-17-
“Can you believe that?” she growled, looking to Fynn for corroboration that what just happened was rude.
“Believe what?” he asked, like there was nothing hinky on his radar at all.
“That they went off like that ‘to get settled’. Who does that?” She’d wiped her slate clean for the day, like a proper hostess, there for her guests. Nothing to do. Nowhere to be. “She’s probably in there right now bouncing a quarter off of the bed to check my hospital corners.”
“What?” Fynn’s face was screwed up in confusion.
“That’s what people do.”
“People?” Dubious.
“The pros. And don’t think I didn’t see the way my mother looked at the stack of sheets in the linen closet. My flat sheets aren’t folded into perfect rectangles, and don’t get me started on the fitted nightmare in there.
“Paranoia will destroy you…. You know that, right?”
Catherine groaned.
“They’re just tired. It was a long trip. Let them get settled or decompress or rest or whatever. Not everyone is out to get you.”
“Come on, I’ve made that trip over and over and I never once did that to you.”
“That’s because you were always throwing yourself at me the moment you got here. And remember, we took a lot of naked naps afterward so obviously you also needed your rest.”
She rolled her eyes. “All I’m saying is this is going to be the longest two weeks ever if she can’t just sit and talk to me about… anything. This house isn’t big enough for the two of us to avoid each other. We have to have something in common.”
“Don’t get all riled up. They’ve been here all of twenty minutes.”
“I’m not getting riled up. I am just pointing out a fact. Like the fact that she didn’t even ask about me or the baby. Didn’t even want to know anything at all.”
“I thought you were going to spit nails if she even said one word.”
“I never said that.”
“I think your exact words were, ‘You’re going to have to hold me back, Fynn, or so help me I’ll spit nails if she says anything about how big I’ve gotten—’”
“That’s quite enough out of you.” Firm. But she was stunned because if that was what she’d said, “spit nails”, and she wasn’t conceding to it just yet, not without concrete evidence (a tape, something), then it was happening already. Her mother had planted all kinds of things deep in her subconscious and they were going to come to the surface more and more.
He sighed lightly. “Listen, I have some work to do.”
“You would,” she grumbled.
“Wow, you are really being something else.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Something other than the woman I love and married and—”
That did it. The tears started burning in her eyes. She needed Fynn to be on her side. It was the two of them against her parents. And he didn’t get it.
“Like I said, I have some work to do. If I do it now, I’ll be around when everyone’s together. A buffer for you,” he acquiesced.
“But what am I supposed to do? I have been so busy getting ready for this moment; now it’s here and I can’t just sit and twiddle my thumbs.”
“Why don’t you rest. Lie down and take a nap.” Words he called back to her as he was already halfway out the door to the garage.
“I’m not tired,” she humphed. And she wasn’t. She was hungry. Reuben hungry. No wonder, it was just about that time. She would usually be making her way to the diner, enjoying her afternoon snack, then heading home for Cara. Could she actually leave? Walk out? Would that be any ruder than, say, getting settled in?
She couldn’t believe that in the blink of an eye everyone had left her behind. She flopped onto the couch, staring at the tree and the stockings, noting what a difference a year could make. It wasn’t just her and Fynn anymore, and it wouldn’t be for at least eighteen years to come. Not that their life together had ever really been about just them. From the beginning, Cara had been considered in every decision they’d made. They’d always been a party of two-plus. Encompassing her in their love and life was tantamount and now they would add another little girl to the mix. Unplanned? Yes. But not thoughtless.
She rubbed her belly, caressing the mound that was soon enough going to be a living and breathing person in her arms. Eve. It was exciting and terrifying all at once. Two little girls growing up in this wonderful home that she and Fynn would fill with love and life. Maybe even another baby someday.
“Were you resting?”
Catherine startled, sitting up to attention as her mother came back in the room. “No. I was just taking a… moment.”
“Your father is napping, though he would never admit it. Resting his eyes,” she snickered.
“Of course,” Catherine smiled. As far as William Hemmings was concerned, that was all he ever did. She was surprised he’d ever slept a wink his entire life.
“Are you getting enough sleep?” her mother asked.
“Of course.” Why? Do I look like hell, Mom? Bags under my eyes? Dark circles?
“Because you do realize that once the baby comes, that is all out the window. You need to store up some energy if you can.”
“It’s not like collecting nuts for the winter,” Catherine joked.
“You need to sleep whenever you can. At least you will have Cara at school during the day, so whenever the baby sleeps, you need to sleep.”
“I’m sure that I’ll manage,” she bristled slightly, still sensitive to the all-knowing tone her mother used best.
“But, that is just some old advice that my mother gave me that I didn’t listen much to either. Not until Josey. By then, with three of you, I couldn’t even try to fight it. I was exhausted.”
Catherine softened her heart just a little.
“And I was still in my twenties at the time.”
Wow, she hadn’t even heard her mother unsheathe her sword before it was plunged right into her gooey center, just missing Eve and her vital organs.
“But all of you women today are having children later.”
Damn straight we are. Lacey is over thirty too and you think she’s the cat’s pajamas.
