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

by Heather Muzik

  “You think it’s boring for you. I’m the one talking to myself.”

  “Where the hell are we anyway?” Tara asked.

  “Still in Indiana, I think.”

  “Well, let’s get out and walk on Indiana-hallowed ground.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cuz I want to eventually be able to say that I walked on every state in the union. It’s on my bucket list.”

  “Really?” Catherine was surprised Tara was that deep.

  “No,” she guffawed. “I’ve got to pee like a racehorse.”

  “How can you have to pee already? I still have more than half a tank of gas.”

  “Asking me that isn’t going to make the pee go away. Pull over.”

  *****

  “Cool, I always wanted to give this a try.”

  “Knock yourself out.” Catherine waved a hand dismissively at the soda that sat in the cup holder, the one she’d bought during Tara’s pee break. The less she drank the better anyway.

  “So when did you take up this little habit?”

  “What habit are you talking about? Hanging around with you? Truck driving? Getting married?” she snorted.

  “This,” Tara said around a mouthful.

  “What?” She turned to look. Tara’s cheeks and lips were ballooned out from her teeth comically. Where did she get more food? Catherine wondered, totally jealous. Tara had eaten something at every stop along the way, most recently a hotdog… and now what? Dessert?

  “Dipping.”

  “Like skinny dipping? Eew, never.”

  “Dipping,” Tara enunciated slowly, fighting her mouthful and holding a little can in the air.

  “Oh my God! That’s not mine!” Catherine screeched, bobbling the steering wheel in her hands and causing them to swerve out of their lane to a chorus of horns from neighboring cars. “Why would you think that’s mine?”

  “Because it was right here next to your purse.” She wiped at a little river of brown drool that was trying to escape the corner of her mouth.

  “Disgusting! Whose is that? … And you put it in your mouth?”

  “My wips and gums feew, wike, totawy numb,” Tara said, garbling the words drunkenly. “Ooh, and my head…. God, I’m dizzy…. Are you dizzy?”

  “Where did it come from?” Catherine screamed, like the can of dip was a massive spider or a nuclear bomb or something much more sinister than tobacco.

  “The wast wenter?”

  “The what?”

  “The wast wenter,” she said again, only louder.

  “Huh?”

  “Wast dwiber,” Tara said, pantomiming steering.

  “Yuck!”

  “I wonder if he weft his spit cup too.” Tara rummaged around the passenger side but came up empty, so she rolled down the window, coughing and gacking.

  Catherine threw up a little in her mouth.

  “That shit is lethal,” Tara exclaimed, massaging her jaw to bring it back to life from the buzz.

  “Hey, it looks like he left behind some other stuff too,” Tara said, moving the purse. “Is this yours?” She pulled a hunting knife out from under the seat.”

  “Of course not!”

  A moment of silence passed between them and then Tara held up a man’s wallet from the floor of the truck. “Cat… I don’t think we’re in our truck anymore.”

  Catherine whipped the wheel to the right and brought the truck to a brake-whining, skidding stop on the shoulder. They both got out and went around to the back, sliding the door open to take a look at their cargo, hoping they wouldn’t find dead bodies or anything—hoping to hell they would find her furniture and boxes of things… and her wedding dress that Georgia had offered to keep at her place until the wedding but Catherine had insisted on keeping with her at all times up until the event.

  “Holy fuck!” Tara exclaimed as Catherine crumbled to the asphalt.

  -60-

  “I need to report my wedding dress missing.” Catherine’s voice was shaking.

  The police officer at the desk looked her over carefully and fully, like a human lie detector. He was cute, although not as drop-your-panties sexy as Fynn. Oh God, Fynn! He was expecting her in Nekoyah tonight. And now she was stuck in godknowswhere driving someone else’s U-Haul full of useless crap (or perhaps their life’s worth, but that was neither here nor there), while her dress might be halfway to East Jabip at this point.

  “Ma’am?” the officer prodded.

