Johnny Cakes (The Rachael O'Brien Chronicles)

by Paisley Ray

  “My internship. Schleck says she has some projects for me to tackle before the next semester starts.”

  Shaking his head, Tuke tsked. “Silvia’s going to wear herself thin if she doesn’t slow down.”

  Tuke on a first name basis with Schleck?

  His head bobbed. “The professor’s all work and no play. She needs to get out more, have a social life ‘n’ all.”

  A gusty wind made a mini-tornado in a corner near the sidewalk of leaves and some candy wrappers.

  “Tuke, this is Stone.”

  Reaching his hand to Stone, he said, “Didn’t know you had a special fella. Nice to meet you. Resting on his elbows, he warmed to the conversation as the temperature inside the car rapidly fell. “Any friend of Rachael’s is a friend of mine.”

  “I guess I should head in,” I said.

  “I’ll call you,” Stone said.

  Continuing his space invasion, Tuke cut my goodbye time short. I wasn’t looking forward to the sterile smell inside Schleck’s office, a mix of book binding glue and Pine Sol that clung to the hallways. No one entered or left the deserted building. In the rearview mirror, back a ways, I noticed a black Ford with its emergency flashers on. “What’s that truck doing back there?”

  Tuke unfastened himself from the driver’s door and took a step back. “Just when you think you can relax,” he mumbled. “Excuse me, folks.”

  Stone rolled his window up. Leaning in to kiss me goodbye, he said, “It’s good to know I’m not the only one keeping any eye on you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I like you and want to make sure you stay safe.”

  “Safe,” I began to protest.

  His head angled, he stiffened his mouth and rattled off, “The Gas N’Biscuit station blowing up, a snake in the house, roommates’ old boyfriends shooting at your sofa.”

  After opening the passenger door, I raised an index finger. “For the record, it wasn’t my sofa, it was Sheila’s.”

  He raised his hands upward and shook his head.

  I was glad I hadn’t mentioned Bubba’s target shooting at the Browns’ dock pilings in New Bern. “Not to worry. The roommates will be back in under a week. After working with the professor, the most exciting part of my day is which frozen entrée I choose to heat up for dinner.”

  Squeezing my thigh, his parting words were, “Take care of yourself.”

  Serenading Stone a last small wave, my inner vixen winked before I turned to walk inside.

  THE SORROW OF THE reality that Stone was gone, again, manifested in leaden feet that I dragged up three flights of stairs. Why couldn’t I find a boyfriend who lived on campus like Katie Lee, Francine, and Jet? Things in my life always had to be difficult. Did I do that to myself? Was I a self-saboteur?

  Outside of Schleck’s office, I straightened my shoulders and rubbed nonexistent creases off the thighs of my jeans. Inhaling a deep breath, I knocked.

  I heard paper being shuffled then the professor’s curt, “Come in.”

  Her office door was on a slow-close latch and behind my back it took its good ol’ time creaking toward the doorframe.

  “Rachael,” Schleck said from behind her desk, not bothering to look up. “I trust you had a relaxing time off?”

  Her office seemed more confined than usual. Professor Schleck had been busy ordering things, and stacks of thin packages leaned upright against the walls. Under her desk to the left of her feet, I noticed a medium sized carpetbag, except this one wasn’t beat up and didn’t house a rug. The Louis Vuitton brown purse had a brass clasp that gleamed and I swore I caught a waft of the premium leather. Sheila owned designer purses and I knew Louis Vuitton could set you back a few months car payment.

  “It’s been nice having time off,” I said not bothering to delve into the whole snake drama.

  She laid a chunky Montblanc pen down. GG had a similar one on her desk. “Did you do anything special with your family?”

  Personal questioning was very unSchleck. “No, not really.”

  “So, a quiet Christmas in Akron?”

  “Canton.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “No.”

  Her red-rimmed cat-eye specs framed suspicion. “Is something going on?”

  “No, it’s just that I didn’t go home. I, um, ended up at my roommate’s home in South Carolina.” I said, scolding myself for blabbing too much.

