“It’s the flyers,” Jake replied. “Nicky and I delivered hundreds of them.”
Toni threw her arms around him in a hug, fulfilling a fantasy I bet she’d long held. “This is wonderful, Jake. Thank you, thank you.”
“Nicky delivered most of the flyers.”
I gave Toni an offended look. “Yeah, why don’t I get a hug?”
Toni laughed and walked right by. “This calls for a celebration. Drinks for everyone in the house, my treat.”
“Hey, big spender,” Jake said, sardonically. “There’s nobody here but us.”
“I’ve always wanted to use that line,” Toni said, laughing. “And I couldn’t afford to say it if the place was full, now, could I? So unless you want to look a gift chardonnay in the mouth, I suggest you go get that bottle right now.”
“Right away,” Jake hurried to the back.
“By the way, we have another reason to celebrate,” I announced.
Toni looked at me, puzzled. “What?”
I grinned. “Jackie is pregnant.”
“She’s pregnant?”
“So it seems. But I have no idea how that could have happened.”
“I suspect it was the usual way. You know, little boy doggie meets little girl doggie, the birds and the bees and all that jazz.”
“But I thought she’d been spayed. I got her when she was already a year old. I guess I just assumed…”
Toni wagged a finger at me, and I realized I’d set myself up for another of her zingers. “Well, you know what they say about people who assume…”
“Ha-ha. But shouldn’t the vet have told me she’d never been spayed? I don’t even know if she can carry the pups to term. She’s such a tiny thing. What if the father is a Great Dane?”
Toni slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, shit! That would be terrible.”
“On the other hand, if the vet tells me she’s in no danger I’ll have to start preparing for puppies.”
Toni whooped. “What color will you paint the nursery?”
now that he’s seen my fat behind
The next morning I was at the vet clinic, watching like a nervous parent as the doctor gently palpated, then listened to Jackie’s tummy. Dr. McNeil, a pleasant-looking woman in her late thirties, took the stethoscope out of her ears and wrapped it around her neck.
She turned to face me. “You’re right. Jackie Chan is pregnant.”
Jackie looked at me with a fooled-you expression.
“Oh, my. This is—” I stopped as I realized what that meant. A houseful of puppies, all of which would need training, all for whom I’d have to find a home. Let’s be realistic, I’d fall in love with all of them and never give them up. I gathered Jackie into my arms and she buried her nose into the crook of my elbow. “Is she all right? What about the pups? Can she carry them to term?”
“Without knowing the date she was impregnated I can’t tell with certainty, but from what I can determine, she’s probably about one month into her pregnancy.”
“I know when it happened.” I pulled out my cell phone and clicked on the calendar.
“Dogs gestate for two months, give or take a couple of days, which means Jackie is due in about four weeks. I can make out two heartbeats. The father must have been tiny because the pups are very small.”
This came as a surprise. “Only two? I always thought dogs had large litters.”
“Bigger dogs have larger litters, but tiny dogs like Jackie often have only one or two pups. Mind you, there might be more than two. I can’t tell unless we take an X-ray.”
“Not too many, I hope. I don’t know what I would do with a houseful of puppies.” I hesitated. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. When I adopted Jackie, I took her in for a checkup, and nobody told me she hadn’t been spayed.”
Dr. McNeil picked up Jackie’s file and flipped back a few pages. “Here’s the answer.” She pulled out a form and handed it to me.
I recognized it as one I’d filled out myself three years earlier during Jackie’s first visit. I looked at the spot she indicated. In the yes box next to Spayed was a checkmark. “I guess I took it for granted.”
Dr. McNeil nodded. “Little dogs often bleed so lightly that, unless you’re really looking for it, you might never notice. In the same way, tiny dogs have tiny organs, and we wouldn’t be able to tell whether a dog was spayed or not from a physical.” She chuckled. “I hope you’re looking forward to an expanded family.”
I smiled. “I’m getting more and more used to the idea, as long as Jackie isn’t at risk.”
