Boot Points

by Ann Charles

  I slammed the broom cupboard door shut. Still no freaking boots. Grrrr. Did Puff the Magic Dragon pop in and out of here, borrowing them without asking me?

  “But you got your purple boots,” Doc said, shutting the pantry door. “Well, at least one of them, anyway.”

  I looked over. He was holding one of my boots.

  “Where was it? Behind the flour?”

  “No. In the corner next to a sack of potatoes.” As he spoke, he looked inside of it and then reached in and pulled out a white unicorn with a pink horn.

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s what Addy meant the other night when I tucked her in and she told me Buck was in the hoosegow.” Old man Harvey’s vocabulary was beginning to rub off on my kids, a fact which made me antsy. It was just a matter of time before a letter came home from a teacher—or I got a call from the principal.

  “Buck?” Doc frowned down at the unicorn in his hand.

  “Yeah, he’s one of Addy’s favorite stuffed animals. We got him out at Wall Drug.”

  “But Buck has a pink horn.”

  I took the unicorn from Doc and placed him on the chair Addy usually sat in for dinner. “You shouldn’t judge a unicorn by the color of his horn. Buck is loaded with testosterone, trust me. Now where’s my other boot?” I had about thirty minutes and then I’d be officially late to the breakfast meeting.

  “Do your kids always ignore normal gender identification cues when naming their pets and toys?”

  I shrugged. “They’re free spirits—especially Addy. I feel sorry for the guy that falls for her. She’s going to take him on one hell of a rollercoaster ride.”

  “As I said before,” Doc ran his fingers over the side of the boot near the pinkie toe, “like mother, like daughter.”

  I was going to ignore his comment, but I couldn’t let it go. “Are you trying to say that I’m going too fast for you?” Because if he was, I was going to grab my boot and kick him in the shin after all of the foot dragging I’d been doing in order to keep this thing between us from rocketing out of control—at least on my part.

  His eyes held mine for a couple of breaths. I had the feeling he was weighing his answer with care, probably not wanting to lead me on. “No, but you do tend to spin me in loops and steal my breath on sharp turns.”

  “Oh.” Was that a good thing?

  “Has your boot always had this scratch?” he changed the subject.

  I let him. “Since the kids were babies.”

  “I guess I didn’t notice that before.”

  “You’ve been a little distracted when I’m wearing them.”

  He laughed. “Just a little, huh? How’d it get scratched?”

  “That’s a present from my sister, the bitch from hell.”

  “Nice nickname. She sounds like a real sweetheart.”

  “That’s just her pseudonym. Her real title is the Bride of Satan.”

  He laughed again. When I didn’t, he sobered. “I take it you haven’t forgiven your sister for sleeping with the kids’ dad. Or was that moniker earned for scratching your favorite boots?”

  “Whether Susan scratched my boots or not was a moot point by then because I already loathed her for so many other reasons.”

  I took the boot from him, frowning at the scratch and the memories that came with it. I never had understood why Susan hated me so much and with such intensity. Oh, well. I shrugged and set the boot on the floor next to the table. No amount of wishing or wondering was going to change reality, and after putting up with all of her bullshit over the years, I preferred we kept to different hemispheres until death put an end to the whole ugly mess.

  “I’m going to go check the basement,” I said. “Do you want to come along and keep the spiders at bay?”

  “Do you use that line on all of the boys?”

  “No, only the ones made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails.” Opening the basement door, I shooed Elvis down the concrete stairs in front of us. She squawked her opinion of my pushiness. I squawked back and chased her down a couple of steps. Doc’s quiet laughter followed me down.

  At the bottom, I waited for him to join me. When he did, he asked, “Should I be nervous about being alone with you in a dark basement?”

  “Definitely.” I hit the light switch on the wall next to us. A line of fluorescent lights buzzed to life. “You should always be wary of a woman who wears purple cowboy boots.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I didn’t have a witty answer, so I shrugged and threw out, “She’ll rock your world.”

