distance is appropriate,” she added, deferring to Elizabeth Hemmings.
“What a nice surprise,” Elizabeth said without a hitch, when there should have been hitches all over the place. Tara was the one responsible for most of what went wrong when it came to her daughter’s life. The instigator of madness, standing before her.
“Get real,” Catherine humphed under her breath.
Elizabeth Hemmings had obviously not lost any of her superpower hearing and gave her daughter a look that warned she would send her to her room. Not that she could possibly enforce such a punishment at this stage of the game.
“Dad, why don’t I help you with those,” Fynn said, heading for the trunk where William was emptying out their bags.
“So, Mom, I hope you had a nice, easy trip.” Catherine’s words were stilted as she fought to swallow the frustration of being made to feel like a child all over again.
“It was a plane ride,” her father shrugged, like there was nothing that could be done about that mode of transport. “And then, it was like pulling teeth to get a decent car.”
“It seems you procured a fine specimen,” Fynn offered, taking a nice slow walk around the Buick to show his appreciation, gaining even more points with his father-in-law.
William nodded toward Fynn. “See, Elizabeth, that’s what I’m saying.”
“I just didn’t see the big deal. It’s a rental. It isn’t a life choice that will define you forever,” she retorted.
“You aren’t going to catch me in one of those sardine cans. Not even for a minute. No way. I could feel my balls receding at the thought.”
“William!” Elizabeth screeched.
Catherine’s eyes bugged out. That was not the father she remembered.
“I’m serious.” He turned to Fynn. “The woman at the rental counter was a complete idiot. I gave her my name for my reservation and she says, ‘Hemmings? You’ve been upgraded to VIP in our green rental program.’ So I say, ‘What the hell is that?’ and she says, ‘Prime rentals on our electric fleet.’ So I ask her, ‘You have a fleet of electric cars?’ You know, because I want to know if I’ve just walked into hell on earth. Well, turns out they only have one car so far, but they are damn proud of it. Worse yet, somebody named Hemmings of all things is their only taker, and they thought I was him. As a repeat electric customer, the guy gets ‘priority’ status. Positive reinforcement, I guess. Everyone gets a medal; we’re all winners here. God, since when is Minnesota the new land of fruits and nuts? I thought we had lo about a couple thousand miles between us and them.”
Catherine cringed.
“I guess they’re a little bit of everywhere now,” Fynn said, winking at her.
“Oh, you mean Cat’s rental—”
Catherine elbowed Tara in the ribs to cut her off before she had to explain her use of a Smart car—not just once, but twice—to her father, who would be appalled to learn that the idiot behind that counter was speaking of his own daughter, Catherine Marie Hemmings, who had been raised better than that.
“So, Mom, Dad, you had a long trip, I’m sure you would like to come in,” she said, overly welcoming, trying to drown out Tara’s protestations over the physical assault. Suddenly having her mother traipse through her marital home and see where she missed a spot while dusting was better than being outed as the electric car VIP of Minnesota.
“You know, when you add together all the time: driving to the airport, getting there early to go through security, waiting to board, getting on the plane, taking off, flying, landing, going through baggage claim, getting the rental, getting to the rental, and driving here, we probably should have just driven out.”
“Oh, William, don’t be such a crank,” Elizabeth chided.
“I’m just speaking the truth. It’s almost the same amount of time when you really look at it.”
“And only you would really look at it,” she countered.
“Could have saved ourselves an arm and a leg if we only had to pay for gas,” he grumbled, following his wife to the front steps, unwilling to let it go without his point being made.
She shook her head. “That’s a lot of driving for one day.”
“There’re two of us,” he pointed out. Not that her mother ever drove when her father was in the car.
“Will you be joining us?” Elizabeth Hemmings asked Tara.
“No. She was just on her way out, actually,” Catherine prodded, eyeing her friend, begging her to get on the same page.
“Yes, I was on my way out. Don’t let me get in your way.” Robotic. Like she was reading from a cue card, and poorly.
“I’ll call you,” Catherine mouthed to her friend, crossing her heart like kids used to do.
-16-
“What on earth was that about?” Fynn whispered as they carried her parents’ bags to the guest room while William and Elizabeth Hemmings busied themselves with shrugging out of their winter gear and hanging it in the coat closet—her mother probably organizing the whole coat closet while she was in there. Not that Catherine hadn’t already torn apart and reorganized the closet, like she had done to every closet, though unlikely up to Elizabeth Hemmings’ standard.
“How should I know?”
“You knew nothing about it?”
“Do you think I knew anything?”
He ceded her point that she’d been a banshee about anyone being in the house or at the house or around the house for the weeks leading up to today, coming after both Fynn and Cara with a wet dishrag, following behind them with the vacuum, dusting underneath them, sweeping around them, and generally doing her best impression of her own mother in an exhausting attempt to prove she was running a lovely home here. Of course she wouldn’t have accepted Tara coming and messing everything up.
“And what’s with the U-Haul?”
“It’s Tara. It could be anything. Maybe she was evicted. Maybe she thinks she can rent it and use it as a mobile home, drive the country and finish out her PINK list.”