“Don’t worry. You have a healthy little dog, and she’ll be around for a good long time. Smaller breeds like Yorkies have a life expectancy of fifteen to sixteen years.”
A few minutes later Jackie and I were on our way home, and I was eighty dollars poorer. “Listen, little girl, business may be improving, but you can’t make a habit of going to the groomers and the vet every other day, or I’ll go broke.”
Ruf.
“‘Rough’ is your answer to all my complaints, isn’t it? You couldn’t care less about my financial woes.”
She sauntered ahead happily. I glanced at my watch and decided I had time for a brief walk in the park. I turned around, detouring down the block with Jackie trotting happily along.
Once in the off-leash area, I directed Jackie to our usual spot and released her. Instead of staying by my side, she darted off to another little Yorkie a few hundred yards away. Ah, Charlie was here. I strode over to join Charlie and Kim.
“It’s been ages since I saw you,” Kim said in a reproachful tone. “Every time I take Charlie to the park, he gets so excited, and then he’s so disappointed when we leave without seeing Jackie.”
I laughed. “We’ve been working really hard at the restaurant. I haven’t been taking Jackie out nearly as often as I should. And now, Jackie might not be able to come to the park for a while. I just found out she’s pregnant. I’ll have to keep her in once the pups are born, at least until they’re weaned.”
“You decided to breed her?” she asked.
“Actually, it was a surprise.” I related the story of Jackie’s wild night.
“When was this exactly?” she asked, suddenly rapt.
“About a month ago.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “Charlie pulled a disappearing act around the same time. The next morning I picked him up at the clinic on Church.”
I looked at her in amazement. “Do you think…?” I stopped. This was too much of a coincidence.
“It couldn’t be.” But there was something false about her reaction. It was as if she’d already known. Jackie was busy licking Charlie’s nose. “I think maybe you and I are about to be grandparents,” she said. “We’ll be sort of related, in a way.”
As I walked home, I couldn’t help wondering if Kim had anything to do with Jackie’s disappearance that night. Her dog just happened to disappear and turn up at the same clinic. It was all too fantastic to be a coincidence. And if she did have something to do with it, what did that mean? Why would she have engineered that kind of a stunt—unless it was to search my house.
Crap, I really was losing it. Was there anyone I didn’t suspect?
*
It was six forty-five in the morning, I was dripping wet from my shower, and Jackie was already whining to go out. I realized, now, that Jackie’s behavior over the past few weeks was simply that of a mother-to-be. She spent more time sleeping, and when she needed to pee, it was now.
“Okay, okay, Jackie. I wish you’d let me towel myself off.” I hurried downstairs, tying my bathrobe. “It’s not even seven yet. Can’t you wait a few minutes?”
She scurried out and made a beeline for the side of the house. Oh, no, don’t tell me the gate is open again. I ran out, and sure enough, not only was the gate wide open, but Jackie was nowhere in sight.
“Jackie!” I yelled at the top of my lungs and ran down the side of the house. When I got to the sidewalk, I spotted her squatti
ng on Mitchell’s front lawn. “Jackie, come!” She saw me, and she dashed off. “Jackie!”
Barefoot, I chased after her up the street, screaming like a banshee and with the fronts of my bathrobe flapping about. God only knows what I was exposing. Thank goodness it was early, and the street deserted. Three doors up, Jackie came to a stop and sniffed the ground.
“Jackie,” I yelled again. She turned and looked at me and, just as I was about to grab her, she shot away. I was sprinting as fast as I could, holding up the bottom of my bathrobe to keep from tripping. At last I got close to her. If I didn’t grab her now, she’d be at Dundas in two seconds, and the traffic there was murder. She’d get herself killed.
In a last explosion of energy, I went into a football lunge, landed on my belly on the lawn and slid to a stop. The back of my bathrobe flew above my waist and came swooping over my head. Jackie, however, was safe in my arms, and that was all that mattered. I was scrambling to my feet, trying to hold Jackie while simultaneously rewrapping my robe, when…
“Oh, good. You got her.”