  “Well, that sounds lovely,” she said, finishing the sentence with a forced smile.

  “How about you? Nice holiday?”

  Pursing her lips, she removed her glasses and toyed with the ends. Lowering her voice, she said, “The Baron and I spent a romantic Christmas and New Year’s at Sugar Mountain in a chateau. He’s such a free spirit; we danced most nights until sunrise. Being a connoisseur, he always ordered fancy dishes: caviar, oysters, clams, lobster. The sweet and briny flavors made me felt like I’d been whisked off to some remote island.”

  “Baron?”

  “My boyfriend’s a Baron, but he doesn’t like to advertise it. Baron Hans von Richthofen.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Neither did I. He wanted to make sure we were meant to be together before he told me. He’s from a long line of nobility.”

  It took concerted effort to maintain a straight face and not giggle.

  Brushing a hand against her face, she continued, “He insisted on lavishing champagne and caviar on me.

  Where she’d find this dude? The theme from the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous drummed inside my head.

  “Such an old-fashioned romantic, he hid something special for me in the Chateau each of the twelve days of Christmas; oh, what I had to do to find some of them.”

  Sounded like the Baron had Christmas confused with Easter.

  “I just hated to come back to work.”

  Me, too.

  “He sounds special. When are you seeing him again?”

  She sighed. “Two weeks.”

  To my horror, Schleck and I had long-distance relationships in common. I wouldn’t be seeing Stone again until his lecture series started in February.

  “So what are all these packages? Are they from the Baron?”

  The professor cracked a devilish smile. “They’re part of a new business venture. I’ve found a good source for replications to aid in teaching art history. Some colleagues have placed orders so we need to inventory the parcels and direct them to the correct recipients.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot of packages. There are dozens of boxes.”

  “I’ve been overwhelmed. What started as a side pocket-money maker has spiraled.” She pushed a handwritten sheet of paper toward me. “The left column is the reproduction, the right column is the recipient. I need you to open the boxes, match the reproductions, create shipping labels, and then repackage them. Over here is a pile of UPS invoices to fill out. Another shipment is due in so you really need to get busy and clear these stacks out.”

  The company of Dad’s girlfriend, Trudy, suddenly became appealing. I was an idiot to pass up afternoons on a cruise ship playing bingo and shuffleboard for this. I should’ve made up an excuse. This wasn’t teaching me anything, and would only dry out my hands and split the corners of my fingernails. I eyeballed a stack. A few of the narrow boxes had been opened. “These have industrial size staples holding them shut. What am I supposed to open them with?”

  She pulled a pair of orange-handled scissors out from her drawer and for a moment I thought of Mom’s warning.

  “Now I have an appointment, and may or may not be back by five. Be sure and lock the door behind you when you leave.”

  Finish?

  “When do these need to go out?”

  “Today.”

  “Today?” I stuttered.

  “Projects always appear larger than they really are. I’m sure you’ll have everything ready in a couple of hours. A courier will come by around five-thirty. Make sure you keep the yellow copies and papercli
p them to the invoice register.”

  No way was I going to complete this project today.

  Slinging her designer brown leather bag on her shoulder, her eyes lingered downward a moment as she admired it, before brushing past me toward the door.

  In a momentary lapse of pissed off, I shot the bird to her back.

  She stopped dead in her tracks and I held my breath. “Rachael, do make sure all the packages are accounted for. Overhead projectors, pointers, furniture items have a way of going missing on a university campus. We don’t want any of these packages to walk away.”

  I didn’t immediately answer. My head was too busy fuming at the menial tasks she assigned me. This internship was a joke. It only showcased that the rumors of Schleck being a self-absorbed, narcissistic, raving bitch were true. What the Baron von Dufus saw in her, I couldn’t imagine.

