Peculiar Treasures

by Gunn, Robin Jones

  “We should plan another beach day while the weather is still so nice,” Christy said. “That is, assuming you and Rick start speaking to each other again.”

  “Oh, right. There is that.”

  “Come on, why don’t you go into the Dove’s Nest now and talk to him?”

  “No, he really doesn’t like mixing business stuff with personal stuff. That would only cause another fight. Besides, I don’t have time. I have to go to a Student Services council meeting.”

  “Student Services council?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I agreed to be a representative for the senior class on the Student Services council.”

  “On top of being an RA?”

  “Overachievers for Jesus! That’s my new club. Wanna join?”

  “Katie, that’s not funny. You know you don’t — ”

  “Before you say what I know you’re going to say, the meetings are only once a month. Ruth at Student Services told me I have helpful opinions, and I think she’s right. My bias bank is always full. You know how much I enjoy sharing my views with those who are underprivileged in the opinion department. This is my chance to exercise those skills.”

  “I’m still not laughing. You know you don’t have to do this, Katie.”

  “I don’t go looking for these opportunities. They keep finding me.”

  “Well, when those opportunities find you, all you have to do is say no. It’s a miraculous little word. Only two letters. Easy to remember. Repeat after me, ‘No-o-o.’ ”

  “Yeah, yeah, very funny. You don’t have to lecture me, Little Miss College Graduate who got sick during graduation and right before her wedding because she was trying to do too much.”

  “Truce.” Christy put up both her hands.

  “Besides,” Katie said with a swish of her flaming hair, “I can say no whenever I want.” As an afterthought she sarcastically added, “I might not be the champion of no the way Rick is: ‘No, I won’t kiss you.’ ‘No, I won’t bend the rules.’ ‘No, I won’t further our commitment until I’m good and ready.’ But I do know how to say no when it counts.”

  “Yes, you do.” Christy reached over and took hold of Katie’s arm before she got out of Baby Hummer. “Listen, I want you to know that I applaud what you did Saturday night. Walking out of Rick’s apartment was probably the best choice you could have made. And I know this is all very idealistic and sappy, but I’m going to say it anyway. Katie, your days of being single will go quickly. One day you’ll wake up, and you’ll be married. You’ll have the rest of your life to spend all those saved up kisses. The rest of your life, Katie. Remember that, okay? Trust me on this. You will be so glad you didn’t compromise. All your noes will turn into a lot of happy yeses, and you’ll be glad you didn’t spend your kisses now.”

  Katie gave Christy a half-hearted smile. “Thanks for the old-married-lady advice, Mrs. Spencer. I knew you would find a way to slip those cotton candy castles into this conversation.”

  “You want to talk about castles and princes? I’ll tell you something else, Katie. My opinion of Rick Doyle has gone up about a hundred points. He’s showing you how much he cares about you. He’s trying to establish a strong foundation for your relationship. That’s pure gold. Very princely.”

  “I know.”

  “I have a thought about the flowers too, but I’ll tell you later. I have to get to work. Call me tonight, okay?”

  “Chris?” Katie leaned over as Christy closed the door. Christy turned back and looked at Katie through the open window.

  “Thanks. Thanks for always being there for me and for being my truth-teller.”

  Christy smiled. “I love you, Katie.”

  “I know you do. I love you too.”

  Katie drove back to Rancho feeling comforted and highly agitated at the same time. The comfort came from the strength she always gained from her heart-to-heart times with Christy. The agitation came from things being unsettled with Rick. Part of her wanted to go back, march into the Dove’s Nest, and get the necessary conversation over with, whether Rick wanted to have it during working hours or not.

  She knew that kind of approach would only cause more problems. At the core, she wanted resolution with Rick and not more tangles. She also knew she didn’t want the relationship to end.

  As she was leaving Baby Hummer in the parking lot at Crown Hall, Nicole called to her. “Katie, up here!” She waved from the rooftop patio. “Come up!”

  Katie joined her at one of the patio tables on the rooftop. Nicole’s laptop and three textbooks were spread across the table.

  “I’m glad I saw you. I’ve been wondering how things are going. You would never know we lived on the same floor the way we keep missing each other.”

  “I know. It’s been pretty intense. Everything is fine. The Kissing Wall turned out good. A little too good, maybe.” In the back of her mind Katie had assigned some of the blame for the Saturday night showdown with Rick to the way she had feasted on The Kissing Wall words.

  “I think it turned out great. So did The Peculiar Treasures Wall. I love the verse by your picture.”

  “Em was going to pick one for me. I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “She did a good job.”

  “What time is it?” Katie turned Nicole’s wrist her way to read the time on her watch. “I’ll take a look at it before I head across campus for a Student Services meeting.”

  “Could you do a quick favor for me before you leave? Help me to move this table. It needs to be more in the shade.”

  They worked together, scooting the table over, and came close to the edge of the enclosed deck. Katie looked down on the parking lot. “You really feel like a bird in a nest up here, don’t you? You can see everything that’s going on, but no knows you’re watching.”

  “I know. Cool, isn’t it?” Nicole looked over the rim. “Hey, is that Rick? This is great. You can watch your boyfriend on his way to visit you. How fun is that?”