I spun around, and not ten feet from me Mitchell was grinning like a kid who’d been served his favorite dessert.
“Oh, er, Mitchell. Hi.” The blood rushed to my face. I could only imagine the spectacle he’d just witnessed. Too bad it’d been my fat behind. Now he was bound to have lost interest in me.
“I haven’t seen much of you lately. That is,” he continued with a playful twinkle in his eyes, “until now.”
My embarrassment turned to anger. “I’m sure you enjoyed the show, didn’t you? If you were any kind of a nice guy, you wouldn’t purposely embarrass me.” I marched off toward my house with as much dignity as I could muster in my grass-stained bathrobe.
Behind me, Mitchell called out, “Hey, I was just trying to help.” I heard him chuckle. “By the way, that was a damn fine dive. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
I walked around to my back entrance, locked the gate and slammed the door shut behind me. I was furious, but was my rage directed at him or at myself for caring what he thought? If only I hadn’t invited him to dinner on Sunday. A few days wasn’t nearly enough time for me to get over this awkwardness.
I snuck over to the living room window and peeked from behind the curtains just in time to see Mitchell walking up his path. Damn him for being so cute. Almost as if he’d heard my thoughts, he paused in his tracks, lifted his gaze to me and waved.
Shit. Now I felt even more foolish.
she needs a man in her life
Suddenly business was improving. On the fourth night, Jake was in a panic. “How are we going to seat all these people?” He counted the reservations. “Can you believe this? We’re overbooked. It never occurred to me to count the number of guests. Just last week, two tables was a good night.”
“How many places are we short?” I looked around the empty room. Originally, Toni and I had made the decision to have fewer tables, on the theory that more tables would only emphasize how empty we were. Could it already be time to add some seating? “Are you sure we can’t seat another few people?”
“We need one more table for four.”
“Wait a minute.” An idea took shape. The prep table from the kitchen. “Jake, come help me.” Together we pulled and tugged all the dining room tables away from the window, until we’d opened a space for one extra table. Covered with a tablecloth, no one would be able to tell the difference.
“They’re all different shapes and sizes, anyhow,” Jake pointed out. “But what do we do for chairs?”
I rubbed my chin. “There’s no way four chairs will fit into my car, but Toni’s is big enough.” I glanced at my watch. “She’s probably on her way here now. Call her on her cell and ask her to swing by the antique shops near Roncesvalles. They have plenty of secondhand chairs. Tell her we need four.”
Jake picked up the phone. “I guess it would be too much to ask for them to be fuchsia?”
“I’ll tell you what, Jake. If it offends your sense of decor that much, you can paint them yourself tomorrow.”
“Me and my big mouth,” he muttered.
While Jake punched in Toni’s number, I hurried to the kitchen and gathered salt and pepper shakers, candles and holders, and four full place settings. “Now help me set this table.” We hurriedly placed everything on the table and stood back.
Jake looked at the ceiling. “None of the chandeliers are centered anymore.”
I looked at my watch. “The first customers will be here in less than an hour.”
“There’s a hardware store about a block up the street.” Without further explanation, he was out the door. Ten minutes later, he was back with packages of screwin hooks.
He climbed on top of a table and screwed a perfectly centered hook in the ceiling, then took hold of the nearest chandelier and clipped the chain to the new hook. When he finished, the only table without an overhead chandelier was the new one in front of the window. Jake disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with a candelabra Toni and I had bought months ago but never used.
“Voila!” he declared, centering it. “And just imagine how glamorous that will look from outside.”
“I could have done that myself,” I teased.
“Well, you didn’t. That just goes to show, no matter how independent you think you are, you still need a man in your life.”
I laughed. “Sure I do, like a bullet in the head.” But for some reason, Mitchell immediately popped into my mind.
Minutes before the first customers were due to arrive, a harried-looking Toni came stumbling in through the back entrance. “I need help.” Jake and I followed her to the alley and burst out laughing. The roof of Toni’s beautiful BMW was stacked high with chairs.
