Be My Neat-Heart

by Baer, Judy

  Jared raised an eyebrow but said nothing. The pen was an expensive one—upwards of two hundred and fifty dollars, and no doubt he was wondering what kind of relationship I had with a man who would give me such costly gifts.

  The truth be known, the pen said very little about my relationship with Ben. He’d purchased the pen because he thought it was funny—Ben and Bently. He’s always chosen to purchase his clothes at Goodwill and lavish gifts on his friends and family instead.

  My good manners finally welled to the surface. I gestured him toward the kitchen. “As long as you’re here—and have already cleaned my furniture—would you like a cup of chai or coffee?”

  “Coffee is fine.”

  Jared sat at my small stainless steel-topped table and took in the room while I brewed the coffee. My kitchen has a Nordic feel with its simple maple cabinets and blue and white color scheme. There are the painted red Dala horses I love, beautiful blown glass bowls and a family of trolls decorating the tops of my cupboards, but I prefer to have nothing on my counter but the coffeepot and a cluster of yellow and red tulips in a bright blue glass vase. I like things simple, tidy and spotless. Wendy says that the man I should be dating is Mr. Clean.

  I set the coffee cup in front of him with a plate of cream-filled pirouettes and butter cookies. He looked like a bull in a china shop looming over the delicate things so I went to the freezer, pulled out another container and extracted four chocolate chip oatmeal cookies the size of salad plates, put them in the microwave and defrosted them.

  When I brought those to the table, Jared gave a sigh of relief.

  “Sorry about the girlie stuff. I forget men like cookies bigger than their little finger.”

  “You have a lovely home,” he said politely.

  “Thanks. I’ve lived here over a year now.”

  “Just moved to the cities?”

  “Oh, no. I grew up here.” I folded into a chair and looked at him with palpable curiosity. “And you?”

  “Me, too. Kenwood area.”

  “Not too shabby.”

  “I suppose not.”

  The conversation ground to a halt. Jared seemed almost relieved to have Zelda jump into his lap, put her overlarge foot pads on the front of his coat and jam her nose under his chin. For a moment, he didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  “She likes you!” For some reason it pleased me inordinately. “She usually doesn’t warm up to people so quickly.”

  Jared stroked her back.

  She’s soft and warm to the touch and when she arched into his hand, I knew Jared could feel her boney spine beneath his fingers. Despite her weirdness, there is something endearing about Zelda. She is blissfully unaware of anything but the force of her personality and she was turning it all on Jared. He scratched her and she purred. He gathered her to his chest and she snuggled in. He talked softly into her ear and she kneaded his arm approvingly with her claws. He slipped off his watch to keep it from catching on her skin. She tipped her head and her rhinestone collar flashed in the light.

  Zelda was doing her magic act and Jared fell under her spell.

  “So how do you feel about my naked cat now?” I watched them as I sipped my coffee.

  “Not what I expected.”

  “Things seldom are.”

  “She’s amazing.” He looked down at Zelda, who was batting with one paw at the tip of his shirt collar.

  “The breed is very intelligent and friendly. Zelda is always ready to cuddle or to play. In fact—” and I reddened a little “—she likes to sleep under the covers with me.”

  Fortunately, before Jared had time to think about that, Imelda pranced into the kitchen looking, as many labradoodles do, like an oversize, curly-haired toy, carrying her favorite high heel like a bone between her teeth, her bright purple-and-pink toenails clicking on the hardwood floor.

  After he left, I began to wonder how Jared really saw me—a green face print on the seat of my chair, my wiry fur-challenged cat and goofy flop-eared dog who Jared insisted on calling a retrievapoo instead of a labradoodle. When Imelda wasn’t chewing on a high heel, she was sitting on it, protecting it from who-knows-what—other dogs with shoe fetishes, perhaps. I’m sure none of it fits with the brisk, no-nonsense woman he thought he’d hired to help his sister.

