Catherine wound along the streets of town, by Cara’s school, through Drew’s neighborhood, pointing out the old and new parts, then heading toward the lake Nekoyah surrounded, one of ten thousand in the state, as Minnesotans were so proud to share that it was emblazoned on their license plates. “And this is where I stayed when I first came out here,” she said, pulling into the packed-snow parking lot of Rustic Haven Cabins, noting that not a single car was in residence now, much like when she’d first arrived in mid-spring. “Through the trees there’s a lake.” But there was no lake to see with the snow on top of it, just empty white space.
“Well, it certainly is… quaint,” her mother pointed out in a grim monotone.
This from the woman who had been planning to move to Wyoming and build a log cabin with her husband. Catherine had never been comfortable with that story of their retirement. She’d come to think it was all just a threat intended to induce her children into providing her with the grandchildren she deserved—a theory that seemed to be backed up by the fact that once their daughter-in-law got pregnant last year the plans were dropped completely.
“It’s perfect,” her father said from the backseat. “Next time we visit, we can make it a real vacation and stay in a cabin.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Catherine agreed, much too excitedly. Her mother could have her very own kitchen to run and place to clean and laundry to do rather than getting in the way at her place. Like this morning, after she made the breakfast and cleaned up after the breakfast, she commenced not just sweeping the floor, but instead Catherine found her on her hands and knees, spot mopping with a dishrag—at least that was what Elizabeth Hemmings called it. Catherine called it not leaving well enough alone.
“William, we are here to visit Catherine and her family, not vacation.”
“But it’s really wonderful here in the summer, and Fynn did all the renovations on the cabins. And you would enjoy the space and freedom to come and go,” Catherine noted, trying to sell it. “You know, to visit when you want and have time without all the madness of a house full of—”
“We always have that,” her mother reminded her. “Our life at home is a vacation. No rushing. No noise. Nothing hectic about it. It is kind of nice to be caught up in the middle of things.”
Catherine noticed the wistfulness in her mother’s words and was floored. Elizabeth Hemmings had always been so busy cleaning and straightening and shushing! around the house behind her family. Now she missed it?
“Is there good fishing here?” her dad asked, saving them from what was dangerously close to a “moment”.
“Fynn says so. He hasn’t gotten me out fishing.” She shook her head with force.
“You wouldn’t go with me either. ‘Eeew, Dad, that’s gross’.”
She vaguely remembered him trying to prod both her and Connor to go. A long way back. Then he just stopped trying, like he’d hung up his fishing pole and tackle for good.
“You know, it’s actually only just through the woods to Fynn’s place from here.” She said it without even thinking. Home. MY home. Our place. “He brought Cara out here over the summer. Said she had no problem putting the worms on hooks or cutting the fish off of them. Then they gutted what they caught and cooked it,” she sneered. “On a campfire. Just the two of them.” Catherine held her hands up, clean of any of that nastiness. Her fish threshold was sticks and tuna salad sandwiches.
“I never cleaned anything your father caught either,” her mother said.
“She wouldn’t touch my fish,” William added sadly. “And speaking of fish, I say we grab some lunch.”
“We still need to grocery shop,” she reminded him.
“We can do that after. You shouldn’t grocery shop on an empty stomach,” he admonished, sounding so much like his wife that Catherine snorted a laugh. “Say, why don’t we go to that diner I saw on Main Street?”
Her blood suddenly ran cold and she gripped the steering wheel tighter. “The what?” she asked dumbly.
“The one with the ‘Diner’ sign out front,” her father added helpfully.
“Oh, but there’s a nice Chinese place on the other side of town. A real sit-down with some great lunch specials.” Catherine tried to be helpful.
“Now why would I come to Minnesota for Chinese food?” he asked.
“Why would you come to Minnesota for a diner?” her mother challenged. “Pennsylvania is full of them, and you have probably gone to most of them.”
“Can’t blame a guy for knowing what he likes.”