“This looks like an IKEA commercial,” Jake said.
“How many chairs did you get?” I asked.
“Ten. The owner made me a deal. He agreed to charge me ten bucks apiece, as long as I took them all.”
“You’re good at this. You should do all our negotiating.”
“I don’t intend on ever doing that again. Do you have any idea how many people were staring at me on my way here?”
We brought the chairs inside, washed off the dust and decided that only seven of them were salvageable. Jake nodded approvingly. “Now we don’t have to turn anyone away.”
The bell above the door tinkled and Jake hurried out to greet the guests. For the rest of the evening, we all rushed about, pitching in wherever we were needed. Charles, Scott, Marley and I diced, chopped and blended as fast as we could. Even Toni ran about, helping Jake with the service. By the end of the evening, when we tallied the numbers, we had served eighteen people, twelve bottles of wine and twenty-two courses. Our Skinny Menu had brought in more money in one night than our full-fat one ever had.
Toni stared at the balance sheet in disbelief. “This is amazing. If we’re that successful so soon, it won’t be long that we’ll be fully booked all the time. We’ll need more tables, more chairs. Maybe this place isn’t big enough. We’ll need a larger space.”
“Whoa there, partner. Not so fast. I’ve been studying the reservation book and there’s a lot we can do before we even think of moving to a bigger place. We can stay right here and still increase our numbers.”
“How do you propose we do that? Stack our customers like sardines?” Toni asked.
“Don’t be silly. We’re still a far way from being that busy. But look here.” I pointed at the open page. “Most bookings are for eight o’clock. If we steer our customers toward earlier and later times, we can fit in two sittings per table each evening.”
I flipped a few pages, pointing along the way. On every page, the early hours had few bookings, as did the later hours.
Toni put down the deposit book and nodded. “That’s smart. Tell them we only have openings at seven and nine. Most people will accept that. If they argue, we find a cancellation.”
*
When I left for home
later, I was beyond tired. But I didn’t care. The restaurant was taking off, and the money would soon pour in. No more financial worries—now there was something to look forward to. And in just a few days I would trap Harry, and I would no longer be a suspect. And just as important, I’d no longer go around suspecting everyone around me. Life was definitely looking up.
I turned onto my walk, darting a quick glance at Mitchell’s dark front window. He was probably fast asleep by now, not surprising since most people were in bed by the time I got home. It was just as well, I told myself. After that little episode on the street a few mornings ago, he was just about the last person in the world I wanted to see. If that was true, why did my heart sink when I didn’t catch a glimpse of him?
I walked into my house and punched in my alarm code. “Jackie, I’m here,” I called, expecting her to run over and greet me. “Jackie,” I called out again, heading for the kitchen. Sure enough, she was napping on the mat in front of the sink. “There you are, little girl. What’s the matter? Is your tummy hurting?” I carried her to the back door for her evening pee-pee. She slipped out by her doggie door and I watched through the window as she hopped down the steps slowly. Within two minutes, she was back.
Showered and in fresh pajamas, I crawled into bed with Jackie. “Here, baby. You can sleep right here.” I moved the second pillow to the foot of the bed and gently placed her on it. Soon she was snoring.
*
I was having my second mug of coffee with Jackie on my lap and one hand on her tummy when I feel a small flutter against my palm. Was this what I thought it was? I pressed gently and held my breath. Yes, it was. I could feel faint flickers, like butterfly wings. Jackie looked up at me. “I can feel them, Jackie. I can feel your babies.”
She squirmed out of my hands, hopped to the floor and lumbered to her favorite spot, the rug in front of the sink. Poor little thing, she was probably uncomfortable. “It won’t be long, little girl. One month, that’s all.”
As I left the house, I noticed an envelope sticking out of my mailbox. I pulled it out and tore it open. Inside was a note.
Getting Skinny (A Chef Landry Mystery) Page 23