Tee winced. “Does that hurt your feelings?”
I placed the scraper’s blade at the edge of the cabinet and applied even pressure, pushing away a long, thick ribbon of softened paint, scraping all the way to the opposite end of the door. Then, I wiped the gummy paint from my scraper and applied the heat gun to the next edge.
“Dempsey?”
“I know my dad loves me,” I said finally. “He’s just not very demonstrative with me. Not the way he is with the twins. And I’m okay with that. I think he regrets that he didn’t have a closer relationship with me, and maybe, with Gavin and Garrett, he thinks he’s getting a second chance at being a better parent. Or a different one, anyway.”
“That’s a remarkably mature attitude to take,” Tee said.
I laughed ruefully. “Well, maybe I just talk a good game. Things aren’t all that rosy between my dad and me right now.”
“Why’s that?”
“We had a fight,” I admitted. “He called me up this morning, after that reporter called him about the story in the Post. He was absolutely livid that I’d dragged his good name through the mud.”
“Did you tell him your side of the story?” Tee asked.
“I tried. He didn’t really want to hear.”
“I’m sorry,” Tee said. He stared down at the cupboard door. He’d only managed to scrape away a few inches of the paint.
“Do you realize what a great dad you have?” I asked. “I really envy the relationship you guys have.”
“We weren’t always this tight,” Tee said. “I was your typical pain-in-the-ass teenager. Dad rode me really hard—he didn’t like my friends, my grades, or most of my choices. When I went away to college, I swore I’d never be anything like my old man. I was never going to be a lawyer like him, and I definitely was never coming back to live in a backwater like Guthrie.”
“You’d never know that now. Anybody can see that he adores you, and is insanely proud that you’re his son. What changed things?”
“My mom got sick,” he said. “And when it was clear that she wasn’t going to get any better, I guess Dad and I both decided our differences were pretty petty. Going into practice with him was sort of a last gift to Mom.”
“That’s so sweet,” I said, blinking away sudden tears.
“Well, don’t go getting all sloppy on me,” Tee said. “I think you have a pretty idyllic notion of us. We’re not perfect. We fight and fuss and cuss just like any other family. And he’s still pissed that I want to spend more time running the paper and less time practicing law.”
“But he won’t stand in the way of your running the paper.”
“No,” Tee said. “He just likes to give me a bunch of grief about it, every chance he gets.”
Tee put his scraper down and walked over to where I was working. “You’re almost done with this door,” he said accusingly. “And I’ve been hacking away over there with that smelly stuff, and I’m not even halfway finished.”
“I’m quick on the trigger,” I said smugly. “So sue me.”
He held out his hand. “It’s my turn now. Gimme the gun.”
“No way.”
He stood behind me and nuzzled my ear. “Please?”
“If I give you the gun, what do you give me?”
He switched to my left ear. He needed a shave and his stubble tickled my neck.
“Go away,” I said, swatting the air ineffectively. “I’m very busy here. I have no time for your tomfoolery.”
He wrestled the heat gun away from me with very little effort, then turned me around to face him. He carefully placed the gun on the saw-horse. “Seriously now. No tomfoolery, as you so quaintly put it. I have an important question to ask you.”
I put my arms around his neck. “Okay. Ask away. But I am not giving you my heat gun. You’ll have to get your own if you want one that badly.”
“I will,” Tee said. He kissed me.
“What’s the question then?” I asked.
He kissed my forehead. He kissed the tip of my nose. He kissed the hollow of my neck in an exquisitely leisurely way, while his hands closed around my butt, pressing us together.
The next thing I knew, something sharp and prickly was slashing at my shoulders and my head.
“Stop that!” Ella Kate hollered, smacking me on the back with a broom. I broke away from Tee, and he ducked, just barely missing Ella Kate’s next swing.
Instead, she landed a blow on my right cheek. “Trash!” she screeched. “I won’t have such trashy behavior under my own roof. You hear? I won’t have it.” She swung again and smacked me on the right arm.
“Ow,” I protested, rubbing my arm. “That hurts.”