“Her what?”
“Nothing.” Catherine waved it off. She’d never shared that little gem with him—that her friend was a whore with a sex bucket list.
“Was she planning on moving in? Because we already almost have two kids and she isn’t the best influence on Cara,” Fynn asserted.
A jolt of protectiveness ran through her. “Tara needs to watch her mouth and tone it down, but Cara adores her and they get along famously.”
“That’s because they’re at about the same intellectual level.”
Catherine cringed even though she had thought as much herself at times. It wasn’t Tara’s intelligence, though; it was her spontaneity and verve that was childlike. She wasn’t jaded. She truly believed she could do anything she wanted to do. It was kind of endearing at the same time it was completely unnerving and overwhelming and sometimes downright impossible to be around.
“Have you heard anything from Jason recently?” she asked, setting the bags she’d carried in the corner while Fynn swung the others onto the bed.
“No, why?”
“Because they aren’t seeing each other anymore.”
“No surprise there.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s Tara.” Blunt.
“So, whose palm do I have to grease to get a tour around here?” William Hemmings bellowed from the other room.
“I think he means you,” Catherine said.
As they headed down the hall and out into the family room, they found her parents wandering the space, looking at this or that, though her mother was more than likely doing less perusing than inspecting.
“Nice place,” William said to Fynn. “You build it yourself?”
“The house? No. I stick to building on a smaller scale. I actually bought it from the original owner. Put in some of my own woodwork here and the
re, though.”
“Those built-ins next to the fireplace are beauties. Your work?”
“Actually, yes. I added them and changed out the mantel too.”
“Reclaimed?”
Fynn smiled. “It is. From an old barn.”
Fast friends. Men’s men. Though William Hemmings was more of a putzer than builder, working on odds and ends and fixing this and that.
Catherine turned to her mom who was fixated on the Christmas tree in the corner. Dammit! She’d forgotten to plug in the lights. Now, instead of providing a festive glow, the tree looked overly busy and sad standing there. And the scented candles for a homey vibe were lined up on the table, unlit. Tara had distracted her from such finishing touches.
“So, Catherine, there is little of you around here.” Her mother scanned the walls and shelves.
“I still have a lot of boxes in the attic. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with the place, and now that I’m pregnant, I figured I should hold off on that stuff until after the baby is born.”
Her mother cocked her head just so, showing her opinion of that choice. “You might have to wait until after the baby goes off to school then,” her mother noted. “Life is about to get real.”
“Not ideal,” Catherine said under her breath, catching Fynn’s slight shake of his head at her crossing the polite line.
“No, it is not,” her mother agreed, obviously deciding to embrace instead of reprimand the comment. “Babies do not tend to come into the world easy.”
“If you are talking about labor, Mom, Fynn and I took a class.”
“I am talking about the fact that it takes a while to get your feet back under you with all the changes they bring.”
“And by a while, you mean years? Because Lacey never took a break from anything. She’s working and juggling it all. And Georgia’s doing just fine too. Is this your advice for everyone or just me?” Polite was long gone now.
“How is Georgia anyway?” her mother asked, refusing to engage in the rest.
“She’s doing fine—“—even though she’s become a total bitch. Catherine didn’t want to discuss Georgia. Didn’t want to talk about her being one of those mothers who judged the rest of the mothers out there for every shortcoming. Besides, Elizabeth Hemmings would probably side with Georgia.
As a distraction, Catherine rushed over to the tree to plug in the lights, then shuffled to each lamp in the room to turn on an ambient glow before shutting off the overhead that was really only good for conducting surgery. There, this is what the room was supposed to look like. The perfect family room for a perfect family Christmas.
“Well that is unique,” her mother said tightly.
“The purple was Cara’s idea,” she explained, defusing her mother before she could get started.
“No, it is… nice,” Elizabeth choked out, fighting with her personal demons between being polite to her hostess and teaching her daughter what was proper in celebrating Christ’s birth.
“Whoa, Elizabeth, you have got to come see this beauty,” William Hemmings said from the kitchen.
Her mother hurried toward the sound of her husband’s voice, seeming to be relieved to have something else to focus her attention on.
“Avocado green. Corded. And goddamned rotary at that!”
“William! What has gotten into you?” Elizabeth reprimanded.
“This is a prime piece of telephone equipment.” He picked the receiver off the wall as if he were about to make a call. “All metal insides?” he prompted Fynn.
“It’s completely original. Guy who used to live here put it in. I’m surprised he left it behind,” Fynn said proudly, knowing that Catherine had been dying for him to get rid of the hideous old thing.
William nodded appreciatively. “You could maim a guy with a phone like this, not like all that modern namby-pamby stuff that would only do serious damage if dropped from the Empire State building. No, you could tear this guy off the wall and give an intruder a good wallop. Something that would put him out cold until the police arrived. No need to shoot him when you have a phone like this in the house.”
“That’s nice, dear,” Elizabeth said, then turned to Catherine under her breath, “It’s called humoring him.” And there it was: she was finally part of the wives’ club. Included.
