Be My Neat-Heart

by Baer, Judy

  “She loves you a great deal,” I ventured.

  “And I love her.” The statement sounded like a burden. “But, Ms. Smith, I’m not going to let that get in the way of what needs to be done.”

  So much for warm and fuzzy brother/sister relationships.

  Every time I thought I might be able to like Jared Hamilton, he pulled another rug out from under me. I put another black check mark against him in the tally I’d begun keeping in my head.

  Chapter Eleven

  Molly called my office on Monday, giggling.

  “What’s so funny?” She certainly is sunny, considering all that’s going on in her life.

  “I eavesdropped on Jared and his friend Ethan last night. They were talking about you.”

  Oh, puleese! Spare me!

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “It’s all good…well, fairly good, anyway…and I thought you’d want to know.” Supposing that she was correct in that assumption, she dived into her story.

  “Ethan asked Jared how he likes you.”

  “Molly, don’t go there.”

  “No, this is good. Really! Jared dodged the question by telling him that I liked you and that’s enough. Of course, that’s not what Ethan wanted to know. He feels responsible for the two of you meeting. He’s taking an interest in your relationship.”

  Terrific. Just what Jared and I need when we’re butting heads—onlookers.

  “Jared thinks you don’t like him and that you are suspicious of his motives with me.” Molly laughed. “Can you believe it?”

  It wasn’t exactly a newsflash.

  “He says you don’t trust him because he’s threatened to fire me.”

  Well, duh!

  “And Ethan nailed my brother to the wall with that one. He told Jared that he just doesn’t like the idea of you thinking of him being the ‘bad guy’ in my life.”

  All this was giving me a big headache. I was hired by these people to get them organized, not be one of the stars in their ongoing soap opera.

  “I think Ethan’s right,” Molly continued. “My brother isn’t accustomed to being out of favor with a beautiful woman.”

  A beautiful woman? Me?

  “Molly, I don’t need to know this.” I felt as though I was in junior high again, playing that obnoxious “He said, she said” game.

  “Jared tried to deny it, but Ethan told him that if he couldn’t see it, he should get himself a white cane and a seeing-eye dog. ‘She’s incredible,’ Ethan told him, ‘that blond hair like spun sugar and those eyes! Big, blue, mesmeric…she’s not just beautiful, Jared, she’s riveting.’” Molly giggled. “Isn’t that fabulous?”

  “Sounds like I should start batting my eyelashes at Ethan,” I joked, not wanting to let her know she’d really flummoxed me with this. I am not in the habit of thinking of my looks at all—and never as beautiful. Nordic, yes. Beautiful, no.

  “Jared said the same thing, but Ethan wouldn’t give in. He told my brother that he is accustomed to women flirting with him. And because you don’t fall at his feet, Jared’s ego is bothering him. I think it really stunned Jared to hear that.”

  It certainly stunned me. My cheeks felt as though they were on fire. This was too much information.

  Molly didn’t seem to hear me. She was having too much fun developing this fantasy of hers. “Then Ethan and Jared went to play racquetball.”

  “What a relief,” I muttered.

  “And Ethan told me later that Jared slaughtered him.”

  “What are friends for?”

  “I know what’s going on when Jared does that. He’s frustrated. Ethan came too close to my brother’s true emotions talking about you like that.”

  Deluded, deluded, deluded. This girl is completely deluded.

  Molly added sagely, “Just wait. You’ll see.”

  I didn’t say it aloud, but I decided then and there that I was not hanging around to find out.

  Chapter Twelve

  If men were shoes, Jared Hamilton would be waffle-stompers, treading over everybody and everything to get to his personal destination. If women were shoes, Molly would be a pair of soft, fluffy bedroom slippers that keep getting lost. And I would be stilettos just waiting to grind a heel into the top of Jared’s hiking boots.

  “Why? I don’t get this, Molly. You’ll have to tell me why.”

  I had her alone for once. Jared was forced to tend to business in his own office while we painstakingly sorted through the jumble in Molly’s. “Your brother is a stalker. He’s been after us since the first day we started to work together. Doesn’t he trust me?”