“Ella Kate!” Tee cried, grabbing for the broom. “Cut it out!”
“You cut it out, you little pissant,” Ella Kate replied, clutching the broom to her chest. “Get out of my house, right this minute, or I’ll call the police. I’ll call your father too, Tee Berryhill. Don’t think I won’t tell him about your behavior.”
“What behavior?” Tee asked, his face reddening. “I was kissing a girl. She was kissing me back. We’re not teenagers, Ella Kate. Anyway, this really is not your house. It belongs to Dempsey and her father.”
“This is a respectable house,” Ella Kate whispered. “Respectable! If you two want to cat around, you can just go to a motel. I won’t have the two of you he-ing and she-ing under this roof. If Norbert knew this was going on here, he would be spinning in his grave. Killebrews!”
She took the broom and hit me squarely on the top of the head with it. She turned to Tee and gave him a vicious slap in the crotch, and then she calmly strolled out of the kitchen, broom in hand.
28
“Are you all right?” I asked Tee.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just grateful she didn’t hit me with the broom handle. Now, that would have been painful.”
“Sorry about that,” I said, raking my fingers through my hair just to make sure Ella Kate’s weapon of choice hadn’t left me with a headful of cobwebs or worse. “I’ve been trying to get her to warm up to me. I drive her to the drugstore, and to run errands, I even buy treats for her dog, but I don’t think it’s working. She still detests me.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Tee advised. “According to my father, she’s always been what he calls ‘eccentric.’”
I picked up my heat gun and switched it on again. “Eccentric. That’s one of those colorful Southern euphemisms, right?”
“Exactly,” Tee said. He wrapped his arms around my waist again. “Now, about that question.”
“Better make it quick,” I said, glancing over his shoulder. “Don’t forget, she does have a shotgun.”
“Which makes my question all the more relevant,” Tee said. “Look. You’ve been under a lot of pressure here lately. I can’t even get you to let me take you out on a proper date. And we sure as hell can’t get any privacy, what with Ella Kate lurking around here, and me living with Dad. One of my law school classmates has a little cottage down on the coast, on Saint Simon’s Island. Let’s take a run down there next weekend. We’ll have a nice dinner, ride bikes, take a walk on the beach. Just relax. What do you say?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
His face fell.
“It’s just not good timing…with this Hoddergate thing hanging over my head, and the damned FBI agents skulking around town, and this newspaper reporter calling my family and friends.”
“All the more reason to go away,” Tee said.
I put both my hands on his chest. “I can’t. Not right now. Give me some time, please, Tee?”
He sighed. “All right. No pressure. The offer stands. There’s just one thing I need for you to do.”
“Anything.”
“Hand over the gun.”
29
It was pitch black when I woke up the next morning. I groped in the darkness for my cell phone, and saw that it was only 6:30 A.M. I lay back in the bed and groaned. Tee and I
had worked on the kitchen cabinets until my hands and arms ached from all the scraping and sanding. We’d managed to finish stripping all the cabinets, but I still had plenty of sanding left—not to mention priming and painting.
I willed myself to go back to sleep, but it was no good. After five minutes of staring at the ceiling, I got up, shoved my feet into some slippers, and struggled into my bathrobe. Coffee. I needed coffee. Stat.
Soft, heartbreaking whimpers echoed through the high-ceilinged hallway. I hurried into the kitchen, where I found Ella Kate, sitting on the floor, cradling a writhing Shorty in her arms. She was dressed in faded red flannel pajamas, hair lank, wild eyed.
“Ella Kate?” I asked, crouching down beside her. “What’s wrong? Is Shorty sick?”
“What do you think?” she snapped. “He ain’t right, that’s all I know. He wouldn’t eat no supper, and Shorty never misses a meal. I took him outside to do his business last night, but he wouldn’t go. Now he’s bad sick.”
“Poor baby,” I said, looking down at the sad-eyed cocker. “Is there anything I can do for him?”
“Get that bottle of castor oil,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of a bottle sitting on the kitchen counter. “I been trying to get some down him, but he keeps jerking away from me. I’ll hold him, and you dose him.”