  “It feels more rattled than rocked,” Doc said.

  Mine felt more like it had been hooked up to a paint can shaker since I’d tripped over his boxes of books outside his front door.

  He followed me over to my son’s makeshift science lab in the opposite corner from Elvis’s pen—where the bird was supposed to spend her nights rather than in my closet.

  “So did your sister scratch your boot on purpose?” he asked.

  “You could say that.” I pulled open the deep drawers on an old dresser Aunt Zoe had relocated down here when we moved in. They were filled with beakers, measuring cups, and other lab equipment my brother had bought Layne over the years. “Susan lives to take or destroy anything that belongs to me.”

  “You’re kidding. She’s your sister.” After I planted my hands on my hips and stared at him, he said, “You’re not kidding.”

  There were several crates lined up along the wall. I sifted through them even though I doubted the boot was in any of them. It was easier to tell the stories about the kids’ dad and my stupidity at that time in my life without facing Doc. “Unfortunately, I’m not. Take the father of my children. We’d been dating for several weeks when Susan found out about him. She didn’t waste any time seducing him and then took great pleasure in letting me know they were having sex—a lot of it—and which positions he liked best.”

  “That’s twisted.”

  I snorted. “Nah. That’s the Bride of Satan for you.”

  “If she’d already stolen your boyfriend, why did she scratch your boot?”

  I flashed back to Susan’s screams and waterworks when I’d told her Rex had abandoned me. She’d gone all psycho. For a moment, I’d thought she might actually have been upset about me being left to fend for a baby on my own. How naïve of me. I stacked a couple of the crates, keeping my back to Doc.

  “Susan wanted something I had,” I explained, “and for once she couldn’t get it, so she took her frustration out on my boots.”

  “Violet, quit being so cryptic.”

  “You’re one to talk,” I muttered. Doc was the mayor of Cryptic City, USA, and a pro at dodging my questions.

  I dug through another crate full of old baseball mitts, finding one of the sandals I’d been missing for weeks. What in the hell was it doing down here? Then I noticed the toe had been chewed off by something much bigger than a gerbil. What the heck? Had we acquired a dog without me knowing about it?

  Doc grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to face him. “Stand still and tell me what happened.”

  We didn’t have time for me to stand still because the other boot wasn’t down here, but I did anyway, handing him my chewed sandal, which he took and tossed back into the crate.

  “As I said before, Rex left town when he found out I was pregnant. My guess is that for the next eight months or so, Susan held out hope that he’d return to claim the kids after they were born and the two of them would pick up where they’d left off, only with my children—a happy little family. Remember, she always takes what’s mine.”

  “Yes, the bitch from hell, I got that.”

  I felt so stupid about my role in the whole soap opera. I closed my eyes to avoid his stare and let the story flow. “After I had the kids, my dad hired a private detective to hunt down their father so my lawyer could send Rex paperwork to sign to revoke all his rights to the kids. The bastard signed off and sent the paperwork back without any hassle, essentially saying goodb
ye to his children and me. That’s when Susan went nuts, getting all up in my face, screaming at me about how I’d ruined everything by driving away the love of her life. She called me all kinds of names, threatened to spend every moment of the rest of her loveless existence destroying mine.” God, there’d been so much yelling that day. I tried to laugh at the memory, but it came out brittle, still coated with hurt and anger. “How dare I mess up the wonderful thing she had going with my damned boyfriend, right?”

  Doc squeezed my shoulders, comforting me. “What did you do?”

  I opened my eyes and locked gazes with him. “I tackled her and tried to strangle her to death.” It was not one of my finer moments in life.

  He laughed. At my flat stare, his grin flipped into a frown. “You’re serious?”

