“What the hell is that?” Leslie was asking, pointing across me at something that looked a lot like a bowling ball with huge ears.
“I think it’s considered exotic,” Amber said, and then she burst into giggles. For someone who was supposed to marry a whiskey distiller, Amber was a total lightweight. One drink and she was under the table. “It starts with a qua.”
“A qua?” I asked. “Is that a letter?”
Amber nodded serenely and I exchanged confused looks with Leslie.
“This woman is teaching the minds of tomorrow,” I added, pointing a thumb at my sister. “And she thinks qua is a letter.”
“I’m a math teacher,” Amber said in her own defense.
Leslie stood and moved around my stool to stand between my sister and me, peering down at the bowling ball on the napkin. “Just so you know,” she said. “Most math teachers know the alphabet.”
Amber straightened, her eyes hardening. “I know it,” she said. And then she proceeded to sing it for us, drawing a fair bit of attention and a round of applause. She stood and curtsied to her admirers.
“That was pretty good,” I said. “But you forgot the letter qua.”
“I meant Q, okay?” Amber slid back onto her seat. “I got confused. I’m drunk.”
“There are no Q animals,” Leslie said definitively.
“Fine,” Amber said, crumpling the bowling ball picture. “Guess this one then.” She drew a stick with teeth.
“Deadly stick bug!” I shouted in victory.
Amber looked disappointed, and Leslie turned to me. “Clearly, that is a vicious snake.”
“You guys suck at this,” Amber said. “It’s a crocodile.”
“Cormac has a crocodile on his porch?” I asked, trying to picture the man I thought I knew scouring the internet for exotic taxidermy. “Oh, wait. Yeah, he has a client that does taxidermy.”
“Why are they sending him bowling balls and crocodiles?” Leslie asked.
I thought about that, realizing I didn’t entirely know except that Cormac had said something about bribery. As I started to form an answer, Leslie slid her hand over my mouth.
“Actually, never mind. We are not talking about him anymore.”
Amber’s eyes grew round. “Is he why we’re drinking?”
Leslie nodded. “Paige slept with him once, because she is a free single lady who can sleep with whomever she likes without it having to mean anything at all.”
Around Leslie’s fingers I added, “But Taylor says I can’t be his mother so it will never work out.”
“Why do you want to be his mother?” Amber asked, shaking her head.
Leslie gave me a disappointed look and removed her hand. “We weren’t going to talk about this.”
“You started it,” I said. “And not his mother. Her mother.”
“Whose mother?” Leslie asked, sucking liberally from my straw.
“Hey, that’s mine,” I said, pulling it from between her glossy lips.
Leslie looked around, and spotting her own drink behind me, reached past me to pull it between Amber’s and mine instead of returning to her stool. She stood between us, sucking down punch and then looked back to me. “Now, tell us about his mother, since you insist on talking about him.”
“I don’t know his mother,” I said. “I don’t think he’s ever talked about her.”
“I thought she died,” Amber said non-helpfully.
Leslie shook her head. “That was his wife. Very sad.” Leslie was swaying from one side to the other.
“You should sit down,” I suggested.
“I’m soberer when I stand.”
“Look,” I said, wanting to put the topic of Cormac, front porch taxidermic bowling balls, and his mother to bed once and for all. “I spent too much time with him and maybe fell a little teensy bit in love with him, or with the idea of him and not being alone and maybe having a family and everything, but I’m not the mother, I will never meet his mother, and I am definitely totally moving to Baltimore. Don’t tell my mother.”
“Paige?” As if summoned by my speech, my mother’s voice came from behind me and I turned to see Mom standing there with a hand over her mouth.
“Oh, hi Mom.” I knew there was a reason why my mother being here was bad, but too much punch had resulted in me already forgetting what it was. I glanced back at Leslie. “You brought her here with all your talk of mothers, I think.” We both burst into a fit of giggles.
“I texted her,” Amber said. “We were drunk and you reminded me we had a mother who could take us home. She was right across the square.”
I tried to give Amber the evil eye for calling Mom, but it made me dizzy. “You shouldn’t call moms to a bar,” I hissed.
“I come here all the time without you,” my mother said, sounding offended. “Now what was that about moving to Baltimore and not telling your mother?”
“Oh that.” Suddenly I felt exhausted. All the emotion and heartache of the past couple weeks with Cormac and the months leading up to that in which I’d been negotiating for a job I wasn’t sure I really wanted compounded to make me feel weepy and tired.
“Lottie, you made her cry again.” Leslie crossed her arms and looked at my mother with a disappointed expression worthy of Lottie herself.
“Again?” Mom asked. She turned to Amber. “Why is Paige crying?”
“Something about kangaroos and crocodiles. And Cormac’s mother.” Amber shrugged as if none of it made any sense to her.
Probably because at this point in the evening and several punch buckets along, nothing made much sense to any of us.