“Castor oil?” I wrinkled my nose.
“Just get it,” she ordered. “That’s what my mama gave all us young’uns when we had a bellyache.”
“Is it safe for a dog?”
“Get it!”
I did as I was told.
She clamped her arms around the wriggling dog. “Hold your hand over his nose so he’ll open up his mouth, then, when he does, you pour that stuff down his throat.”
I uncapped the bottle of castor oil, and clapped my left hand over Shorty’s snout. I held the open bottle over his jaws, but just as I tipped the bottle forward, he flailed wildly with his front paws, and the bottle went flying, an evil-smelling arc of viscous oil spreading over the stack of freshly stripped cabinets.
“Oh no!”
“Now look what you done,” Ella Kate cried. “You done spilt every last drop of the castor oil.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, hurrying to mop up the mess with a wad of paper towels. I stopped short when Shorty let out another high-pitched moan.
“He’s bad sick,” Ella Kate said quietly.
I bent over to stroke the dog’s head, but Ella Kate pushed my hand away. “Leave him be,” she said gruffly. “He don’t trust strangers.”
I didn’t bother to point out that I was hardly a stranger. Shorty’s listless brown eyes told volumes about his obvious suffering.
“Maybe we should call a vet.”
“I done that,” she said. “Think I’m an old fool? They got an answering machine, says to call back at nine. Unless it’s an emergency. Then they say to go to some hospital I never heard of, clear down in Macon.”
“I think it’s an emergency,” I said. “Where’s the hospital?”
She shrugged, holding the dog closely against her chest. “Shorty don’t like doctors. I know he ain’t gonna like a hospital.”
I sat down on the floor beside her. Gingerly, I touched the dog’s pale pink belly. It was hard to the touch, and Shorty yelped and jerked away from me.
“It’s definitely his stomach,” I said. “Look, I really think we better get him to that animal hospital. I’ll run upstairs and get dressed. Can you call the vet back and get an address for the clinic?”
She nodded absentmindedly, then bent over Shorty, stroking his head and crooning some tuneless song.
When I got downstairs, Ella Kate had somehow managed to change into a shapeless cotton housedress and worn blue cardigan sweater. But her wiry white hair was uncombed, and she still wore her battered brown bedroom slippers, a fact I dared not point out to her.
The first pale peach fingers of daylight were dawning as Ella Kate seated herself in the front seat of the Catfish, Shorty clutched tightly in her arms.
“Don’t you have a crate or something he could ride in?” I asked, glancing nervously over at Shorty, whose head hung droopily over Ella Kate’s arms.
“No, ma’am,” she said firmly. “I’ll hold on to Shorty. You just drive where I tell you. Now, let’s get a move on!”
My hands clutched the steering wheel tightly as I sped through the quiet streets of Guthrie.
“Turn left up here, and that’ll take you to the bypass,” Ella Kate directed. The only other words she spoke to me on the forty-five-minute ride to the Middle Georgia Animal Clinic were tersely worded directions. I drove, Shorty whimpered, and Ella Kate sat stone still, her jaw clenched in concentration.
When we got to the animal clinic and reported Shorty’s symptoms to the young receptionist, she nodded calmly, charting the dog’s vital statistics on a clipboard. “He’s hurtin’ bad,” Ella Kate said pointedly.
“I’ll take you back right now,” the girl said, showing us to an examining room. A minute later, another fresh-faced young woman, her brown hair swept back in a ponytail, came into the room.
“Oh, fella,” she said softly, when she saw Shorty writhing in Ella Kate’s arms. “You are feeling lousy, aren’t you?” She held out her arms to take the cocker spaniel, but Ella Kate jerked away.
“He don’t like strangers,” she said. “We’ll just wait for the vet.”
“No wait at all,” the girl said calmly. “I’m Chrissy Shoemaker. Dr. Shoemaker. We’re sort of short staffed today.”
Ella Kate stared. “Are you sure you’re old enough to be doctorin’ people’s pets?”
“I’m thirty,” Dr. Shoemaker said. “And I’ve been in practice here for three years.”