  There was that word again. Midwestern politeness was killing her self-esteem. I’m a bride! she wanted to scream, which in her mind made it technically impossible to be a ma’am at the same time. A bride-to-be was a “Miss” and then in a glorious moment, sealed with a kiss, she became “Mrs.”—poof just like that.

  “Excuse me, I asked if you were wearing it at the time,” he said carefully, motioning to a passing female officer to join him behind the counter in case there was a physical altercation to report or maybe a rape kit needed.

  Catherine looked down at herself, wondering why he would even ask that, unless maybe she was naked. She’d blanked out for a while there after they opened the truck to find it looked like the set of Sanford & Son inside, so anything seemed possible. But no, she wasn’t nude; bedraggled maybe, but fully clothed.

  “Were you assaulted?” the female officer asked.

  “No, she wasn’t—she did that to herself,” Tara said, sidling up to the counter, brushing aside the rat’s-nest-haired, smudge-faced, ripped-jeaned figure that she’d come in with. She leaned over the counter to give both officers an unobstructed view of her goods, gauging which one would be most helpful. “It seems that my friend is in shock. You see, she’s getting married in just over a week, and this wedding dress is the only thing that has survived the wedding plans…. At least it had survived up until now.”

  “And where was it stolen from?” the male officer asked, giving Catherine a wary glance while he talked to the seemingly normal girl instead.

  “Well, Officer Kryler,” Tara purred, reading the nameplate on the counter, “it was on I-80.”

  He eyed them both narrowly, like maybe he was being set up, an elaborate prank. “Perhaps you should be talking to a state trooper then,” he offered blandly, trying his best to avert his eyes from Tara’s cleavage.

  “It wasn’t exactly on the highway,” she clarified. “Or do state troopers handle all the rest stops too?”

  “Where exactly did this happen?” he asked, sighing.

  “I don’t exactly know where we were when it happened. My eyeballs were floating, so I couldn’t read the signs…. Where are we now?”

  “Drunk possibly… or high,” the female officer noted derisively.

  “We most certainly are not,” Tara asserted. “Although I am still a little woozy after that dip. But I didn’t do that until after the robbery. And I wasn’t the one driving anyway.”

  “So what exactly happened? Did someone pull up next to your car, tell you to pull over, and steal the dress?” the woman offered, her tone saying she thought they were potheads, or airheads at the very least.

  “No. It happened at a rest stop.”

  “Do tell.” Officer Kryler settled himself back against his chair like there was all the time in the world to sort this out—like they were here for his entertainment.

  “Someone took off with our U-Haul,” Tara said definitively.

  “They’re getting away as we speak! My dress could end up in China!” Catherine suddenly blubbered from behind.

  Both officers shook their heads piteously at the theatrics.

  “What if they did leave the state?” Tara asked, taking Catherine’s outburst and running with it. “Isn’t transporting stolen goods across state lines a felony?”

  But Catherine jabbed her hard in the ribs to try to stop her from incriminating them any further. The seal on the wall most definitely read Illinois, which meant that at some point they had crossed state lines themselves.

  “Don’t get ahead of y
ourselves,” he said, barely holding back an obscene chuckle. “Was it just the dress inside?”

  “No, my whole life was inside!” Catherine screeched.

  “She’s in the middle of moving from New York to Minnesota,” Tara clarified.

  “So you stopped at a rest stop to… rest, and then you came back to the parking lot to find the truck was gone?” Officer Kryler asked slowly, a pace designed for the extremely young, exceptionally inebriated, or simpleminded.

  “Sort of,” Tara said cagily, suddenly seeming to realize the ramifications of going to the police to report the stolen dress.

  “Then why don’t you tell me exactly what happened.”

  “Well, I really had to pee after the Big Gulp that I got back a ways and Catherine here wouldn’t just pull off into the breakdown lane so that I could use nature’s restroom. She insisted that we find a real rest stop. Of course if we had done things my way she would still have her dress and everything, but she can be such a—”

  “Please, Miss, could you stick to the actual crime here?”