“I can when you threaten to drive the country stopping in at every greasy spoon along the way,” Elizabeth sighed. “That is what his bucket list is.” She turned to Catherine for corroboration that the man they shared as wife and daughter was completely off his rocker. “The whole list. A countrywide road trip to every diner across the land. I have a bone to pick with that Guy Fieri and that show of his.”
“I’ll have you know that I had a fixation with diners long before he was even born. My one vice.”
Elizabeth Hemmings relented. “Take your father to the diner, Catherine. Might as well get it out of his system.” She gave a quick nod, trying to hide the blush that came over her at the thought of her mother finding out just how much this particular diner was caught in her system.
They were there in no time, heading for the door, Catherine feeling more like she was being led to her execution. The last thing she wanted was to have her parents meet Mel and vice versa.
“Do you come here often?” her mother asked as they sat down.
“Enough,” Catherine said tightly, unwilling to go further.
Elizabeth Hemmings searched through her purse for a spare napkin, a stash she kept in there to wipe down questionable places. She also had a stash of tissues, but never the twain shall meet, because a napkin was for napkin jobs and a tissue was for tissue purposes. She wiped at the tabletop as if she was being paid for the task.
“I wonder if their meatloaf is as good as Mom’s,” her father said in a charmingly blasphemous way. Because everyone knew that Elizabeth Hemmings was known for her meatloaf. And William Hemmings was a connoisseur of meatloaf. Which was probably why their marriage had withstood the test of time—a match made over meatloaf.
Catherine shrugged. Not her call or her calling.
“Well, that’s what I’m going to have,” he said.
“What? No fish?” his wife jabbed.
“Nope. Meatloaf, gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans. Good old-fashioned diner food.”
“Have what you want,” Elizabeth said demurely.
Catherine saw Mel approaching the table and wished she could crawl under it—not that there was a tablecloth under which to hide. This was so not what she needed right now.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” The voice, the tone, seemed almost cheerful, or at least smugly satisfied. “Miss NYC, a little early today, are we?”
“What is she talking about?” Elizabeth asked under her breath, touching Catherine’s arm like she feared they were being accosted by a crazy person.
“Good afternoon,” Catherine said to Mel, trying to sound like she was speaking to any random waitress she might come across. “We’d love some sodas around.” The hope, that Mel would be off doing that long enough for them to drop a few bucks on the table and hightail it out of there before things went south. At least now she had an excuse for leaving—the waitress was nuts.
“Actually, I would prefer an iced tea with lemon,” Elizabeth Hemmings said, naïve to the plan.
Mel nodded, divvying out menus, even one to Catherine, allowing her to maintain a bit of dignity.
“Are you going to need some time with those?” Mel asked, sounding almost understanding. Human even.
“I know what I want,” William Hemmings announced, pointing toward the spot in the menu. “One meatloaf platter.”
Another nod from Mel.
“Oh, and can I get that with extra gravy?”
“Certainly,” Mel said.
Certainly? But there were no extras. No substitutions. No changes. Ever.
Catherine stared up at the woman with wide and disbelieving eyes.
“What?” Mel demanded.
“But you—” She stopped herself. Going there meant going all the way there and she would be on the losing end.
Elizabeth Hemmings spoke up, “I think I will order… a… Reuben.”
Catherine choked on her own spit as her Pavlovian response kicked in.
“Really?” Mel drew out the word pointedly, making it seem to last forever, turning to Catherine. “And you?”
“I, uh… the same.” Like mother, like daughter.
“How original,” she noted, dotting forcefully at her pad when they both knew damn well there was no need to write it down. “Anything else”
“Nope. That’s it,” Catherine said curtly. Just the facts. Like Mel wanted. So just leave… for the love of God!
“That’s refreshing,” Mel sighed, walking off toward the kitchen and allowing Catherine the space to breathe again.
“What was that about?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t know,” she lied.
“I’m sure they expect better of their waitresses than snippiness.”
She shrugged.
“No wonder you don’t come here often.”
