2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series)

by Heather Muzik

  “He’s shaking snow everywhere!” Cara squealed.

  But Cara’s words were lost on Catherine as Fynn came around the corner, ghostly pale, the phone in his hand hanging limply at his side.

  “What is it, Fynn? What happened?” she asked, her heart rising quickly into her throat at the same time her stomach dropped out of place. She immediately wrapped her arms around her midsection to protect the hollowed out places, feeling herself as if to prove that she was there and okay. Her eyes flashed to Cara first and then back to him. They were all fine and safe and right there with each other. This wasn’t like Josey….

  But that was exactly what came to mind when she saw his face. Oh God, something’s wrong. The phone was still clutched in his hand though, not falling and clattering to the floor at her mother’s feet like it had that day. And her father wasn’t there to rush in and catch her mother before she crumbled to the floor after it. Her mind raced along all of the inroads of her heart, her life, at dangerous speeds—her parents, her brother’s little family, Georgia’s young family, Drew and her husband and the boys—God, they’re Fynn’s only family left! She felt ill, certain that what was on the other end of the line was death itself, finding her again—calling her family again. Just when she was truly happy. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. For a moment she thought she saw Fynn mouth, Josey drowned. She was back in those nightmarish moments all over again. She was tunneling in on herself, everything slowing down around her, the sounds of life in the room seemed a world away—the TV, Magnus’s collar jangling, Cara’s giggling—

  Fynn wasn’t even looking at her, though. He was looking at Cara, saying the same thing over and over again. Catherine tried to calm her heart, breathe deeply, stay on her feet, stay in this world. “Magnus, down!” she heard, now that her heartbeat wasn’t overwhelming all else. She was back in Fynn’s house in Nekoyah; no longer trapped in a waking nightmare that had coalesced past and present, recreating a moment that had haunted her since childhood.

  “Magnus, down!” Fynn commanded yet again, trying to settle the spunky golden retriever. “The snow puts the dickens in him, Cara.” A light tone of voice that didn’t match his pallor at all.

  “Can you help her? I have to make a phone call,” he said, turning to Catherine abruptly.

  “Of course. Is everything okay?” she asked, worry unguarded in her voice.

  But he was already turning to leave the room, life moving at a normal pace again, the sound of buttons being pressed and then his buttery smooth voice, unintelligible, from the depths of the house.

  She turned to Cara as lighthearted as possible. “Let me get those boots off you.”

  Cara came over and sat on the couch willingly, letting Catherine tug off her boots and unzip her jacket. “Magnus wanted to dance with me.”

  “I’m sure he did. You’re the prettiest girl in the room.”

  She beamed; her chubby little-girl cheeks a bright pink from the cold, her messy brown pigtails peeking out from under a pink and even brighter pink striped hat. Catherine gathered her into a hug, suddenly worried not for herself but for Cara. If Fynn had heard something about Catherine’s family, he would have told her, not walked off into privacy. What if it was Cara’s mom? No matter how much Fynn and Renée had prepared this little girl, it would be awful to think she had come here to spend the week and have no home to go back to after—

  “There you two are!” Fynn spoke up suddenly from behind them.

  “We’ve been here all along!” Cara giggled.

  “I got lost in this big castle,” he said, swooping in to hug them both.

  They had been getting along famously, everything happy-happy-happy. At times it even felt like a real family of three. It was warm and toasty and cozy and all the things it should be, but it was also completely surreal to Catherine… at times entirely overwhelming. It wasn’t like they hadn’t spent time as a threesome before, but now… with the ring on her finger, these moments had permanence under the surface. Cara was there with them—not just in the house, but everywhere. All the freedom that Catherine had cultivated for herself her entire adult life was suddenly gone. She was woken up in the morning. She was followed to the bathroom and watched intently while she put on makeup. She couldn’t just eat when she was hungry; she had to think of when and what Cara would eat too. And Cara needed constant supervision and help—doing things and reaching things and making things. And she asked a lot of questions. Catherine was shadowed and tailed and basically never left alone.

  She wondered if Fynn felt the same way. If it was normal for her or even fair for her to feel that way. Perhaps he was used to the idea of sharing his life with Cara; he’d known her since she was a baby and had been preparing for this eventuality since before he met Catherine. She was the third wheel, the latest addition, the one who was out of place in the equation.

  Fynn growled to add sound effects to his big bear hugs. “I’m getting hungry,” he said.

  “Don’t eat me!” Cara giggled.

  “But little girls are such tasty treats!”

  “But I’m a princess,” she said seriously, putting a hand on Fynn’s heart that put tears in his eyes.

  “Oh, forgive me your highness,” he said, unleashing his arms, pulling back, and bowing to her.

  “Why don’t I make both the bear and the princess a snack,” Catherine offered.

  “Yes—yes—yes!” Cara sang.

  “Come on, Mr. Bear, I need some help.” She pulled Fynn toward the kitchen.

  “What’s going on?” she asked as soon as they were alone.

  The expression on his face was tortured. “It’s Renée. I got a call—”

  “What? Oh my God, is she—”

  “She’s back in the hospital,” he said gravely, cutting her off before she could say the “D” word. “She’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  “Can I have hot chocolate?” Cara asked, wandering into the middle of everything awful in her life right now without even knowing it.