  She’s Miss and I’m a ma’am? Do a few years show that much? Catherine smarted. But she didn’t have the faculties to put up a fight or do anything other than half listen to Tara’s slanderous review of events.

  “I think denying a friend—bridesmaid, no less, although I should be the maid of honor seeing as how you don’t see her here helping her supposedly best friend in her time of need—”

  “Miss,” he prodded again.

  “I’m just sayin’ that denying anyone the chance to pee when they need to is a crime. It’s torture. And I believe torture isn’t allowed in this great country of ours.”

  “Miss—”

  “It’s Tara actually, and if I wasn’t just passing through I know something else I’d like to do here,” she said lasciviously.

  “Could you please finish the story?” He kept his professional tone in check but blushed like a schoolboy.

  Without skipping a beat, Tara continued, “So I finally got a chance to pee and after all that grumbling, when I got back to the truck—ASAP just like she told me to—it turned out that she had to pee too. Can you believe that? Well, since I had a few extra minutes to kill I went to grab a hotdog because I can’t pass by a hotdog on a rotating grill without getting hotdogs on the brain and the only way to shake that monkey off your back is to get one. And then, even though she was pissed that I wasn’t at the truck where I was supposed to be, she came back with a soda. Obviously it was okay for her to stop for refreshments; so I submit that what’s good for the goose should be good for the goose’s friend too, right?”

  Officer Kryler rubbed his face like he was exhausted just following the story.

  “Anyway, when we got back to the parking lot we drove off—”

  “In the U-Haul?” he offered, perplexed.

  “In a U-Haul,” she corrected.

  “A U-Haul?”

  “Well, we seem to have possibly—accidentally—gotten in the wrong truck. As soon as we realized we tried to go back to the rest stop—got off everywhere—but like I said, we don’t even know which one it was, so we turned around and stopped at the nearest police station.” She spread her arms to encompass the space they were occupying as proof.

  “My lucky day,” Officer Kryler breathed, looking to his fellow officers like he was searching for the joke.

  *****

  “Do you think that is one of those one-way window thingies?” Tara asked, pointing to the wall of glass next to them like an awestruck child.

  Catherine gave Tara the hairy eyeball from her side of the table in the small cube of a room.

  “Oh, come on, Cat! I just told them what happened. Somebody had to; you were blubbering like an idiot.”

  “And you were blabbing like an idiot…. And now we’ve been arrested,” she moaned.

  “Not arrested. We’re just being held for questioning,” Tara corrected. “Besides, it isn’t like they separated us. It can’t be that bad if they put us in the same room where we could sync up our stories—ooh, unless they’re trying to break us. Keeping us in close quarters to see if we turn on each other. Hoping for a girl fight.” She eyed the glass speculatively.

  “I can’t believe you got me into this.”

  “I got you into this? If you had let me pee when I needed to pee in the first place, then we would be in Nekoyah by now with your truck and your dress and everything. But you just had to stop at a sanctioned rest area with plumbing and shit—and hotdogs. See, that was your downfall.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m just sayin’ you’re the one who left the keys in the truck—left it running for that matter.”

  “And you’re the one who was supposed to stay at the truck while I used the bathroom,” Catherine pointed out plainly.

  “If you had to pee, why’d you give me crap for needing to go?”

  “I decided that I should go so we wouldn’t have to stop again for a while.

  “Well, I decided I should get something to eat so we wouldn’t have to stop again for a while,” Tara countered, using Catherine’s argument against her.

  “So what the hell do we do if they arrest us? Huh, Tara? Who the fuck are we going to call to bail us out? How am I going to be able to leave the state for my wedding if I’m out on bond?”

  “They’re not going to arrest us.”

  “We stole someone’s truck.”

