Down Home Dixie

by Pamela Browning

  It didn’t really matter. She was comfortable in her own bed. Kyle was beside her. And all was right with her world.

  The next morning, which was Dixie’s day off, Andrea and Twinkle wandered in through the back door as Dixie and Kyle were eating waffles.

  “Hello, all,” Andrea said. She was still wearing the jeans and checked shirt of the day before, but she’d lost the banana clip. Her hair needed brushing.

  Without saying another word, Andrea continued on upstairs.

  “Andrea?” Dixie called. “Are you all right?” What she really wanted to know was Andrea’s time of departure so she and Kyle could plan a celebration.

  “I’ve got a pounding headache. Too many melon sours at the Pee Dee Saloon.” This was the in crowd’s favorite bar in Florence.

  “There’s aspirin in the hall bath medicine cabinet,” Dixie called out.

  Andrea mumbled something, and Twinkle, released from his leash, came racing down the stairs. He was in full pursuit of Muffin, who hadn’t shown her face around the house since Dixie brought her home.

  Kyle and Dixie leaped up at the same time. Muffin stopped, stood her ground outside the sewing room, and hissed and spat. This didn’t deter Twinkle, who one-upped the cat by yapping and growling and snapping in a way that would have been cartoonish if it hadn’t posed a danger.

  “You get Twinkle,” Dixie yelled. “I’ll grab Muffin.” Dixie had no idea where the cat, who seemed terrified for her life, had been hiding all this time.

  “I’d rather you get Twinkle,” Kyle said, lunging for the dog. He managed to curve his hands around the dog’s sleek little body, but Twinkle instantly wiggled free and raced full speed around the living room. In the meantime, Muffin had stopped yowling and jumped toward the back of the couch, where her lack of front claws caused her to fall to the floor, scrambled up and rocketed to the kitchen where she vaulted to the top of the counter. Unfortunately, she knocked a bottle of Karo Syrup to the floor, breaking it in the process. Syrup began to ooze under the refrigerator and toward the table and chairs.

  “Where is Andrea?” Dixie shouted. “Can’t she control her dog?”

  “Sounds like she’s throwing up,” Kyle informed her, angling his head toward the stairs.

  Dixie heard the unmistakable sound of retching. Right now she didn’t have time to deal with that. She approached Muffin warily. “Nice kitty. Nice Muffin.”

  “Can you name her something else? Like Godzilla?” Kyle asked.

  He had a point. The cat’s fur was fluffed in the manner of someone who had stuck a finger into an electric socket. Her eyes blazed green fire. Her whiskers stuck straight out like daggers. Dixie would be crazy to pick up an animal who appeared so fearsome.

  She picked her up anyway. Immediately Muffin sagged and shrank into a helpless little fur piece with no bones. The cat’s eyes closed, and as Dixie hiked her higher on her shoulder, Muffin began to emit a cautious purr.

  “I’m taking Muffin into the sewing room,” Dixie said over the Yorkie’s barking and growling.

  “You’re leaving me with him?” Kyle said incredulously from the dining room, where he’d cornered Twinkle.

  “You bet.” Dixie retreated behind a closed door and listened to the racket while she sat and cuddled Muffin.

  “Stop it, you dumb dog!” shouted Kyle. “Get over here. No, not over here, over there. Stop it!”

  Dixie buried her face in Muffin’s long fur. “You must be hungry, you poor thing. You missed your welcome-home meal because of that nasty dog.”

  Muffin purred louder and began to knead Dixie’s thigh with her clawless front paws. There was something comforting about holding the cat in her lap. I could get used to this, Dixie told herself.

  “Got him!” Kyle yelled in triumph on the other side of the door. Dixie heard a scrabbling of feet and then nothing else.

  “Kyle?”

  “It’s okay. I’m banishing Attila to the garage.”

  “Do that,” Dixie murmured as Muffin butted her head against her idle hand. She figured that was cat language for “keep petting me,” so she did. Frantic barking ensued from the general direction of the garage. Dixie wondered when the next plane left for Ohio and what she could do to make sure Andrea and Twinkle were on it.