  Katie’s heart did a fish-flop. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she muttered. Every instinct told her to hide. She didn’t think she could face him. Not yet.

  Leaving Nicole on the roof, Katie dashed down the stairwell. She thought if she took the stairs instead of the elevator she could avoid running into Rick. Her plan seemed to work. That is, until she reached the lobby.

  There he was, standing next to one of the chairs looking down at the screen on his cell phone.

  Ducking back into the stairwell before he could spot her, Katie leaned against the wall and tried to think how she could get to the other side of the building without going through the main lobby. Then her cell phone rang.

  Katie grabbed her phone and stared at it, paralyzed. Of course it was Rick. The high notes of his custom ring echoed loudly in the stairwell. Katie stared at the phone, trying to decide if she should answer and get this moment over with or let Rick leave a message. If he left a message, then she would at least know by the tone of his voice if he was still upset with her.

  Jamming her phone back into the side pocket of her shoulder bag, Katie decided to wait it out in the enclave of the stairwell. Her phone stopped ringing on the third ring. It was supposed to ring five times before her voice mail picked up. Now Katie didn’t know what to do. If Rick had hung up without leaving a message, she wouldn’t be able to tell if he was upset. She also wouldn’t know if he was still in the lobby, or if he had left.

  She was about to slide open the door to peek when the door swung toward her. Katie leaned back just in time to avoid a collision. Rick stepped into the stairwell and stood only inches from her, looking at her with his hot cocoa eyes.

  “You were loud,” Rick said.

  27

  “I know. I was loud.” Katie felt all her defenses against Rick melt into an invisible puddle there in the stairwell. “You’re right. I was loud, I was rude, and I was way out of line last Saturday night and — ”

  “Katie, I was talking about your phone.” A grin tugged at the corner of Rick’s mouth
. “The ringer on your phone was loud. I could hear it bouncing off the walls. That’s how I knew you were in here.”

  “Oh.”

  Rick narrowed his eyes. “Katie, I don’t want to fight like that with you. We have to work this out.”

  She nodded. “Are you saying you want to keep going?”

  “Absolutely. Why? What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking a lot of crazy things.” Part of Katie wanted to explain to Rick about The Kissing Wall and how thoughts had been directed to their next “first” kiss. Before they even got in the car Saturday night for their date and Rick had showered her with flowers, Katie’s hopes were elevated. It seemed a moot point now. Better to go on than to discuss what went wrong and, as Rick would say, “dissect everything down to the last molecule.”

  “So why are you hiding in the stairwell?” he asked.

  Katie flashbacked to the guy hiding in the wardrobe in Sabrina and Tasha’s room. She was doing the same thing. In the pit of her stomach she realized that everything she raged against on Saturday night — the restrictions, rules, and guidelines — was born of an ancient fervor. Every rule ever established, from the beginning of time, invited mutiny.

  “I guess I was hiding because I was afraid of how this conversation between us might go.”

  “Katie.” Rick’s voice was tender as he held out his hand. “Come on, we need to go for a ride.”

  “I have a meeting.”

  “When?”

  “In about fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, so we’ll make it a short ride. Come on.”

  Katie took his hand, and they walked to the car. Rick opened Katie’s door. Before she got in, she noticed something on the seat.

  A single California poppy.

  Her cheeks warmed. “Rick, where did you get this?”

  “I have my sources.” He looked pleased.

  Katie twirled the poppy between her thumb and forefinger. “Thank you.” She gave him a big smile.

  “You’re welcome. I take it that says more to you than the big mixed bouquet.”

  “Much more. Thank you, Rick.”

  He smiled. “Go ahead. Get in.”

  “I really am supposed to go to a meeting over at Student Services.”

  “In twelve minutes, right?”

  She nodded.

  His expression coaxed her more than his words. With his soft brown eyes, he gave her the you-are-the-red-headed-woman-of-my-dreams look.

  Katie couldn’t resist. “Oh, all right.” She slipped into the passenger seat, and Rick closed the door. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see. Not far.”

  Rick drove to the upper campus. He stopped the car in the gravel parking lot by the meadow where Todd and Christy’s wedding had been four months earlier. The meadow grass was now a dry, pale yellow. The palm trees rustled their hula skirts furiously in a strong wind that was kicking up its heels in its own dance steps.

  Rick opened the car’s trunk and took out an ice chest. Katie gave him a skeptical look.

  “Trust me,” Rick said. He led Katie across the meadow to one of the benches along the walking trail. The view from the edge of the plateau was breathtaking because the winds had blown away the smog and marine layer that usually hung over the coast. They could see all the way to Catalina.

  “Wow,” Katie said. “I’ve heard you could see Catalina from here, but I never checked it out on a clear day. This view is amazing. I never asked you, Rick, have you been to Catalina?”

  “No.”

  “We should go sometime. I think you’d really like it. It feels so remote.”

  Rick was busy setting up something from the ice chest. When Katie looked down, he held out to her two bowls of mint chip ice cream.

  She laughed.

  “I believe you and I have some unfinished business.”