Catherine kept her eyes trained away from her mother, gazing out the front window at the pretty view of town. “Yeah, the food’s okay but the service is—”
“Here are your drinks.”
“—so fast,” she corrected her course quickly, hoping her Reuben didn’t get poisoned for the near slip.
Mel was in and out without a word, back behind the counter—a safe distance, or so Catherine thought.
“Hey, New York, I saw one of those little clown cars out and about the other day and I was sure you were up to something again,” Mel bellowed.
“Is she talking to us?” Elizabeth Hemmings hissed, clutching her purse tightly to her body like she feared she was in danger of a mugging.
Catherine turned several shades of pink. “Nobody knows. She’s the town nutcase. We can go somewhere else,” she whispered back. Please. The last thing she needed was for Mel to out her to her father, solving the puzzle of the Hemmings who’d been made “green VIP” by the rental company. Her house of cards was wavering.
“Does she really work here? Or does she just think she does?” her mother whispered in kind.
“It’s her place,” Catherine admitted.
“But you said she was crazy.”
“She’s a high-functioning nut job.”
-24-
She turned onto the road toward home, loaded down with her parents and the groceries her mother had insisted on buying. Breakfasts and lunches for at least a week, and some “just in case” dinner fixings, leaving them options beyond the ones her daughter may have already made. Basically, her mother had gone hog-wild in the supermarket. Give the woman a cart and she will fill it. And then there was her father, who wandered off out of sight every few minutes eventually coming back with some oddity he wanted to try—a gourmet soup, a sale on crab legs, beer from a local microbrewery, olive loaf from the deli like his mom used to buy, T.O.E. jam. They were like a couple of unruly kids and Catherine didn’t have the strength to stop them, which didn’t bode well for the coming months and years that she could very well have actual unruly kids to deal with at the grocery store.
Catherine stopped at the head of the driveway.
“Did we forget something?” her mother asked charitably, because Elizabeth Hemmings didn’t forget things; that was her daughter’s way.
“I hear Cara’s bus. We might as well wait and drive her down to the house.”
“Noodlebug is home already?” her father asked from the backseat. Like the hours hadn’t stretched into days on their journey.
“Right on time.”
When the bus came into view, Catherine heaved herself out of the car to wave at the driver so she wouldn’t think a stranger was lurking to pick Cara up. The doors opened and Cara burst out.
“Gramma Lizzy! Pop-Pop! I’m home! Miss me?” She bounced over to the car and hopped in the back.
What am I, chopped liver? Catherine prickled. That was what her grandmother would have said. She got back into the car and turned to find the passenger side empty. Her mother had moved to the backseat too, Cara now sandwiched between her grandparents. And I’m just the chauffeur.
Cara was already chattering up a storm, telling Gramma Lizzy and Pop-Pop all about gymnastics that she wanted to sign up for so, so badly because all her friends did gymnastics and they all got to tumble and flip, unlike stupid ballet that she’d wanted to sign up for so, so badly a few months ago but turned out was just a bunch of spinning. Would you jump off a bridge if all your friends were doing that? Catherine snickered to herself, thinking about her mother’s reaction to anything she’d wanted to do purely because her friends were.
“That sounds like a wonderful thing to try,” Elizabeth Hemmings gushed. “Doesn’t it, William?”
“What? Oh, yes.” Though Catherine was pretty certain he hadn’t a clue what he was agreeing to, just as certain as she was that her mother was an imposter. Nothing like the mother she’d grown up with who would have hammered home that gymnastics costs money and time and she better darn well want to actually learn how to tumble and flip if they were going to make the commitment. You have to want to learn for yourself, not just to be with your friends. None of that stuff mattered to this stranger in the backseat with her mother’s voice.
“And I don’t have to wear a bun like in ballet. I hate buns. Except for cinnamon buns. Those are great. Sometimes my mommy would make them for breakfast. But they’re soooo sticky….” Cara went on and on and Catherine glimpsed her mother in the rearview mirror, noting an unnervingly ghostly pallor on her face that she’d seen for a moment last night too. Maybe something was wrong with her. Maybe the whole reason they’d insisted on coming out to visit was because she has cancer—stage four, inoperable. Maybe this was goodbye. What if—
“Does Fynn shovel this whole thing by hand? Or does he have a snow blower?” her father asked.