  “Yeah, I am. It took my father and mother both to pull me off of her that day.” I sighed, remembering those hate-filled days and silent family dinners, and then pushed onward with the foul explanation. “Our house was pretty tense for a while. Susan was pissed at me for driving Rex off and at my dad for making sure Rex wouldn’t return to screw up my life more. After a week of that, Mom asked me to bring my babies up here to Aunt Zoe’s place for the weekend. While I was here, Susan packed up her shit. When I returned, Susan was gone and so were my boots.”

  His eyes narrowed. “She didn’t.”

  “Oh, she did, and I’m sure she was smiling wide when she took them from my closet. Susan knew how much I liked them, what they represented, and all that Quint had done to get them for me.”

  “What a bitch.”

  “From hell,” I added with a wry grin.

  “How’d you get the boots back? Did you hunt her down?”

  “Not quite. You see, she didn’t just move across town, she moved across the country—south, down to New Mexico.”

  “She kidnapped your boots and left the state?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t tell me she tried to hold them for ransom.”

  “No, she never intended to give them back, but then someone changed her mind.”

  “Your parents?”

  I shook my head. “Natalie.”

  “Natalie? Was she friends with Susan?”

  A laugh erupted from my throat. “Hell, no. I think Nat hates her more than I do.” If that was possible. “When Nat found out about Susan taking my boots, she took a road trip.”

  “Natalie drove to New Mexico just to get your boots back?” He stepped back, his tone filled with incredulity.

  “It was never about the boots for Nat. It went way deeper, starting with some rumors that Susan had spread when we were in junior high. Nat doesn’t forgive and forget easily, and she refuses to let something go once she sinks her teeth into it.”

  “She sounds like she’s part badger.” Doc caught my hand, just holding it. His touch felt warm, comforting, making me want to lean into him for more, but I held back.

  “When the whole sex thing with Rex and Susan happened,” I continued, “Nat wanted to go all Tasmanian Devil on them, but I made her promise to drop it. I just wanted to be free of them and move on with my life. But when Susan stole my boots, that was the final straw, and no matter what I said, Nat was hell bent for leather.”

  Purple leather. I thought back to the fury that had contorted Nat’s face when I told her the boots were gone. “Since Susan slinked off into the night, Nat had to track her down. She started with the address for Rex, who had moved to Texas and was working for some research facility there. When Nat met up with Rex, he admitted that he’d recently talked to my sister, but only to tell Susan to stay away from him. He figured my sister was there to try to get some money from him to help me.”

  “I’m surprised he was willing to talk to Natalie about any of this.”

  I shrugged. “Nat can be pretty convincing, especially while wielding a pair of pliers and a crowbar.”

  Doc cringed.

  “Rex spilled that Susan was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That was where Nat found her, working at an art gallery, wearing my damned boots.”

  “Did Natalie use the pliers on her?”

  “I wish. Susan took off running as soon as she caught sight of Nat, who still laughs about the whole scene. She described my sister as ‘a gazelle fleeing across the savannah.’ Unfortunately for Susan, Nat can sprint like a freaking cheetah. She was a track star in high school. Nat tackled her in an alley and tore the boots off Susan’s feet, leaving my sister with a black eye and a warning to stay away from me and my kids.”

  Susan had abided by that threat for a few years, but then had showed up again on my parents’ doorstep, back for more money and to wreak further havoc. But there was no need to go into that now. We had a boot to find.

  I stepped around the lab table, glancing one last time around the basement for any sight of purple. “The scratch is Natalie’s fault, according to Susan,” I wrapped up the story, “who swore the boots had been in pristine shape until Natalie tackled her in that alley.”

  The image of Nat waltzing into the car dealership where I’d worked at the time and handing me back my boots made me grin.

  “Is your life always this chaotic, Trouble?” Doc asked, leaning against the workbench abutting the wall next to the crates. He glanced down at the papers on Layne’s desk and did a double take.

  “Of course.” I backed toward the stairs, watching a frown crease his forehead. “I’m a single mom with twins.”

  “Hold on a second.” He held up two pieces of paper. “I think these are plans on burial extraction and a map of gravesites.”