  “Why certainly, your highness,” Catherine said tightly, curtseying. “Why don’t you go watch some TV and we’ll eat our snack in the family room.”

  “And then will we go to the mall?” she asked sweetly.

  “Let’s just have our snack first, okay?” Catherine said evasively; the mall was the least of her concerns at the moment. Once Cara was safely out of earshot, she turned back to Fynn. “I don’t understand. They just let her go home after Christmas. I thought she was stable. I thought—”

  “They think she caught some kind of virus. Something that wouldn’t do a thing to you or me,” he said angrily.

  “So you need to take Cara back home?” She tried not to feel anything but a sense of understanding even though a selfish part of her was frustrated that their extra-long weekend was being ruined—by a woman on her deathbed, Catherine Marie rightfully reminded her.

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?” She was sure she hadn’t heard him properly.

  “Cara can’t be around her right now. Renée needs to get stronger, and kids—they’re carriers of all those things her body is too weak to fight off.”

  “But what if she doesn’t get better? Cara never said goodbye….” She knew what it was like to be haunted by that.

  “Of course she’ll get better,” Fynn snapped, his eyes flashing with pain and anger.

  Catherine felt a chill sweep through her, unable to begin to know how to respond. He was fooling himself if he believed that. Renée was terminal. One of these close calls or hospital stays was going to be the end. What if this was the one?

  “She’s going to sign a DNR order,” he said, suddenly resigned, giving into the truth. “She wants me to go and finalize the paperwork so she knows that after she’s—that Cara is—that her guardianship is ironclad and she doesn’t end up in foster—” But everything he tried to say was too hard to finish as it all skirted around that place where his dear friend was dead and her daughter orphaned.

  Th
ey stood staring at each other, a stalemate of worry.

  -38-

  This was all so completely bizarre. Thinking back to the conversation, Catherine wondered what on earth she’d been thinking. What was the point she was trying to make, and how had that point led her to this point: on a plane with a five-year-old little girl buckled in next to her. All because she was hurt that Fynn was otherwise going to leave Cara with Drew—a much better mother figure, mind you (exceedingly qualified and pregnant yet again to prove it).

  Catherine knew that he probably thought he was being helpful by having Drew babysit while he was in Iowa, but if she was going to be Cara’s guardian mom or fill-in mom or whatever she would come to be, she needed to be able to do this now, even though it terrified the hell out of her.

  She felt a tug on her sleeve and turned to her charge.

  “I want to have a plane like this when I’m growed up,” Cara said simply.

  “A plane? Really? Where will you park it?”

  “In the garage.” She was adorably definitive.

  “You’re going to need an awfully big garage,” Catherine chuckled.

  “Oh, I’ll have one.”

  To be that certain! She envied the little fighting spirit that was so sure that it was perfectly possible to own a passenger jet and park it at her house. Catherine didn’t think she’d ever told anyone, but when she was little she was sure she’d own a mountain one day and call it Mt. Catherina. And she remembered Josey was about Cara’s age when she professed she was going to live under the sea like Ariel from The Little Mermaid… but her sister’s seemingly innocuous dream made Catherine’s blood run a few degrees colder. She pushed it back into the dark recesses of her brain where she put stuff she hoped to lose. The problem was that one never lost the things they wanted to discard, only the things that mattered.

  “Where are we going again?” Cara asked, tugging her sleeve for the hundredth time since they’d taken off.

  “We’re going to New York City; where I live.”

  “Why do you live there?”

  “Because that’s where my job is.”

  “But why work there?” Cara asked, staring at her expectantly.

  “That’s where I got a job out of college.”

  “Then how did you meet Fynn?”

  “I was lucky,” Catherine admitted.

  “Are you going to come live with us?”

  “Well, I—”

  “You’re getting married to Fynn, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So are you going to come live with us?”

  She hesitated. She’d never really thought of it as moving in with an “us”. It sounded so strange being interrogated by such a little girl who had obviously taken ownership of Fynn.

  “Well?” Cara demanded.

  “After the wedding… I guess I’ll be moving to Nekoyah.” She hadn’t actually thought this part through at all. Like how she would get all her stuff out there—box it and ship it? freight on a train? hire movers? rent a U-Haul? She had a decade-plus-some worth of independence to uproot and it unsettled something deep in the pit of her stomach to even think about it.

  “Does your wedding really cost goshmillion bucks?” Cara asked, her eyes twinkling with amazement.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Fynn told my mommy that the wedding was going to cost goshmillion bucks.”

  “Gazillion?” Catherine asked bitterly, her skin prickly with the realization that her fiancé obviously didn’t approve of the wedding preparations he had left entirely to her.

  “No, I think it was goshmillion. Is that even more?” Cara asked innocently.

  Catherine couldn’t believe it. Here she was trying her ass off to be the kind and accommodating bride-to-be, offering to take Cara with her back to New York and continue planning their wedding, and he was talking behind her back about the cost of it all? He’d never mentioned a thing about the money to her.