  And why that even mattered to me made no sense at all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Anybody home?” I pushed Molly’s door open and walked inside. Today was the day we’d planned to organize what Molly calls the “inner sanctum”—her bedroom. Molly’s home reminds me of a delta, layer upon layer of sediment, stuff washed up upon more stuff until it becomes a new land-mass all its own. It’s no wonder Molly is overwhelmed and has given up trying to sort through this.

  We’d cleared the floor in one small spot on the carpet yesterday and I’d left her with the assignment to keep excavating. I know it was slow going with Molly squealing every few minutes over a sweater she thought she’d lost or a missing earring revealed. It was like being on an archeological dig—slow, tedious and with the tantalizing promise of intriguing discoveries at the end. In this case, the discovery was Molly’s bedroom floor.

  I suppose I should thank her for toughening her brother up for me.

  I recalled last night when Jared had shown up at my front door bearing my lost pen, and cringed. Why he hadn’t run off screaming, I still haven’t figured out. I’d looked as bizarre as Zelda. I never say Zelda is bizarre in her presence, but she is pretty peculiar when compared to others of her species. I’d smelled like compost, looked like death warmed over—except for my sparkling white teeth—and been as clumsy as all three Stooges. If I had wanted to impress him, it was all over now.

  Once I’d gotten over the shock of seeing him at my front door I’d realized that we do have something in common. He’d known exactly what to do to get my face print off the seat cushion, he’d put his own cup and saucer in the sink when he was finished with his coffee and he’d even plumped the pillow he’d rested against as we visited on the couch.

  If he weren’t so determined to fire his own sister and make her life miserable, I might actually have considered seeing him socially. Oh, well. There have to be more tidy fish in the sea.

  “Molly? Are you here?” Odd. She always welcomes me the moment I knock. In fact, Molly is always happy to see me. She believes I’m her lifeline, a way out of the messes of her own making.

  I heard a small noise in the bedroom and followed the sound.

  “Molly?” I peered through the doorway to see her curled into a ball on her chair, feet tucked under her. Tears ran down her cheeks and when she looked up at me, there was desperation in her eyes.

  “Sammi, what’s wrong with me?” was her greeting.

  “Nothing is ‘wrong’ with you other than you’re crying. What’s happened?” I hurried across the floor to her. Still in her pajamas and slippers, she looked like a pink, fuzzy little girl curled there on the chair with a soulful, heartbroken expression on her face. Sometimes Molly seemed so vulnerable it was difficult to remember she was not still a teenager.

  “Nothing! Can’t you tell?” She gestured toward the room, which looked exactly the same as it had when I’d left the day before. “I didn’t get a thing done. I started, but then I found some mail and went to the kitchen to get a knife to open it. That reminded me that I hadn’t eaten dinner so I fixed myself something to eat as I read the mail. Of course there were bills so I had to get my checkbook out to pay them. In my checkbook I found the phone number of an old friend I’d been meaning to call. Next thing I know we’d talked two hours and it was midnight and I was exhausted. My brother is right. I am hopeless!”

  “Did he say that?” I felt a surge of anger within me.

  “He didn’t say it. I did. And it’s true. I’ve spent my whole life muddling things up and he’s had to bail me out. I can’t even get this done properly! I’m like a hummingbird that flits from one flower to another. I can’t stay in one place
long enough to make any headway whatsoever.”

  She looked at me with bleary eyes. “I know you aren’t happy with Jared because he’s grown tired of the messes I create, but it’s not his fault. It’s mine!”

  “I’m not exactly unhappy with Jared,” I began tentatively.

  “Yes, you are. I can see it in your eyes. You don’t even like my brother, do you?”

  Her question hit me like a slap. For someone who considers herself nonjudgmental, I’d certainly fallen into the trap. Jared is a conundrum for me. I’d seen him angry and cordial, loving and hard-nosed, determined and gentle, and still I was clueless as to who he was as a man. And, no, I didn’t like him, if for no other reason than for the way he treated Molly.