  I don’t have much in the way of ego because I know that only God can take credit for whatever I might do right, but Jared is getting on my nerves, the few I have left. I’m going crazy being observed hour after hour by him as his sister and I try to make headway through Molly’s muddle.

  The woman is sweet, precious, generous, giving and completely without organizational skills. I don’t doubt for a moment that she has the intelligence to learn them, but she just doesn’t seem to care.

  Neatness is not even a blip on Molly’s radar screen of desires. For her it ranks right up there with wanting a root canal or ingrown toenails.

  Jared, on the other hand, thinks that a pile of magazines is an eyesore, a stack of papers on a desk an anathema and a disorganized office a deadly sin.

  And I thought I was exacting!

  “Don’t be too hard on him, Sammi. He’s doing what he thinks is best for me, that’s all.”

  “But you’re a grown woman. Why can’t you do what’s best for you?” I sat back to study her and was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “Molly?”

  “Jared’s right. I’m incompetent.”

  Unbidden anger flared in me. “He told you that?”

  “No, but he thinks it. So whatever Jared wants, I’ll do.” She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. “Anything.”

  Jared Hamilton had his poor sister hopping and dancing to his wishes like she was a marionette and he, a puppeteer.

  “Have you considered that Jared may have some issues of his own?” I ventured.

  “Jared is a successful man, highly regarded in business,” Molly huffed. “He didn’t get here without careful planning and hard work. He has to be meticulous and exacting in order to be where he is.”

  “Why do you defend him?” I asked gently.

  “Because you can never imagine what he’s put up with from me. Never. I love him. He’s the best brother in the world.” And that was the end of that subject. Molly was willing to turn herself inside out to make her demanding brother happy.

  Because I’m the hired help, it doesn’t matter that I can’t see the reason why.

  I groaned when the doorbell rang. Just out of the shower, I’d decided to test the self-adhering curlers that Wendy gave me. They were the size of soup cans and, Wendy said, perfect for creating a smooth, sophisticated hairdo. She’d also given me a facial mask, cucumber and seaweed, I think, or maybe it’s grass clippings and zucchini. I’d put foam separators between my toes so my pedicure could dry, whitening strips on my teeth and my softest, coziest and least flattering red-and-gray sweats. I glanced in the mirror. With all the bright colors and distorted features, I looked like some little kid’s worst nightmare, worse, even, than a clown doll, the kind that lurks in children’s closets and gives them scary dreams.

  I shuffled toward the door, keeping my toes wide spread and my neck stiff so as not to upset the precarious pyramid of rollers. Not only was my face beginning to harden, my teeth squeaked and the facial mask was beginning to smell very earthy. Not flower petals and fresh breezes earthy, either. More like barnyard-and-compost-heap earthy. Wendy must have bought all this stuff on sale.

  “Who is it?” I inquired at the door, but my mouth wasn’t moving well because of the rock-hard mask. I was also paralyzed by my reluctance to take off the whitening strip until my thirty minutes were up. My words came out
more like a breathy “whoiszit?”

  I peered through the peek hole but all I could see was a sweatshirt-clad shoulder with a bit of the Timberwolves logo on it. It had to be Ben, the all-time, number-one Timberwolves fan. I reached to open the door. Ben wouldn’t notice if I dressed myself in garbage bags secured with duct tape.

  “Hullocominimmm….” My mumbled greeting ended sharply. “Jrd?”

  “Sammi? Is that you?”

  Jared Hamilton peered into the two peek holes in my facial mask that I’d left for my eyes. His nose wrinkled as he got a whiff of the facial’s “earthy scent.”

  I whipped off the whitening strips and opened my mouth wide, cracking the concretelike facial into bits. “What are you doing here?”

  He bent over to pick up a few of the shards of green facial mask that fell to the floor. “Your face is breaking. Do you want me to pick it up?”