  I paused at the bottom step. “I’m not surprised. Layne thinks this house was built over an old horse graveyard.” I pointed at the sheets of paper. “Put those down and come on.”

  He let the papers drop onto the bench. “Are you sure Layne’s thinking about animals here?”

  “Ninety percent sure, yes. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago at dinner. He knows the rule—he can only dig up animals. No humans.”

  After one last glance at the papers, Doc walked toward me. “What kind of scientist is his father?”

  “I don’t remember. Something super brainiac and unbelievably boring.”

  He chuckled. “And yet you managed to get pregnant by him.”

  I glared down at him. “He was tall, handsome, and charming. It seems I have a certain weakness around men who fit those criteria.”

  Stopping two steps below me, Doc stood almost eye level with me. “Are you saying I’m smart and boring, too?”

  I faked a yawn. “Well, you make up for it in the sack.”

  “Vixen,” he growled and reached for me, but I dodged his hand and raced up the stairs with him chasing my behind. When we reached the kitchen, I grabbed the single boot and held it out toward him like a sword.

  “Stay back. We have a boot to find.”

  He grabbed the boot from me and pulled me close, dropping a soft kiss on my lips, his tongue tasting and teasing at the same time.

  The need for more—much more—lingered long after he pulled away. How was a girl supposed to play hard to get around him, damn it?

  “Now where?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I already searched all over upstairs.” I looked back toward the living room, chewing on my lip. Where had I missed? The attic? Surely they hadn’t taken the boot up there. I’d even checked Aunt Zoe’s room. Where else could it …

  Oh! “Aunt Zoe’s workshop.” I grabbed the key from the key rack near the back door.

  The air outside chilled my bare arms. The scent of cinnamon greeted us inside the cool workshop thanks to an air freshener that almost hid the usual smell of the kiln. Dust floated in the shaft of morning sunlight shining through the window over Aunt Zoe’s work sink.

  Closing the door behind Doc, I said, “If you don’t mind looking around out here, I’ll check in back.”

  I found nothing in Aunt Zoe’s storage room. When I returned to the front, I found Doc staring at a picture o
f me that Aunt Zoe had slid into the bottom corner of an old mirror hung on her wall.

  “How old is this picture?” Doc asked.

  I checked inside the cupboard under one of her work counters. “I don’t know, maybe six years or so.”

  “You’re wearing your purple boots in it.”

  “Actually if you look closer, I’m wearing a boot bracelet with these gorgeous glass and metal charms that Aunt Zoe made just for my purple boots.” I walked over next to him and plucked the picture from the mirror, looking down at the photo Aunt Zoe had taken of me one summer day long ago. In it, I was leaning back on the lounge chair with my boot in the air, posing like some fashion model. The kids had been standing just outside of the shot giggling like mad. I could still hear their laughter in my head. “She told me it was supposed to bring me good fortune.”

  “Did it?”

  “I lost it before it had a chance to pay off.” I stuffed the picture back into the mirror. “She made me another one that looked a lot like that one, but I refused to wear it on my boots again—I didn’t want to lose it. I keep it in my jewelry box now, along with some of the stuff she’s made for Addy and Layne.”

  “More charm bracelets?”

  “No. For Layne, she makes him these bookmarks with charms on the tassel. He uses them in the books he’s always carrying around. Addy gets wrist and ankle bracelets and necklaces. Aunt Zoe makes Quint little good luck charms, too. He’s supposed to carry them with him at all times.” I hadn’t ever paid attention to whether she made them for Susan.

  “I wouldn’t have pegged your aunt as the superstitious type.”

  “I know.” Aunt Zoe was usually the salt-of-the-earth type of mentality. But every now and then she surprised me.

  “What’s with this mirror?” Doc tapped on it.

  “It reflects light.”

  “Not very well, smartass.” He poked my ribs, making me laugh and wiggle away.

  “What do you mean?”