“That’s it,” my mother said, pulling her purse strap higher on her shoulder. “I’m taking you all home.” She made a lasso motion with her arm, signaling the bartender.
“What’s she doing?” Leslie asked me, mimicking the motion.
“Calling a cab,” I suggested.
“Rodeo!” Amber screeched and then laughed hysterically. I thought she’d been sober a moment before, but the crumpled mass of laughing sister I saw next to me now told me I was a shitty judge of sobriety.
“It’s the universal sign for ‘check please,’” Mom said, sounding annoyed with us all. She gave the bartender her card and waited for him to run it, signed our check and then hustled us all out of The Shack.
“Girls,” she sighed, helping us all into her car, which was parked across the square in front of the Muffin Tin. “I’m a little surprised really. On a Tuesday night, of all things. Amber, how will you teach tomorrow?”
“She doesn’t have to know the alphabet, so it should be fine,” Leslie said, sounding serious.
Mom sighed dramatically and drove Leslie and Amber home, then pulled into my driveway and turned to me with a serious expression. “Paigey, are you moving away?”
I stared at my hands. They looked foreign and far away. I needed to avoid buckets of alcohol, I reminded myself. “Yeah, Mom. I think I am.”
She took a quick little breath in, and then cleared her throat. “I figured you would eventually.”
That caught my attention. “You did?”
She shrugged. “I hoped you’d find something here to make you want to stay. I have to say, I was pretty excited about the friendship you seemed to be building with Cormac Whitewood. Can I ask what happened?”
I sank down into the seat of her car a bit, letting the vibration of the running motor soothe my frazzled emotions. “We let it go too far, I think. He made it clear he wasn’t looking for anything, and I’d already given a verbal acceptance of the job in Baltimore. But it just felt so easy … until his daughter decided I was trying to replace their mother and got super upset. It was like someone poured a bucket of ice water over me and I realized suddenly what I’d been doing.”
“What had you been doing?” Mom asked this like she already knew but thought I didn’t.
I swallowed hard and let the disappointment I felt wash through me.
“I was just … getting
in too deep. Getting into something I already knew wouldn’t work in the end.”
“But maybe it could work,” Mom said, her voice light, as if she had just thought of this.
I shook my head. “It’s better to stick to the plan. I’ll go sign the paperwork and find a place to live on Friday. And then next weekend, I need to go.” If I hadn’t been drunk, I’d be gentler breaking this news to Mom.
Mom looked shocked. “So soon? But what about the festival?”
“I’ll stay to help with the cakewalk, don’t worry.”
“And your house?”
“I’m going to do short term rentals, I think. I’ll be close enough to come do whatever things need to be done, but I can pay a housekeeper and a gardener.”
“You’ve really thought this all through.”
I nodded, feeling the punch swish around in my brain.
Mom sniffed. “I’ll miss you, Paigey.”
I took in her expression, surprised at how well she’d taken this news and impressed, as usual, at how my mother had managed to anticipate my needs even before I had. “I’ll miss you too. But Baltimore isn’t far away. Not like …” I didn’t say “New York,” because my sister Addison’s departure had broken Mom’s heart, but not as much as her resistance to ever coming home to visit.
“Right,” Mom said. “Well, you go get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you for all the cakes,” she said.
I kissed her and slid out of the car, slumping into my house, letting Bobo out, and then putting myself to bed.
Can’t Spell Taxidermy without “Tax”
Cormac
Everything was back to normal.
I drove the girls to school in the mornings, picked them up in the afternoons, and tried to keep Luke out of my office as much as possible while I tried to work during the day.
In the past, I’d wished for more clients. Though my business was stable, and I wasn’t strictly a tax accountant (thank fuck), it was at this time of year that I was grateful I didn’t have many more. Trying to get the taxidermist organized was turning out to be nearly a full-time effort.
“These things, Cormac. These things you’re asking about. They’re hard to explain, you see?” Antoine the taxidermist was trying to explain to me why he couldn’t answer my questions about the international shipping charges, the extensive travel, and the insane deductions they were claiming. “Do you like the animals?”
I sighed and swung my gaze to the corner of my little home office, which currently looked like that of an exotic zookeeper. There were animals piled atop one another in the corner where I’d flung them. I’d been in no mood to explore the house looking for a perfect spot for a stuffed monkey. “The girls like them,” I said.
That much was true. They were no longer fighting over Frederick the Kangaroo. Now there were enough ridiculous stuffed exotic animals to go around.
“Is it legal to stuff things like wombats and kangaroos?” I asked, my mind finally landing on a potential reason for Antoine to be evasive. “I mean, how do you import these animals? Aren’t they considered exotic?”
Antoine was silent for a long minute. “You should come see our operation,” he said. “Then you understand.”
Or then they kill me because I’ve figured out they’re illegally importing exotic animals to stuff. “Probably not necessary just to do your books,” I told him.
“No, for fun too,” he said. Antoine had an accent I couldn’t place. Maybe he was exotic too.