  The professor had left me with a shitty job. I knew no magic fairy was going to suddenly appear, take sympathy on my irked ass, wave a wand, and complete the repackaging job for me. My volcanic instincts oozed and bubbled. Screw her. Walk away. Schleck could do the stupid mailing task and wreck her own nails. Yakking was a classic and not an excuse anyone, except parents, ever verified. I could pen her a note telling her that the contents of my stomach decorated the hallway bathroom shortly after she left. Better yet, I could leave and never again show my face. But red flags inside me began to flutter.

  It was my parents’ fault. They’d raised me with hefty doses of Catholic guilt. My grandmother GG, I’d noticed, leveraged the trait to her advantage. Why else did our shop refurbish all her collectables over the years when she and Dad weren’t on speaking terms? Depending on how it rears itself, it’s a gift or curse that is passed down from generation to generation. It spoke to me in its uppity all knowing voice: You’ll piss her off and things will only get worse. She’ll pull the scholarship fund if you nettle with her, which will make you financially dependent on your father, which will encourage him to coerce you to transfer to Xavier or somewhere closer to home so he can ‘keep an eye’ on you.

  The professor knew how to dampen my holiday. I grabbed the freaking scissors, the extra sheets of bubble wrap, the inventory list, and rolled Schleck’s desk chair toward the sideboard where a stack of boxes were piled like layers of a cake, except there was nothing sweet about this task.

  Inside the first box, I removed a painting the size of a shoebox lid. Painting was actually not the right word for what I was looking at. It was a still-life reprint of a Cezanne cherub, and the quality at best, was fair. Not the kind of thing I’d sell to colleagues even if it was a tool meant to be used in a classroom setting. Who’d buy this? The frame was worth more than the re-print. The cherub was even a little crooked. Whatever, I told myself.

  Glancing over the inventory lists, I checked it off and began typing the UPS label. There was just a name and an address in Virginia. No college was noted. I was so over Schleck. I packaged a crummy Cezanne and moved onto to a Delaunay then an Ernst. The reproductions weren’t labeled. Some had unrecognizable signatures. Good thing they were popular works I remembered from museum visits and textbooks. If I’d had to flip through art books, guessing who painted the various art, this task would’ve taken forever. Eventually I figured out that a ten-digit pencil number of the bottom left of the paper backing was listed on Schleck’s cheat sheet, and began quickly cross-referencing. I’d gotten into a rhythm, unwrapping the bottom of the boxes, and just slipping a corner out to check the reference number, and take a quick peek to make sure they matched. The scissors I used were dull and I wished I had the knife Nash had given me. I was only three-quarters of the way through when there was a knock on the door.

  I bit through a piece of packaging tape. It tasted like cardboard and managed to suck all the moisture where it touched my tongue. Checking my Swatch, I still had twenty minutes until the courier was due for the pick-up. He was just going to have to wait. “Come in.”

  Tuke held two paper cups of steaming, vending machine hot cocoa. “Rachael. Still hard at it?”

  “Are you checking up on me?”

  “No. Of course not. I was just working on some basement pipes and…” He handed me a flimsy paper cup that was scalding hot. “Missed her?”

  I nodded. “She was only here for five minutes.”

  Greedily, I took a sip and singed a quadrant of taste buds.

  “Watch out, it’s hot.”

  Tuke plonked his behind onto the corner of Schleck’s desk. “She’s like a racecar zipping around the track.”

  “Maybe throw some nails at her feet, that’d slow her down.”

  His face contorted.

  “Kidding!”

  “What ya doing here with all these boxes?”

  “Repacking posters and shipping them out.”

  “That seems like a funny sort of thing to be doing on break.”

  “Professor Schleck is a funny kind of lady.”

  He took a sip of his cocoa. “I’m getting the feeling you and the professor don’t see eye to eye.”

  The flimsy cup’s heat stung at the fresh paper cuts on my fingertips. “Listen, I think you’re a great guy.”

  “Awe, Rachael, I think you’re a great girl.”

  “Great. We’re both great. With that being said, the professor, well she’s the prickly type and you’re more the soft type.”

  “Like a pin and a cushion?” he grinned.