“I don’t know how you all do it.”
The medical community doesn’t have a problem with it, or God for that matter, so what Elizabeth Hemmings thinks matters not one little bit.
“I guess there are tradeoffs.” Elizabeth ran her hand surreptitiously along the mantle like she wasn’t doing a dust check but rather admiring the wood, even though they both knew well enough what was going on.
Forget your white glove, Mom?
Her mother suddenly turned to her. “So, your father and I want to take you all out to dinner. Make it easy. Have a nice outing. It’s been a busy day and nobody should have to be caught up in the kitchen—”
“I already had plans for dinner.”
“You did?” Elizabeth Hemmings seemed genuinely surprised that her daughter knew what plans were.
“Yes, I did.” She wished that at this point she could unleash some fabulous seven-course meal rather than takeout pizza. Damn you, Catherine Marie, for spending the last eight months eating and growing and not getting a season pass for every cooking show on TV. She could have learned how to make something. But she’d taken the path of least resistance, relying heavily on the fact that Fynn and Cara didn’t mind that her culinary tricks were limited to things that were precooked, frozen, ready-to-heat.
“Well, isn’t that… nice,” her mother said, pausing just enough to get her point across that it wasn’t exactly her idea of ideal.
But life is real, not ideal, Mother.
-18-
“Pizza? In Minnesota?” William Hemmings scoffed upon hearing the dinner menu.
“It’s pretty good, Dad.”
“Some guy from New York owns the place,” Fynn offered. “As one Italian in a city full of Italians he was limitin
g his profit share, but here—no competition.”
Her father raised an eyebrow, a nice capitalist success story speaking to his sensibilities. Catherine didn’t even know if it was the real story about Frank’s pizza—not Franco’s or Luigi’s or Sal’s—but it sounded good. And she wasn’t lying about the taste; it was pretty close to home. Certainly better than any of the chains.
“It’s Cara’s favorite,” she added to further the cause.
“I love it!” Cara jumped up and down, willingly playing the pawn.
“Well, how could I argue with a pro?” William chuckled with grandfatherly good humor, like her opinion, six years in the making, was golden.
“I think it sounds like a wonderful idea,” her mother added. Nice and agreeable.
Too agreeable.
Wonderful as in wonderful or wonderful as in thank-god-we-don’t-have-to-eat-what-our-daughter-cooks? Catherine’s cynicism was warranted considering she didn’t know that she had seen her mother eat pizza more than a handful of times in her life. Meaning five. Five times. Each of those times with a fork and knife for that matter because she didn’t like to get her hands messy—the same hands that had been up a turkey’s ass over and over through the years, pulling out innards and shoving in mountains of stuffing. It seemed that pizza ranked higher than guts on the eew scale.
At least the pizza would be fresh, unlike anything her daughter would be serving. That was probably what she was thinking when she said “wonderful”. Catherine was quite sure she’d heard her mother open the freezer door when she was resting on the couch. Not just a blip either, like she accidentally did it, but a full-on stock-taking perusal. You could tell a lot about a woman from the state of her freezer, and hers said nothing about taste or nutrition.
This was the part about having company that no one covered in all those homey magazines. She’d bought up a whole shelf of them and studied them like she was studying for her SATs. It seemed that there was a widely held assumption that anyone who had visitors over would already know a certain basic level of cooking and entertaining. The articles that assured her she would learn how to “Entertain in Thirty Minutes or Less” and “Create Company Comforts” and “Give Your Guests a Gouda Time” were all directed toward people entertaining better. What about some sort of remedial class? For people who hadn’t so much invited their guests but had guests thrust upon them through a mix of Catholic guilt and obligation? Where were those how-tos?
Catherine had considered bringing in outside help, begging Drew for her services. Her sister-in-law had a knack for precooking and freezing family-size dinners en masse. She had seen the mythical event before: three different kinds of meatloaf in the oven with a full roasting pan of chicken, chili simmering on the stovetop along with taco meat and the beginnings of goulash, and in the slow cooker, a pile of chops slathered in barbeque. Drew was a machine. And Catherine’s strong suit was reheating. A win-win. But her mother would definitely smell a rat—a perfectly cooked and seasoned rat.
“Hey, Pop-Pop, guess what?” Cara asked.
“What, noodlebug?”
“I play a mean game of Chutes and Ladders. I beat Cat all the time. And my stuffed animals, too.”
“Whoa, those’re some serious stats,” he said, wiping his brow dramatically.
“Why don’t you show Pop-Pop what you’ve got while I go pick up the pizza,” Fynn offered.
“I’ll get the pizza,” Catherine countered, trying to keep the edge out of her voice, though judging from the way Fynn reared back a little in response, her words hit like a shockwave.
The standoff lasted all of two seconds, when her mother said, “So long as you two have that settled, I will just whip up a salad to round out the meal.”
It was classic Elizabeth Hemmings, passive-aggressively making a statement that vegetables should always be served with a proper dinner. Catherine waffled for just a moment before conceding to Fynn’s pronouncement. “Oh, right, I was planning to make a salad,” she said, hating that her mother had beat her to the punch. She’d bought the fixings and everything, and now it sounded like she was only doing it because her mother had pointed out the shortcoming.