“Hmmph,” Ella Kate said, clearly unconvinced.
“I’ll take good care of him, I promise,” Dr. Shoemaker added, holding out her arms again.
Shorty whimpered, but finally, Ella Kate handed him over.
Dr. Shoemaker placed Shorty on a stainless-steel examining table. She stroked his head and caressed his floppy ears. “Okay, fella,” she said. “Let’s see what’s going on with you.”
She checked the dog’s eyes and ears, looked down his throat, and took his temperature. “Nothing here,” she said.
“It’s his belly,” Ella Kate said. “He’s got a bad bellyache.”
Dr. Shoemaker gently rolled Shorty over and examined his abdomen. She looked up at Ella Kate. “His tummy is pretty rigid. Is there a chance he’s eaten something he shouldn’t? Like a remote control or a lipstick or something like that?”
“I don’t wear lipstick, and I don’t own a remote control,” Ella Kate said stiffly. “Shorty hadn’t ever eaten nothing like that before.”
“Well,” Dr. Shoemaker said, “I have a feeling he’s got a foreign object in that belly of his. If you’ll step into the waiting room, we’ll take some blood and do an X-ray to see if we can spot what’s hurting the poor little guy.”
“X-ray?” Ella Kate’s head jerked up.
“Don’t worry. He won’t feel anything,” Dr. Shoemaker said, opening the door to allow us to leave the examining room.
Ella Kate and I sat on a couple of molded-plastic chairs in the empty waiting room. The only reading materials were pamphlets dealing with spaying and neutering animals. I read one of the pamphlets. Very educational. Ella Kate sat and stared out the windows.
After ten minutes, Dr. Shoemaker rejoined us. “He’s definitely got something in his stomach,” she said. “We won’t be able to tell exactly what it is until we operate.”
“Operate!” Ella Kate exclaimed. “Can’t you give him something to make him throw up whatever it is? You saying you’re gonna cut on Shorty?”
“If he could have passed it normally, he probably would have by now. I’m afraid surgery really is the only option,” Dr. Shoemaker said. “But it’s a very common procedure. Dogs and cats are constantly eating things they shouldn’t. I did three of these surgeries last wee
k. You should see the assortment of stuff I’ve found in pets’ tummies. Don’t worry. We’ll take very good care of Shorty.”
Ella Kate’s lips compressed into a thin colorless line. “I reckon if you gotta, you gotta.”
“We gotta,” Dr. Shoemaker said. “We’ll put him to sleep and it shouldn’t take too long. Would you like to go on home, and I can call you to let you know what we found?”
“No, ma’am!” Ella Kate said, looking directly at me. “I’m a-stayin’ right here.”
The minutes dragged by. The phone rang, and people came and went with their pets. Ella Kate stared out the window. I stared at everything else.
For lack of anything better to do, I tried to strike up a conversation with Ella Kate.
“Just how old is Shorty?” I asked.
She shrugged. “He was just a pup when I found him. That musta been eight or nine years ago.”
“He was a stray?”
“Yes, ma’am. He was eating out of a trash can behind the Piggly Wiggly. Poor little thing was about half starved. Had sores all over his paws. Nobody else wanted him. Just like me. I took him on home and doctored him up myself. Pretty good, since I never even had no pet growing up.”
“Never? Not even a goldfish?” I’d had a fairly fractured childhood myself, moving from Lynda’s house to Mitch’s house, and then all around the country, whenever Mitch’s job required it, but I’d always managed to have a cat or a dog—or even a hamster, for one short summer.
“My mama and daddy had eight head of children,” Ella Kate said. “Mama said she didn’t need another mouth to feed. And then, when I got grown, I was working and didn’t have no time for a dog. Anyway, Livvy liked cats.”
“Livvy?”
“Olivia,” Ella Kate said, looking away. “She’d be your grandmother. Livvy always had cats. Up until she married, she was always real partial to Siamese cats, but she did have a calico kitten one time that somebody left on her doorstep, after she busted up with Mister Killebrew and he went off and took the baby with him.”
The Fixer Upper Page 18