  Kyle didn’t return, and soon she heard the phone in her home office ringing. Hugging Muffin to her chest, Dixie ran to answer it. Maybe it was the airline calling to confirm Andrea’s flight. Her heart sank when she heard Milo’s voice.

  “Hi, Dixie. May I please speak to Andrea?”

  Dixie leaned out the door to get a glimpse of what was going on upstairs. Andrea was still in the bathroom, and the water in the sink was running.

  “She’s indisposed,” she told Milo.

  “Will you tell her I called? I’m planning to ask if she’d like to go to the movies tonight.”

  “Andrea’s supposed to fly back to Columbus, Ohio.” Dixie didn’t add the sooner the better.

  “She might change her ticket. We had a good time last night.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Yes, Andrea’s a real partier,” Milo said.

  “I gathered.”

  “In fact, I hope she stays around a while.”

  “Uh-huh.” Muffin was really purring now.

  “Have her phone me, okay?” Milo sounded eager, like a little kid.

  “Of course, Milo.” She made up her mind, I am definitely going to have to yank the welcome mat out from under Andrea.

  As soon as she hung up, she settled Muffin in the kitchen with a bowl of dry cat food and some water. Then she marched upstairs and rapped on the guest-room door.

  “Andrea! I need to talk with you.”

  “Come in. Do you have Twinkle with you? Where is he, anyway?”

  Dixie opened the door to find Andrea lying in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. “Kyle took Twinkle out. For a walk.” Maybe this was true. It could be true.

  “That’s good,” Andrea said, closing her eyes. They’d sunk in their sockets, and she was uncommonly pale. The bed, of course, was still not on a frame; mattress and box springs rested on the floor, which meant that Dixie loomed over Andrea. It seemed weird.

  “Andrea,” Dixie began.

  “I’m coming down with a cold.”

  Dixie let the words register for a long moment. She wondered if there was a chance that Andrea hadn’t really spoken them. Andrea may have said, “I think my rummy down is sold,” though that didn’t make any sense.

  “Excuse me?” Dixie said.

  “A cold. I probably got it from the people sitting on either side of me on the plane. I was stuck in the middle because all the aisle and window seats were taken. Those guys were coughing and sneezing the whole time.”

  “Maybe you just had a little too much to drink last night,” Dixie said hopefully.

  “My throat is on fire and my eyes feel hot. Do you have any cold medicine?”

  “Not much,” Dixie said. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to get home as soon as you can so you’ll be more comfortable?”

  If this was ungracious, Andrea apparently didn’t notice. “Oh, I can’t fly when I’ve got a cold. It’s a bad thing to do. Germs get forced into the eustachian tubes and people go deaf from it. It happened to my friend’s mother. Deaf as a post because she flew with a cold.”

  “I’ll see if I can find something,” Dixie said, backing out of the room. The last thing she needed to catch was some awful respiratory bug that could lay her up for a week or more.

  Kyle was viciously hammering together a birdhouse in the garage when she arrived there.

  “Kyle,” she said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  He stopped hammering. “No, we don’t. I tied him to that sawhorse over there.” He gestured toward Twinkle, who woofed.

  “I don’t mean the dog. I’m referring to Andrea. She’s sick with a cold. Or at least she says she is. She doesn’t want to fly home because germs might rise up her eustachian tubes
and make her deaf.”

  Kyle laid his hammer aside. “What?”

  “Deaf. Andrea’s not flying anywhere for a while, and I don’t have it in my heart to make a sick woman leave my house.”

  “You’re too nice, Dixie. I’ll talk to her.” He started toward the house.

  “I suspect she’s naked under the blankets,” Dixie warned him.

  “Trust me, her completely naked body won’t do much for me.” Kyle kept walking.

  “Kyle!”

  “Neither would her fully clothed body in case you’re worried about it.” He turned around, hands on hips.

  “Gee, you’re cute when you’re mad,” she said.

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Kyle, if you could—please tell Andrea to call Milo.”

  “With pleasure,” Kyle muttered.