“Would you like some help with that?” her mother offered.
“There isn’t really that much to do, Mom. I can handle it.”
“She hardly ever cuts herself anymore,” Fynn quipped.
Catherine shot him a look that could kill as he came over and kissed her on the forehead. That kind of joking was fine between them, but in front of her mother?
“So long as she doesn’t bleed on the food,” her father chimed in from the other room.
“Cool!” Cara exclaimed. About the game they were playing or the bloody vegetables—there was no telling.
“Anything else I can do?” Elizabeth asked as Fynn slipped out the door.
“Really, I have it under control. Why don’t you play with Cara and Dad?”
“If that is what you prefer.” In a tone that said it was a shame to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Cara would love it if you would play,” Catherine pointed out, making it less about her and more about the little girl who was thrilled to have Gramma Lizzy and Pop-Pop here.
-19-
Catherine had never eaten and started clearing plates so fast. Usually she liked to languish a little, let the digestion process start before hopping up and turning to. But that was out the window with Elizabeth Hemmings at the table. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to get up first. Because that was what her mother did. At some arbitrary point she would simply stand up, possibly in the middle of a conversation or maybe while the rest of the table was still mid-bite. The woman took pride in determining the end of a meal; the only warning to others, the time it took her to clear her own plate to the kitchen sink. Growing up, Catherine had spent many of those seconds shoveling the last forkfuls into her mouth on top of each other with one hand and grabbing one last dinner roll in the clutches of her other, where it was safe from clearing. And that, my friends, was why she had a vacuum-like ability to suck down a meal to this day. It was about survival in the Hemmings household.
But tonight she won. First up and first to start to clean up, edging her mother out in a race to the sink that was definitely awkward, bumping her out of the way in a play that she pawned off as clumsy, what with her sizeable girth and lifelong predisposition—a strong case. Catherine filled the dishwasher quickly and efficiently, a show of just how well she knew her way around that chore, then went to work washing the bulkier pieces by hand.
“Let me help,” her mother said, hovering nearby, grabbing a dishtowel for the second time in just a few short hours of arriving.
“Mom, it’s only a few things.” Just like earlier, she wanted to add. “No need to—”
“Idle hands, Catherine Marie,” Elizabeth Hemmings said with a tsk-tsk, not bothering to finish her diatribe about idle minds as she snatched up the salad bowl her daughter had just released to the drying rack. She whipped the dishtowel expertly around the bowl and reached for the nearest cabinet door, pulling it open to see if it went there.
Catherine’s breath caught as her mother zeroed in on the plastics cabinet, thankful that she hadn’t let Fynn get in her head where her mother still had a strong hold. This moment justified everything she’d done in preparing for her parents’ arrival.
“Where do you keep your serving bowls?” Elizabeth Hemmings asked simply—no hitch, no sigh, no sharp intake of shock at what she had just seen.
Tupperware test: passed.
Catherine let out the breath she’d been holding and had to consciously stop herself from doing a fist pump in the air or a victory lap around the island, which of course would have been met with bewildered innocence on her mother’s part, like she had never lived a judgmental day in her life and why on earth would she care about the state of her daughter’s plastic containers.
The phone rang and Catherine wiped her wet soapy hands on her belly without think
ing, not that it wasn’t already wet from being pressed up against the counter while she washed. She caught her mother’s glance of disapproval that a dishtowel had not been employed for the purpose. If you weren’t using the dishtowel at this very moment, I would have had something proper to dry my hands on. Okay, so there was another towel still on its matching hook, plus there was a drawer full of them at arm’s length. But that was beside the point.
Catherine ignored the look and went for the phone on the wall, the cord keeping her tethered too far from the sink. An impatient, “Hello?”
“Hello, Mrs. Trager?”
Ugh. She should have used the other phone. At least then she could have checked the caller ID. This was not a good time. Trying to sound happy-go-lucky, “Mrs. Karnes! How nice to hear from you.” The proper words and tone from Elizabeth Hemmings’ school of phone etiquette, while the founder herself was right there in the room hearing every word.
“Mrs. Trager, of course you know that the Snow Party is coming up next week, and that is the biggest event of the year for the class.” Right down to business, no niceties to dispense, Catherine noted.
“I do, yes,” she agreed studiously, the gravity of the situation not lost on her. She knew the score: one hundred points for Sophie Watts and about one and a half for Catherine Trager.
“We had a wonderful success with the Christmas tree decorating. Did you see the class tree over at Werner’s?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Didn’t Sophie do a wonderful job with the kids? The ornaments were all so—”
“Elementary.” The word just came out, blurted like an ugly little yawn-burp. Nothing she could do about it once her mouth popped open. But it was true (a commandment, she’d like to add). The tree came in fifth. Out of six grades. The fifth graders came in first, the fourth in second, and so forth down the line. Just like Sophie Watts intended. Each class did their time in all the places. William Hemmings would be disgusted. A rigged, feel-good competition. Charmin-soft kids.
2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) Page 11