  “Go take a shower. You’ll feel better. Then we can make some headway in here.”

  But Molly, for once, was suddenly difficult to distract.

  “You really don’t like him.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think….”

  “It matters to me. I’d do anything in the world for Jared. He’s the best brother a woman could have.”

  “Even if he fires you?”

  Molly winced and was quiet. She couldn’t find a way to argue with that.

  By evening, we had made remarkable progress. Her closets looked like Better Homes & Gardens material, there was a place for everything and everything was in its place.

  We sat on the floor in her bedroom and admired our work.

  “It’s perfect,” she said breathily. “I’m going to visit here every day.”

  “Visit?”

  “If I move to a hotel, I wouldn’t be here to undo our work. What do you think of that?”

  I stared at her for a moment before I realized she was teasing. I put my hand to my heart and sighed. “You scared me. For a minute I thought you were serious!”

  “I’m like Pigpen in the Peanuts comic,” she said ruefully. “There’s a little cloud of clutter floating around me all the time, wherever I go.”

  I decided to ask the question that’s been burning in me. “Molly, do you ever think that your brother might be unfair about you? Do you think he’s too harsh, threatening to fire you?”

  Molly chewed on her upper lip. “You don’t know the whole story, Sammi. All I can say is whatever Jared does, I deserve. He’s a great guy. If you’d met him without me in the picture, I think you two would have hit it off.”

  She sighed. “Here I am messing things up for Jared again. Maybe, just maybe, under different circumstances, you could be my sister-in-law instead of my mentor. What would you think of that?”

  “Sister-in-law?” I was speechless. So that was the direction Molly’s mind was turning in. Suddenly I was in a very big hurry to be done with this job and out of Jared Hamilton’s life.

  “You can quit slamming pots and pans around, you know. He’s not here to bug you.” Wendy sat at the table knitting while Zelda and Imelda unrolled her ball of yarn and tangled it around chair legs as they played.

  “I’m making dinner. This has nothing to do with Jared. I can’t believe you said that!” I punctuated the sentence with an extra clank of a pan.

  Wendy narrowed her eyes and stared at me. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

  “What does Shakespeare have to do with anything?”

  “I’ve heard a dozen times tonight that you think this Jared Hamilton is a jerk…or a cad…or a creep. He must have some redeeming qualities. What about those?”

  “Flushed down the toilet, that’s what. Molly Hamilton brings out something protective and nurturing in me. Weirdly, I feel driven to protect her from her own brother.”

  “So, then,” Wendy said, wisely changing the subject. “Have you seen Ben lately?”

  “He was over last night. He wanted to hook my TiVo to my alarm clock so that I could wake up to The Brady Bunch.”

  “The man is a genius and a wreck waiting to happen.” Wendy knitted and purled awhile before she spoke again. “Have you noticed that even though you are the most organized person in the world, you attract messies like me and Ben…and Molly?”

  I hadn’t really thought of it, but what she said is true. I love tidiness—and people who aren’t.

  “Maybe I have a missionary complex,” I offered. “I want to save you from yourselves.”

  “Hah!” Wendy jabbed the knitting needles into the scarf and dropped it to the floor. Zelda and Imelda pounced and I knew that in a few minutes they’d undo all the work she had done. I bit my lip and stayed silent. It was Wendy’s scarf. If she wanted it to look like the snarled underside of a tapestry weaving, so be it.

  “This job has got your dander up,” Wendy said bluntly. “And I think it’s Jared Hamilton who’s really got you going.”

  “Not me. Look what a state he’s got his sister in.”

  “It’s not your business.”

  Wendy was right, but somehow I’d made it my business anyway and I wasn’t happy about it.