  They hadn’t discussed their financial situation at all. On any level. Ever. When was the time to talk about such things? Was that supposed to happen before the proposal? Before the wedding? Within the first year? When? Maybe they should have said something by now. At least run the proper reports and exchange them. Full disclosure: savings—slim-to-none; credit cards—too many to count; 401k—not maxed for matching, to the chagrin of any financial guru; CDs—dropped those for digital long ago; bonds—cashed them in last decade; annuities—what the hell are those; mortgage—long-term renter, just throwing money away; finance charges—stratospheric…. There was plenty of conversation to have. On paper she looked “questionable” at best. But a lot of the baggage she was carrying had only grown bigger at the cost of dating him. He didn’t make it easy being in Nekoyah all the time. Loving him wasn’t cheap.

  How did people do this whole combining lives thing? How had Georgia done it? People always talked about the sweaty palms and butterflies “love” part of relationships. They talked about the “moments”—when they first kissed, first said the “L” word, first slept together. But the first sharing of financial statements was hush-hush. Nobody warned you that there was coming-together-as-one that happened monetarily as well as physically and emotionally. Of course Georgia was no help—she married rich. When there was ample money to go around, how difficult could it be? She was probably just absorbed in.

  Catherine wished someone gave seminars on the issue, warning people about the ugly numbers game under a human merger. She had no idea how the pieces of her marriage puzzle fit together. Maybe this is what jumping the gun felt like.

  Friday, January 28th

  -39-

  She made it exactly 17 hours, 9 minutes, and 22 seconds before she realized just how unprepared she was for this venture as “babysitter” or “single mom” or whatever it was she was trying to be. And one of those hours she was counting was actually a “gimme” what with the time change from Minnesota to here. The only reason she even made it this long was because at 17 hours on the nose she’d found a single pouch of Pop-Tarts in the pantry behind her curlers—how food got in there in the first place was beyond her. But at least she’d fed them breakfast before getting on the road… that had to count for something.

  “Where are we going now?” Cara asked in awe.

  Catherine had already dazzled her with the plane ride, and the cab ride, and the festival of lights that was New York City at night. And then to stay in an apartment for the first time in her life too! She’d introduced Cara to so many new things, but now they’d reached the bottom of her bag of tricks and unfortunately their next stop would be noticeably less amazing.

  “We’re going to visit my mom and dad,” she said lightheartedly, trying not to show weakness, not to let on that she was totally panicking underneath her cool exterior. She had no idea how to entertain a child left in her care for days on end. She couldn’t cook at all, and suddenly that little shortcoming was coming back to bite her. Who knew it really was a useful skill. All those years of living alone it had seemed entirely unnecessary, which explained why she had curlers and hair products in her pantry—well, that and the fact that she had a tiny bathroom in which the only storage space was an ancient medicine cabinet over the sink.

  “Do they live in an apartment too?”

  “No, they live in a house in the suburbs.”

  “Where is Suburbs?” Cara asked studiously.

  “The suburbs aren’t actually a town,” Catherine said, smiling to herself. She hadn’t realized just how many normal conversational words were new to someone Cara’s age. “The suburbs are….” And that is when she realized she was entirely undereducated. She knew what they were, but how to explain it to a child who has no frame of reference? “… It’s a word people use to talk about a type of place that is outside the city but not in the country. It’s where people live in neighborhoods and developments rather than in apartment buildings or on farms.”

  Cara nodded her head lightly, wheels in motion.

  Before she
could ask anything that would test her knowledge further, Catherine said, “They live in Chesterton.”

  “Is that where Chester Cheetah lives?” Cara giggled.

  I wish, Catherine thought. “It’s in Pennsylvania.”

  “I’ve never been to Pennsylvania.”

  “Just like I’ve never been to Iowa; where you live.”

  Their conversation flowed easily enough, mostly with Cara asking questions about things they passed along the way. Then they hit the Jersey Turnpike and she started asking about why they hardly seemed to be passing anything along the way, and why you had to pay to drive on this road and not other roads… and why the exits were so far apart… and why the signs were all in different colors… and whether you had to stop at “rest stops”—like it might be against the law not to. Actually, the answer to that last one was yes, you had to stop, because otherwise it went against the law of nature, mainly that little girls had tiny bladders. Catherine did the best she could with the trivia, but she had a sneaking suspicion she was too stupid to have children.

  “We’re here,” she said with relief as she pulled to a stop in front of her childhood home.

  Cara’s eyes fluttered open in surprise, having fallen asleep about ten minutes out after exhausting her cache of questions.

  She didn’t even have the key out of the ignition when she saw her mother—dishtowel in hand—evacuating the house, pulling her father along with her. Her mouth was moving excitedly as she headed straight for the car.

  Catherine tried to get unbuckled and out before her mother reached them, but there she was, wily and quick Elizabeth Hemmings, at the back door, opening it and releasing Cara.

  “You must be Miss Cara,” her mother said, giving her a hug. “I imagine you two girls are starving after the ride, and you’re in luck because I just made lunch.” She released Cara from the hug and then took her by the hand before turning to Catherine. “I hope you drove carefully—”

  “We made it here, didn’t we?” As if that proved her point better than anything.