  “And we turned ourselves in. That has to count for something. They’re the ones who took off with our stuff and never looked back.”

  “They probably never looked in the back,” Catherine corrected.

  “Besides, we might be the victims here. A setup. Maybe they pulled a bait-and-switch on us.”

  Catherine humphed, wondering if that was at all possible—

  “Ahem.” A man in wrinkled plainclothes and probably a week’s worth of growth on his face came into the room, covering a yawn from working too many days straight—probably the unassuming closer for tough cases in these parts.

  We’re small potatoes—hardly worth your trouble, Catherine tried to say with her eyes.

  “Aw, where’s the cute cop from the desk?” Tara whined.

  “You’ve been turned over to me,” the man said—pleasant face, brown hair, a smidge of gray in his beard. He was tall and lanky and lean and had to fold himself awkwardly to fit at the table.

  “Are you our public defender?” Tara asked brightly.

  “No, I’m Detective Banks…. Why? Are you trying to lawyer up?” he jabbed.

  “I don’t want a lawyer. I don’t want anything but to clear up this mess and get my things back,” Catherine said as calmly and succinctly as possible, trying to regain control of the situation. She might look like she’d been buried alive and clawed her way out, but that meant she was a survivor.

  “Then can you please explain how you ended up here?” he asked, a bemused smirk on his face.

  “But I already told that tasty cop out front,” Tara pointed out.

  “Humor me.”

  “Well, you see, she wouldn’t let me go to the bath—”

  “I’ll explain,” Catherine said, cutting Tara off forcefully before she made things any worse. “It was all just a giant mistake actually….”

  -61-

  She never thought that any seven words would be as musical to her ears as, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Not until that moment when she heard, “Catherine Hemmings, you are free to go.”

  It turned out that their truck made it all the way to Iowa before the guys who took it even figured out what had gone wrong (making her wonder if perhaps she and Tara weren’t the biggest idiots in the world). So they were off-course, but not terribly so. And thankfully they were released just in time to catch the last bus to their destination. Things were looking up, until they reached the other side and found out they owed two hundred dollars in impound fees to get their truck back and, insult to injury, the lot was closed for the day.

/>   But Tara, the eternal optimist, took it as a sign. “This will work out just fine,” she said with a devilish grin. “I’ve never done it in Iowa before. It’s a goal of mine you know.”

  “Stepping foot in every state? You tried that one on me already, remember?”

  “This has nothing to do with walking, bitch.”

  “Why do you want to have sex in Iowa?” she hissed, hoping no fainthearted Iowans were nearby to hear Tara’s crass intentions for their land. “Or is this an all fifty states thing?”

  Tara glared at her in openmouthed shock. “I’m not a whore you know. Just the ‘I’ states. And ‘P’—which is done. And ‘K’—which is half done. Plus the ‘N’ ones—Dakota and Carolina are going to be a bitch, but I already did the rest.”

  Catherine stared back at her, bewildered. “You were never in Nebraska,” she challenged.

  “I figured that I should get credit for screwing a guy who was born and raised in Nebraska, seeing as how he has the place in his bone—”

  “I don’t really need to know this,” Catherine cringed.

  “What? It isn’t dirty. I’m just saying that a man born and raised in a place has it deep in his soul, so it should count at least as much as being in the state and doing it with some random transplant or drifter passing through. Maybe even more so.”

  “And why those states exactly?”

  “Because they’re pink.”

  “Excuse me?” Catherine asked, against her better judgment.

  “P-I-N-K, get it?”

  “I see what the letters stand for but—” She stopped herself. Was it really worth delving deeper? It was just Tara being Tara… as usual.

  “So I guess you’re on your own tonight.”

  “Are you serious?” Catherine exclaimed.

  “Dead.”

  “But you don’t even—”

  “If I need you I’ll call…. But I won’t be needing you. Or a place to stay,” she asserted, heading off down a totally foreign city street with no qualms or inhibitions at all.

  Now what?