  Katie looked at both the bowls. The ice cream was melting fast. “Are you going to tell me which one came from a round container and which one from a square container?”

  Rick’s grin was full of mischief. “No,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  Katie took a spoonful from the first one. “Nice,” she said.

  Then she took a taste of the second one. “Hmmm. I’m not sure.”

  She went back and forth with a few more tastes of each and finally said, “This one,” pointing to the first bowl.

  “Really?” Rick said. “That’s your final choice, then?”

  “Yes. Which one was it? Round or square?”

  “Check the bottom of the bowl.”

  Katie held up the bowl and saw a piece of paper taped to the bottom that read “Round.” She read the answer reluctantly since round was Rick’s preferred choice of ice cream containers.

  “Is that so? Round, huh? Imagine that. So, are you telling me that ice cream in round containers is the best-tasting ice cream?” Unfortunately Rick looked really cute when he was smug.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, you win. Get over yourself, Doyle. The truth is, they both tasted pretty good and . . .” Katie lifted the other bowl, expecting to see a tag that read “Square.”

  “Hey, this one says round too!”

  She reached over and opened the lid of the ice chest, exposing Rick’s taste-testing supplies. The ice chest contained one carton of ice cream. And it was round.

  “Uh, Rickster — and I do use the name accurately — what’s with the skewed taste test?”

  He still was grinning irresistibly. “What can I say? I went to the highly recommended Grocery Kart, and would you believe, they only had mint chip ice cream in round containers? I would have set up the test with both options, but the Grocery Kart was uncooperative with the supplies.”

  “You’re pretty happy with yourself, aren’t you?”

  He gave her a charming shrug, but his powers of persuasion had stopped working on Katie.

  “Why did you do this? It was pointless. You set me up.”

  “It was supposed to be a joke.”

  “Yeah, a joke on me.”

  “Katie.” Rick reached his arm around the back of the bench and leaned closer. “Hey, you’re taking this the wrong way. I really intended to get both the round and the square boxes and finish the crazy taste test. The Grocery Kart honestly only had round ice cream. So I thought it would be funny to run the test this way. It was supposed to be a joke.”

  “You and I don’t have the same sense of humor.” Katie felt herself calming down as she thought through Rick’s logic. The point was that he was trying to do something clever and fun. Yet in the same way the huge mixed bouquet hadn’t sat well with her, the ice cream taste test didn’t sit well with her either.

  “You’re right. We don’t have the same sense of humor. You and I are opposite in a lot of ways. But you know what they say about opposites.”

  “Yeah, we attract each other.”

  Rick tugged gently at the ends of her hair, rubbing the fine strands between his thumb and forefinger. “Katie, you need to know that I’m trying here. I’m trying to figure out how to do things right in our relationship. I’ve put on the turn signal, as you called it, but nothing is going the way I thought it would.”

  “Do you think we’re trying too hard?” Katie asked. “I mean, we rolled along pretty well the first part of this year.”

  Rick nodded. “I don’t think either of us was as concerned then about what should happen next.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “You’re right.”

  Rick paused and in a lower voice said, “I have to tell you, Katie, I’m in uncharted territory in our relationship. I’ve never continued a relationship this long. I don’t know how to ease over into the next lane. I’m trying but . . . I don’t know. Maybe we’re not ready. Maybe we’re not supposed to go anywhere beyond the great friendship we’ve had all these months. Maybe we’re done.”

  His last line ran through her like ice.

  “Do you think we’re done?” Katie’s heart
was pounding.

  “No, I don’t. Not yet.”

  “I don’t think we’re done either.”

  “Good. At least we’re not opposites on that point.” Rick grinned.

  Katie grinned back. “It seems like figuring out our relationship shouldn’t be this difficult.”

  Rick laughed.

  “Why is that so funny?”

  “It’s funny because every couple I know has to figure all this out for themselves. I think a few basic principles apply across the board, but for the most part, every relationship is a signature piece. They’re all different. God writes a different story for every couple.”

  Katie let Rick’s words fill the space between them. She thought of Julia’s hot-on-God’s-heels theology and knew that the only way for her and Rick to know what was next for them was to stay close to the Lord. He would make it clear.

  “I do have one question for you, though,” Katie said.

  “What’s that?”

  “What are your plans for the rest of the ice cream?”

  Rick laughed and pulled out the container. Sitting side by side, the two of them dipped their plastic spoons into the round carton.

  The wind had died down, and now a warm breeze spun figure eights between them as they gazed out at the ocean miles away.

  “Remember when you were an elf?” Rick asked.

  “What?”

  “In high school. You were an elf at the mall during Christmas. Remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Or should I say, I tried to forget. Thanks for bringing that memory back to the forefront.”

  “I’ve never forgotten how you looked that day in the car with Christy.”

  “Do you mean in my Santa’s little helper outfit complete with curly-toed shoes and pointed ears?”

  Rick nodded. “You tried to hide from me that day too, remember?”

  Katie recalled all too well the way she had scrunched down in the passenger seat of the car, hoping Rick would keep walking and not stop to talk to Christy. But he stopped, all right.

  “Why do you think you hide from me, Katie?”