Catherine shook the morbid thoughts free and shifted out of park, heading down the driveway. “If it’s only a few inches he just flattens out some wide grooves with his truck. If it’s a big snow he pulls out the snow blower.”
“I guess he’d be out here all day otherwise.”
“Pretty much.”
The house came into view and with it a box truck sitting out front.
Catherine groaned. Not Tara again.
As they drew closer, though, she could see it wasn’t a U-Haul. And she could also see men, a couple of them, struggling with a massive box the truck seemed to be birthing at this very moment, which made her stomach twitch as she thought about her own impending delivery.
Fynn appeared, gesturing and talking to the men. Maybe this was some kind of Christmas surprise for her or Cara that they weren’t supposed to see. As she braked to a stop in front of the porch steps and got out, Fynn came toward her. At the same time they said, “What the—” They stopped and stared at each other in disbelief.
“You don’t know what this is about either?” he asked.
She shook her head.
William Hemmings was walking around what turned out to be several large boxes, whistling his awe at the bounty as if looking over a brand new Cadillac. “How much did these babies set you back?” he asked, as the delivery men disrobed the boxes one by one. He stroked the handle of a commercial-grade stainless steel refrigerator with sub-zero freezer. “Must have been a pretty penny.”
“Oooh, neat!” Cara squealed, hopping out of the car and racing toward a shiny stainless steel gas range, or more accurately toward the box that had just come off of it. “Can I have that?” she asked the man who’d removed it.
>
“Sure you can.” He set it on the snow. “You might want to get it inside before it gets wet though.”
“Can I? Can I bring it inside for a fort?” she asked Fynn.
“I don’t see why not.”
“I’m going to need one of you to sign this,” another man said, holding out a clipboard.
“These are pretty… modern,” Elizabeth Hemmings noted, stepping around the full kitchen’s worth of appliances.
“Where did they come from, Fynn?” Catherine asked pointedly.
“KTL United.”
She gave him a look that said he was being unhelpful.
“That’s what it says here on the invoice.” He jabbed with the pen.
“Mr. Trager, where would you like us to put them?”
“Back on the truck,” Catherine said with certainty. “We didn’t order them. We aren’t paying—”
“There’s no charge, ma’am.”
That word would have sent her into a tailspin a year ago. When she was single and childless it was a personal affront masquerading as politeness. Now, it held no power anymore. “But how is that possible?” she asked.
“They’ve already been paid for.”
“By whom?” Elizabeth Hemmings spoke up.
The man shrugged. “All I know is I have to deliver them. So just point the way—”
“You can leave them in my shop,” Fynn said.
“We were contracted to deliver, set up, and take away.”
“You’re stealing our appliances?” Catherine was completely bewildered.
“Replacing. We have directions to donate them.”
“Directions from who?” Catherine blurted.
“Walter Cutter,” Fynn said, looking up from the invoice. “Who’s that?”
“How should I know?” she exclaimed.
“It says here, ‘I had a wonderful time. It was a beautiful wedding. You two deserve the best.’… Seems like this Walter guy thinks he knows us.”
Catherine was struck dumb.
“A bit late for a wedding gift, certainly,” Elizabeth piped up smartly, the self-appointed voice of etiquette.
“Is this the kind that can text you and tell you what you’re out of while you’re at the store?” her father questioned of the refrigerator. “Because I’ve seen those on TV. Crazy if you ask me. And a complete racket. The more they can make an appliance do, the more parts that can fail, the more money they can make on warranties and repairs. Same thing with cars. Give me a basic fridge/freezer any day, one that doesn’t know anything but to keep stuff cold. Simple as that. No TVs in the door panel or robotic arms to reach out and hand me what I’m looking for.”
2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) Page 14