  Dixie puttered around in the garage, sweeping up wood chips, pushing aside a bag of fertilizer so she could reach the dustpan. Maybe she should have accompanied Kyle to Andrea’s room for this discussion. On the other hand, she trusted him completely. It was just that she would have liked to hear how it was going.

  She went back in the house when she ran out of things to do in the garage. She found Kyle sitting at the kitchen table staring moodily into a glass of iced tea. He’d cleaned up the syrup from the floor.

  “Well?” Dixie asked.

  “She’s pretty sick,” he said. “I reminded her that it’s tax season, and she says she’s handling the workload from here, thanks to her laptop and a phone. I suggested that she might be in the way, and she reminded me that you and I are out of the house most of the time due to our jobs. I told her to get out, and she sneezed at me.”

  “I get the picture,” Dixie said as she sank into a chair beside him.

  “I’m sorry, Dixie,” Kyle said bleakly. “I didn’t expect this.”

  “I’ll take her some throat lozenges, the zinc-and-vitamin kind that are supposed to get rid of a cold before it starts.”

  “Is it possible she’s malingering because she’s spying on us?”

  “She and Milo hit it off big,” Dixie informed him. “Maybe she plans to make him fall in love with her.”

  “By pretending she has a cold? Now, that’s a new one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  They stared at each other glumly across the kitchen table.

  “Kyle? Dixie?” Andrea’s voice sounded strained as it wafted weakly down the stairwell.

  “What now?” Kyle muttered.

  “I’ll go,” Dixie said, getting up again. “I was going to get her the lozenges anyway.”

  “No, I will,” Kyle said.

  “Together,” Dixie said, offering her hand, so they climbed the stairs and pushed open Andrea’s door.

  Their houseguest was pathetic. Her nose was now red, and she was wiping her runny nose. “Do you have any tissues?” she asked Dixie.

  “I’ll get them.” Dixie went to her own bathroom and grabbed a new box of tissues, as well as the lozenges and an unopened squeeze bottle of nasal decongestant.

  “Thanks,” Andrea said when she reappeared. “I’m sorry about this. I do hope to stay and explore this thing with Milo, but I didn’t expect to get sick.”

  “Huh,” said Dixie.

  “As soon as you get well, you’ll have to leave,” Kyle said.

  “Where’s Twinkle?”

  “In the garage, chewing on something,” Kyle told her.

  Dixie hadn’t seen the Yorkie chewing anything, and it occurred to her that Kyle was making this up. She shot him a skeptical glance out of the corner of her eye.

  “Could you bring him to me?” Andrea asked plaintively, reaching for the lozenges.

  “I’ll send him right up,” Kyle said. His voice was gruff. He wheeled and stalked out.

  “Milo wants you to call him,” Dixie blurted before following.

  As she rounded the corner into the kitchen, she was met by a galloping Twinkle. She jumped out of the way in time to avoid a collision and met Kyle in front of the sink.

  “I’m going shopping for a living-room rug,” she said, though she had originally intended to unpack boxes.

  “I’m supposed to help a guy build a shoeing stock,” Kyle told her. “He lives between here and Florence.” At her blank look, he said, “A shoeing stock immobilizes a nervous horse while we put on his shoes.”

  “Well, that gets us both out of here for the day. See you around.” She slid her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Tonight. Same place. Be there,” he said.

  “You got it.” She smiled as she headed out the door.

  She didn’t find a rug, though she did scope out a department-store sale on bridal gowns. While she didn’t have the nerve to try one on, some of them sure were elegant.

  KYLE MET HER in the garage when she arrived home that evening.

  “We should move into the playhouse so neither one of us gets sick,” he said.

  “There’s no TV out there,” Dixie objected, closing the car door after her. “There’s no phone, no fax machine, no anything remotely resembling creature comforts.”

  “Hey,” he said, pulling her close. “I got you, babe.”

  She let herself be hugged for a while. What Kyle said about avoiding infection made sense, especially since, for her, staying home from work meant losing a possible sale.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked him.

  “The guy I was working with offered me some ribs and I took him up on it.”

  “I grabbed a hamburger at the drive-thru in that new place off I-95. I’m not hungry now.”