  I spun to run to the bathroom to chisel off the rest of the mask but forgot that my toes were swathed in foam rubber. The rubber stuck to the hardwood floor, pitching me over the back of a white canvas-covered chair and face first into the seat cushion. I teetered, feet in the air, for a moment before righting myself. As I did so, I saw the imprint of a minty green face on the seat of the chair—my own sort of death mask imposed right onto the cushion of the newest piece of furniture in the house. The term death mask is appropriate. I was dying from a case of terminal embarrassment. Mortified by my lack of dignity and even my lack of balance, I staggered to my feet in a vain effort to recover my poise.

  That, of course, didn’t happen. My curlers abandoned ship, sprang loose and pulled from my hair. I could feel them dangling around my shoulders like decorations on a Christmas tree. Then, one by one, they tumbled out of my hair and onto the floor.

  The horrified expression on Jared’s face said it all. All there was to say, at least, until he started laughing. And laughing. And laughing.

  I scuttled, crablike, toward the bathroom and didn’t come out until I’d found my normal skin color, my hair and my pearly white teeth. Then I returned to the living room where Jared was on his hands and knees with a bucket, a rag and cleanser carefully removing my visage from the seat cushion.

  He looked up, half worried and half laughing. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you for asking,” I answered with as much dignity as I could muster.

  “This is going to come out, but it will take a little work. I didn’t want to spread the stain, but if you just blot it like this…”

  “Thank you. I can do it. Cleaning is one of my specialties, you know.”

  How am I ever going to live this down?

  He unfolded himself and stood up, eyeing me cautiously, as if he didn’t know what to expect to happen next. He had the right to be nervous. I certainly was.

  “I see I caught you at a bad time—during your beauty ritual.” He said “beauty ritual” as though referring to the horrific and mysterious procedure the Egyptians used to embalm mummies.

  “My friend Wendy gave me some new products to try and…”

  “You don’t have to explain. I grew up with Molly, remember? I’d challenge any woman to come up with something my sister hasn’t already sprung on me, Sammi. No need to be embarrassed.”

  He’d managed to say exactly the right thing to make me feel better. I looked up at him with a thankful smile and saw his expression had turned into one of complete, unadulterated horror.

  Jared stared over my shoulder toward my bedroom door. He lifted one hand and pointed to the opening.

  “What on earth is that?”

  I turned to see Zelda yawning and stretching in the doorway, her skinned and skinny body writhing in bliss, her gigantic ears quivering with pleasure. To the uninitiated in the world of hairless cats, it must have been a sight to behold.

  “That’s my cat, Zelda. She’s a sphynx. We’re playing spa night. I just gave her a bath and cleaned her ears with oil. She’s feeling frisky.”

  Wrinkled skin is highly desirable in the sphynx breed and Zelda is show-cat perfect. Her little muzzle is exceptionally wrinkled, as is the skin between and around her shoulders. Her head is longer than it is wide, her skull rounded but with a flat forehead and prominent cheekbones. Of course, if one didn’t know the breed, that might seem a little creepy. She also has very large ears, startling, wide-set lemon-shaped eyes and a whip of a tail. Her hind legs are slightly longer than her front so she always looks like she’s walking downhill. What’s more, a sphynx’s paw pads are very thick and their toes long and slender so Zelda appears to be walking on air cushions. A large female, Zelda is almost ten pounds of luxurious, exotic, alien-looking feline.

  Jared gawked at her, dumbstruck. Zelda stared back at Jared with disdain. He had no distinguishing features whatsoever to make him interesting to her, no catnip mouse on his lapel, not even a large, semitransparent set of ears. She turned to give him a full view of her bony behind, flicked her tail and, ignoring us both, sat down to bathe herself.

  “Is it supposed to look like that? What happened to its hair?”

  “Shhhh.” I put a finger to my lips. “Don’t say anything to hurt her feelings. Besides, I don’t think she sees any blue ribbons on you, either.”

  He glanced around the room as if looking for someone or something sane or normal. Finding no one, his gaze came back to me.

  “Is that really a cat?” His brows furrowed. He looked particularly handsome when he was perplexed.

  “What else could it be?” Hopping on one foot and then the other, I pulled the sponges from between my toes.