But then her mother turned into her mother all over again, wasting no time looking around the kitchen and taking in the scenery on her first voyage in there, instead heading straight for the hooks that held Catherine’s freshly washed dishtowels, commandeering one. She almost yelled, Drop it and step away from the dishes! She’d forgotten to run the dishwasher the night before and it was whirring away now, but she’d done the breakfast dishes by hand and left them air-drying on the rack next to the sink when Tara showed up. It was like her mother couldn’t help herself, or more like she was helping herself. A wet dish was a dish in need. And a dishtowel was control and security in terry cloth form. She wouldn’t be surprised to find her mother had packed dishtowels in her carry-on luggage just in case her daughter was too stupid to have any of her own, and further, the airline was too stupid to keep track of her luggage. Some people needed guns or crosses or garlic wreaths around their necks. Her mother only needed a dishtowel to protect her from bad guys or bad news or monsters or whathaveyou.
It made her ass twitch. And she had two weeks of this ahead.
“You don’t have to do that, Mom,” she said, holding back the rest.
“Nonsense, it’s just a few things.”
Exactly.
That was the difference between them right there. It was a few things that were out of the way and could dry on their own, versus it’s just a few things that can easily be dried in no time. Irreconcilable differences in their views of the world.
When she finished what needed finishing, and Catherine stepped in to put the dishes away before her mother started opening and closing cabinets of her own accord, and in doing so indirectly pointing out where things should be, her mother tossed the towel over her shoulder like she owned it. “See, only took a moment and now it’s done.” Catherine bit her lip, making a mental note to buy her mother dishtowels for Christmas—a thoughtful, practical, and pointed gift.
“It is just so nice to finally be able to picture where you are living. It truly is lovely here,” her mother said, as they finished up the tour. There wasn’t much Elizabeth Hemmings could say about the four-dormer Cape Cod. A nice, traditional home on a pretty piece of land. Family room—check. Dining room—check. Kitchen—check. Three bedrooms and two full baths upstairs—check. Nice first-floor guest bedroom and private bath downstairs, a space that Fynn also used as his office for billing and paperwork that was all closed up tight in a rolltop desk like the old-fashioned guy he was.
So instead her mother focused on the petty details. “You do realize you have a mouse in the house?” she pointed out in Cara’s room. Elizabeth Hemmings was not a pet person at all, let alone a mouse. In fact, she was the first to bait traps and set them in the bread drawer each fall at home when a field mouse or two would inevitably find their way into her kitchen. “And what is that hanging from his cage?” she asked. “A stocking, because he can’t come out for Christmas,” Catherine explained. See, I have rules, Mom.
In the family room, her mother stopped to straighten pillows on the couch, not because she sat down and messed up those pillows, but because tweaking was one of her specialties. And in the linen closet, she procured her own bath towels since she noticed her daughter had forgotten to put some out after cleaning the guest bathroom one final time this morning. She also offered to change the sheets on the guest bed, in her own way of asking if they needed changing—because a proper hostess always provides clean sheets for her guests. But of course Catherine knew that and had even taken perfectly clean sheets out of the closet and tumbled them in the dryer with a dryer sheet in order to make them smell fresh as fresh could be. Not that she would ever get recognition for it.
“A
re you two hungry? I can make lunch,” Catherine offered—because a proper hostess always offers her guests something to eat or drink, and right now it was one in the afternoon, ergo lunch.
“We ate on the road to save you the trouble,” her mother said dismissively.
Catherine was pretty certain it was really, to avoid your cooking. And even though she should have been happy that it meant one less meal to serve, the problem was it was a meal she could actually handle. Deli sandwiches. Nothing to burn or overcook or undercook or otherwise screw up.
“What’s the plan for dinner?” her father asked. “One thing’s for certain, that tuna melt I had isn’t going to hold me over forever.”
“Oh William, you can’t possibly already be thinking about dinner.”
“What else does an old man have to keep him going but a good meal?”
“We are not here for them to cook and entertain us,” her mother said. Translation: remember this is your daughter we’re talking about.
Then, as if she hadn’t just said something completely crappy, she turned to Catherine and asked, “So, when will Cara be getting home?”
“Yeah, where is that little firecracker?” her father seconded.
“The bus comes through in a couple of hours.”
“Where’s her bus stop? Far?” her mother wanted to know.
“At the end of the driveway.”
“That’s nice. Although it would be nice if you could see it from the house.”
“It would. But one of us takes her up there in the morning and goes to meet her in the afternoon. Plus, there’s Magnus. He even senses the bus and he is off like a shot. Poor guy gets tricked by the UPS truck all the time.”
Magnus’s collar jingled as he raised his head to acknowledge he was being talked about, hoping it would be followed by one of the words he knew like dinner, or walk, or treat. When none of those words got uttered, he laid his head back down with a thump on the wood floor.
“Well, I think that your dad and I will go and get settled in.”
“Oh… yes… feel free to… get settled,” Catherine said as her mother shuttled her father out of the room.
2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) Page 10