  “So do we move to the playhouse or not?”

  “Might as well,” she said. She went inside the house, climbed the stairs and listened for Andrea. No sound came from behind the closed guest-room door, so she gathered up clothes and toiletries and left. She and Kyle started down the path to the playhouse with him carrying Muffin and her litter box.

  When Kyle set the cat on the floor, Muffin uttered a small inquisitive mew and proceeded to walk around sniffing everything. Dixie and Kyle perched uneasily on the teeny-tiny chairs and contemplated their perplexing situation.

  “Maybe Andrea and Twinkle could go to a motel,” Dixie suggested. “We could check on vacancies at the Magnolia.”

  “Any chance she could stay with Milo?” This uttered wishfully.

  “He’s living with Priss, his sister.”

  Kyle let out a long exasperated sigh.

  “Well. Here we are.” She glanced around the playhouse. “The night is still young. It’s only six-thirty. What is there to do?”

  “I could field a few ideas. Why don’t you guess what they are? Hint—there’s a reason they call this a playhouse.” His grin was happily insinuating.

  Dixie ignored it. She was still irked that they hadn’t had a chance for that romantic walk under the stars on the night that Andrea had surprised them with her presence. “Maybe this is a good chance to talk about our relationship,” she said.

  “Hey, do we have to? I’m not Dr. Phil.”

  “Too bad,” she said, disappointed. She had learned how to close on real estate deals. Why couldn’t she close on this thing with Kyle?

  He leaned forward earnestly. “Dixie, just because we insert bits and pieces of relationship assessment into other conversations doesn’t mean they’re invalid.” His point made sense.

  Maybe this wasn’t a good time. She could forgive him for waiting until they could both concentrate on all the heartfelt things that they needed to say to each other, so she leaned over and kissed him. “All right, but if we can’t talk about our relationship, we could go visit relatives. That’s a very Southern thing to do.”

  “Some other time.” He was eyeing her in that come-hither way that she had learned to like.

  “We could continue this discussion in bed,” she suggested.

  “Someone else beat us to it,” he said, angling his head backward. Muffin had curled u
p in the middle of the cot, the tip of her tail warming her nose.

  “Come here,” Kyle said, reaching over to caress Dixie’s upper arm.

  She did. His lap was quite accommodating, and she leaned her forehead against his. They kissed, and Dixie remembered why she was mad about this man. It wasn’t his looks or his sense of humor or the way he encouraged her to be the best she could be. It was the way he kissed, as if he really meant it, as if kissing her was the best possible use of his time and effort. As if, as if…as if he loved her?

  If only he did. If only he would tell her so. If only they could lie down on the cot and make love until he couldn’t stand not telling her.

  “I think…” she said.

  “Don’t,” he told her, his mouth working its way down her neck. “It’s counterproductive.”

  “I think we should spread blankets on the floor,” she said. “So we can be more comfortable.”

  He kept kissing her until she was so weak that it required superhuman effort to drag the blankets down from a nearby shelf and spread them on the wee section of the floor that wasn’t taken up by the chairs, table, cot and Muffin’s litter box. Things proceeded from there, but they didn’t require talking. Maybe that was better.

  On the other hand, wouldn’t a good talk clear the air? Or would that only drive Kyle away?

  One thing she was sure about, and that was that Kyle was over Andrea. She hoped he’d decide that he’d never be over her, Dixie. And soon.

  Chapter Ten

  In the morning when Dixie woke up, a heavy ball of fur was sitting on her chest and purring. Muffin.

  “Kyle?” she said, reaching for him.

  Kyle wasn’t there.

  Her frantic thoughts ranged from He’s gone back to Ohio to Maybe I dreamed our wonderful lovemaking of last night to What if he went outside to smoke?

  However, Kyle’s truck was parked in its usual spot, last night’s lovemaking had been better than any dream and Kyle didn’t smoke. After a pet-and-purr session, she nudged Muffin off her chest and reclaimed her clothes, which were strewn atop the teeny-tiny chairs. Muffin stretched and headed for the food dish.