  That one raised my eyebrows. Analogies weren’t working here. “I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to spill it. I don’t think you and the professor are a good fit. I think she’s looking for a champagne lifestyle and you’re more of a soda fountain kind of guy.”

  Crap there I go again with analogies.

  Tuke analyzed the file cabinet that rested against a far wall for a few moments. “Rachael, I know you’re real book smart ‘n’ all, but me and Sylvia ... well, you’re reading this one all wrong.”

  My frustration with him not seeing the real her jostled my nerves. “She’s seeing someone. A Baron. It’s serious. They spent the holiday at Sugar Mountain. Together,” I blurted, and instantly regretted it.

  “Oh.” Moving toward the door, his voice rose an octave, “Well.” He cleared his throat. “I best be getting back to the pipes. They aren’t going to fix themselves.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said as his backside slipped out the door.

  He’d left his cocoa behind and I realized what a heartless ass I’d just been. Schleck’s negative energy reservoir overfloweth and had begun to permeate me. I checked my Swatch. Ten minutes till quitting time. Car-less, I’d be legging it home, and wanted to get to the house before the temperature dipped any lower. I began tearing open the last stack of boxes, checking off the inventory list, and quickly filling in the UPS address labels. There was another knock at the door, and I guessed Tuke had come to his senses and probably wanted to get Schleck off his chest.

  “It’s open.”

  The clank of a dolly’s wheels rattled. “Don’t you know, it’s not safe to leave doors unlocked. Might get company you’re not expecting.”

  It was a familiar slippery voice. “Nash.”

  “Hey there, Raz. What are you doing here?”

  “Me? How about you? Since when are you popping into offices on college campuses?”

  He leaned in to kiss my cheek. “Happy New Year, darlin’.”

  I pulled back. “Cut the bull. What’s going on?”

  His hat read, Package Plus Delivery. “I’m here for a pickup.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He plopped into Schleck’s chair and took it for a spin. “I’m sure I mentioned I’d started a business?”

  “You were serious?”

  “For a college girl, you have a limited vocabulary.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  He adjusted the face of his wristwatch. “UPS closes at six. If you’re not ready, we can reschedu
le for early morning. And since we’re friends and all, I’ll waive the additional fee.”

  I pointed. “Those are ready to go. I just need five more minutes.”

  Nash made three trips and by the time he returned, I had another pile waiting as I packaged the last one. “Is this business legit? I asked, “Or are you screwing around in my life?”

  He swung his hand onto his heart. “That hurts.”

  “Face it, Nash. You have a habit of messing things up.”

  “That was the old me. I’ve mended my ways. I’m a changed man.”

  I checked the digits on the back of the terrible-looking Renoir before taping the flap of the last package. “Letting a snake loose in our house was not funny.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Yeah Right.

  “Did you let it loose, then plan to shoot it to liven things up, or was it a fake all along?”

  He smirked.

  “Your practical jokes are so not funny. Do you want some kind of revenge? I mean is that why you’re carrying on with Sheila? To try and rattle Katie Lee?”

  “I thought you and I understood one another.”

  My eyes went big like those furry demons in the movie Gremlins, and I channeled the same eat-shit-and-die attitude.

  “You can take your own damn packages to UPS. I’m not sticking around to be insulted.”

  I caught his arm before it went out the door. “Wait, wait, wait. It’s been one of those days.”

  He nodded reluctant forgiveness.

  “What’d you mean, understand one another? Have you and Sheila ended things?”

  He sealed his thin lips tight.

  “I’m not asking to be nosey, just as self-preservation. You should’ve been there when Hugh ended his and Sheila’s thing, and before that Clay. She’s nuts. And if that’s what’s going down, I need to make plans for alternative living arrangements.”

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “Oh, so you are still seeing her.”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “Nash!”

  “Can I trust you?”

  “That depends. If it’s illegal, I don’t want to know.”

  He rested on a corner of the side table that had been cleared since he removed a stack of packages. “I’m gonna get her back.”