  That night I dreamed that I was rubbing my hand over Jared Hamilton’s strong, masculine, stubbled jaw and he was loving my touch. He even hummed softly in my ear, a contented sound…a purr. Then I woke up and realized I’d been stroking Zelda, who’d burrowed into my arms and allowed me to hold her in a warm embrace.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We are nearing the finish line and not a moment too soon.

  My affection for Molly is growing in an inverse relationship to my dislike for her brother. He set up camp at her house again when we moved to Molly’s home office, and demanded to see every scrap of paper or envelope we ran across.

  “Molly, I can’t believe the unmitigated, unimaginable mess you’ve got here! How you cope is beyond me.” He threw the papers he’d been looking at onto the floor and ran his fingers through his hair in frustration, a gesture I’d become far too familiar with lately. “What am I going to do with you?”

  Molly froze for a moment to stare at him. “What are you going to do with me, Jared? I need to know.”

  The sparks between them flew so hot and bright that I found myself backing away. This was a mostly invisible conversation, the kind only siblings or mates can have with one another.

  Then Jared remembered that I was there, sighed, rose to his feet and walked out the door without saying a word or looking back.

  When I turned to Molly, I was surprised to see the expression on her face. She looked concerned. Not for herself but for me. “Don’t worry about that, Sammi, he’s just having a bad day. He’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  “Why do you keep protecting him, Molly? I don’t get it. Your job is on the line and all you care about is whether I like him or not?”

  She looked at me as though I were a very slow child who couldn’t comprehend the ramifications of what had just happened. “It’s okay, Sammi. It really is. You don’t have to take on my battle with my brother. Really.”

  But I had. I’d stepped across a line and I knew it. I’d become Molly’s friend, not merely her consultant. It was time for me to quit.

  She didn’t take the news of my resignation well.

  “Are you sure I can do this alone?” Molly fussed unhappily. “Can I call you if I need help?”

  “Call me as a friend anytime. If you need professional services, I have the names of some great people you can use. I wrote Jared a note to let him know what I’ve decided. He’ll get back to me when he returns from his business trip so you don’t have to tell him, okay?” I put my hand on her arm because she looked as though she was about to burst into tears.

  “I don’t see why…”

  “I’ve become too close to this situation, Molly. I’m no longer objective about you and your brother. I should have kept my distance and not become so involved with you. It’s a policy I have. It wasn’t professional.” I felt myself tear up. “I’m sorry.”

  “You mean you can either be a coach or a friend but not both?”

  “It’s my policy, Molly.” I took her hand. “But I am still your friend.�
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  “I know how protective you’ve been of me, but it’s not necessary. Really.”

  “There you go again, defending Jared.”

  Molly looked as though there were something she desperately wanted to tell me. She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again.

  “I won’t go away mad,” I said with more lightness than I felt. “I’ll just go away.”

  She leaned to give me a hug. Her smile returned. “I wish you’d met us in different circumstances. Jared and I are really cool people, you know.”

  “I know.” About you, at least.

  As I drove away from Molly’s house, I took a peek in my rearview mirror. She was waving. And the mystery of her obstinate brother was no closer to being cleared up than the day I’d met him in Ethan Carver’s office almost a month ago.

  “Your mail is here,” Ben announced. He’s come twice this week to work on my furnace. It scares me a little, but he’s promised he isn’t hooking it up to anything else in the basement—especially not the water heater, the freezer or propane tank.

  “Thanks, sweetie.” I gave him a hug. I’m more grateful than ever for Ben these days. He never has a dark moment or a flash of annoyance. I appreciate him more after having spent time with Jared.

  “No problem.” He held up a large, impressive looking envelope. “What’s this? Looks important.”

  “Probably more expensive junk mail. Here, let me have it.” I reached for the piece and noticed Molly’s return address in the left-hand corner. “What on earth…”

  I tore into the envelope, which looked very much like an oversize wedding invitation. The inside envelope was addressed simply “Sammi.” Inside that was a formal-looking gift certificate.