  “A cross between a fruit bat and a Chihuahua? A chemistry experiment gone wrong? Doctor Frankenstein’s dirty little secret?”

  “Would you like to pet her?”

  He recoiled slightly. “What does it feel like?”

  “She feels like the chamois you use to wash your car, only she’s nice and warm.” I moved toward Zelda and bent to pick her up. She immediately began to purr and knead her paws into my arm.

  Jared put out a tentative hand to touch her and drew back quickly. “She feels like a suede jacket that’s been lying in the sun.”

  “Good analogy.” I scratched Zelda behind the ears. “Hear that, sweetie?”

  Zelda yawned so widely that I believed that had Jared looked, he could have seen the inside of the tip of her tail.

  At that moment, Imelda came trotting out of my room with the decimated Manolo Blahnik in her mouth. She went right to Jared, put her paws on his chest as if to show him the doggie pedicure I’d just given her, hot pink and purple nails, faux rhinestones and all.

  “What kind of a zoo do you have here, anyway?”

  “Yours truly included?” I asked sweetly, knowing that at the moment I was looking every bit as weird as my beloved pets.

  “No, I didn’t mean…I…” Jared looked to me for help.

  I thrust Zelda into his arms. “I’ll be back in a minute. I have to brush my teeth. I think I have chips of that facial in my mouth.”

  It was actually closer to five minutes by the time I’d rinsed my mouth and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. When I returned to the living room both Zelda and Imelda were on Jared’s lap.

  “You got their Good Housekeeping seal of approval, I see. That’s not easy. Good going.” I dropped into the chair across from him.

  “Thanks. I think.” He looked at me, puzzled. “Somehow I never thought of you…like this.”

  I glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. Sleek, Danish modern furniture, maple floors, bright, modern art posters, sculptures Wendy had made in some of her funkier phases and baskets everywhere to corral clutter and keep it out of site. And Zelda and Imelda, of course, both living, breathing forms of contemporary art.

  “What does ‘like this’ mean?” I asked.

  “Untraditional? Arty? A little crazy?”

  “That’s me in a nutshell,” I agreed amiably. “Now, what are you doing here?”

 
; Chapter Thirteen

  When I’d opened my front door to see Jared standing there my first instinct had been to run and hide under the bed with Imelda. Then I remembered that he knew nothing of Molly’s informational report of the conversation he’d had with Ethan. Whew.

  Jared shifted uncomfortably, as if he, too, was wondering why he was here.

  Maybe I’d made him curious and he wanted to see if I practiced what I preached.

  That’s the theory Wendy had come to and vocalized over dinner last night.

  “You’re a curiosity to him, Sammi. Look at the man. He’s incredible-looking, smart, wealthy, has great clothes and a sports car. He’s not accustomed to women not being interested in him. He’s not used to women playing hard to get.”

  “I’m not playing ‘hard to get’!” I’d said. “I don’t want to get got!”

  “Whatever that means,” Wendy had said, grinning.

  But it is true. I’m not playing hard to get. It’s no act. Every vibe I give off should tell him that this is no game. Why Jared and I seem to be the only people who don’t look at each other as a romantic opportunity in the making, I don’t know.

  “He doesn’t realize that getting close to you now is going to be like climbing Mount Everest in tennis shoes and jogging shorts,” Wendy had observed. “He simply isn’t prepared for you.”

  Well, I’m not prepared for him, either.

  I wish everyone would quit playing matchmaker and philosopher and let me live my life without their offerings of pop psychology. For one thing, if Molly hadn’t told me about Jared’s conversation with Ethan, I’d be a whole lot more relaxed right now.

  “I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop by and deliver this.” He pulled a Bently fountain pen from his pocket. “Is it yours?”

  A wash of relief spread over me. This visit had nothing to do with me at all, other than the fact that I owned and had lost a very expensive pen. “You found it! Did I drop it at Molly’s?” I reached out for pen gratefully. “Thank you. It was a gift from my friend, Ben. Every once in a while he surreptitiously checks to see if I’m still using it. I didn’t look forward to telling him I’d lost it.”