“That’s okay,” I said, although the idea of fun was so foreign to me at this point I half wondered what he meant.
“You come.” Now he sounded serious.
“I really don’t—”
“The weekend,” he suggested.
“I have kids, Antoine, I can’t—”
“Next week then. Give you time to find babysitter.”
I let my mind rove over the idea of driving to Virginia to get to the bottom of the questions I’d been asking. It would be nice to just get the damn return filed and have this particular client out of my hair. Plus, if they sent any more taxidermy to the house, I’d have to find the actual people another place to live.
“Fine. Next week,” I said, beginning to think maybe just getting out of Singletree for a few days might give me some clarity.
“We will show you a good time,” Antoine promised.
“I really just need to see your receipts,” I said.
“Those too.”
I hung up and stood to stretch, feeling dark and hopeless in a way I hadn’t felt since Linda died. The stuffed quokka was grinning up at me from the edge of my desk where Taylor had balanced him. “Stop smiling at me,” I told him. “There’s absolutely nothing to smile about.”
The quokka didn’t answer, and I glared at him as I gathered my keys and got ready to go get Maddie and Taylor from school, wishing I could find a reason to smile.
Luke jumped into the car when I opened the back door for him, and we headed off to pick up the girls.
Maybe there were a few things to smile about, actually.
The girls, obviously. Taylor seemed to be fully recovered from her meltdown, and appeared to be totally oblivious to the effect it’d had on my mental state and the prospects for me to ever even speak to my neighbor again. I felt terrible about the way things had ended with Paige, but I kept telling myself it was for the best. What had happened with Taylor was just the tip of the potential iceberg of what could have happened if I’d gotten any closer, or let Paige any further into our lives. It was my job to protect the girls—physically, emotionally. And setting us all up in a situation where we’d come to depend on someone who was only going to leave had been the opposite of that. I’d let my brain take a back seat to… other things.
Luke was something to smile about now too, I guessed, though even he reminded me of my sexy neighbor. I had found that I could almost be around him without sneezing constantly. I still felt my throat swell a bit, and my nose ran, but there was a distinct improvement in how well I tolerated him. And that was a good thing.
But Paige … there was a dark spot inside me—equal parts sadness and guilt over how I’d handled things there. I’d tried to talk to her at her office the week before, but she wouldn’t let me talk. Maybe it was for the best. What had I planned to say? That I was sorry? That even though my heart was pulled to her and my body lit itself on fire when she was around, there was no hope for us?
I asked myself if all that might be different if I hadn’t known from the outset that she was going to leave, but I wasn’t a guy who dealt in hypotheticals. And even if she were to stay, there was no guarantee things would work out. And that was too big of a gamble to take with my daughters’ hearts.
“So what?” Callan asked me as I sat on his back porch later that afternoon with a beer in my hand as the girls and April played with Luke out on the lawn. “So you’re just writing her off?’
“I never wrote her on,” I told him, wondering if trying to talk to my meathead athlete brother about matters of the heart was completely pointless. If I’d had anyone else, I’d never have bothered.
“That’s absolutely not a saying, but I’ll let it slide because you’re clearly not yourself.”
“I’m myself.” I was more myself than I had been for the last few months when I’d been deluding myself that I might be someone else. That lighter, happier version of myself I’d been when Paige was around.
“You’re a disaster. You look like you got dragged backwards through a cornfield behind a tractor. You clearly haven’t been sleeping. You’re drinking,” he pointed to the beer in my hand.
“You gave me this beer! It’s the only drink I’ve had today!”
“Still,” he said, a little smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “Mac, look. It was pretty clear you had it bad for the doc on the day you brought that kangaroo to the movie.”
I hated that my life would now be categorized by which ridiculous animals had accompanied me to which events.
Today we’d had to stop back home on the way from school pickup because Maddie insisted on bringing along Mortie the Warthog and Taylor needed the as-yet-unnamed quokka to accompany her. The animals now sat next to me on the back porch, overseeing the lawn play.
“April and I could see it—the way you looked at her, the way you got all mopey when she spoke.” He waited for me to say something, but I was searching myself for a way to refute his assertion. “And you said dinner went really well right? At that stupid place in DC?”
“You knew that place was stupid?”
“Why do you think I was willing to give up the hardest to get reservation in the city?”
“Ass.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, and then tilted his beer back for a long drink. “So the question is whether you’re going to allow your seven-year old to run your life for you, or if you’re going to man up and take charge.”
I didn’t like the way he’d put that, but I could still hear the truth in his words. Though I loved her and needed to focus on making her happy, Taylor could not be responsible for my happiness. That was on me. I didn’t answer right away, but felt my brain click back onto the familiar track it had worn into a groove since all this had started, and I blurted out the words I’d been focusing on since I met Paige. “It wouldn’t matter. She’s leaving anyway.”
Callan rolled his eyes at me.
“What? She’s a grown woman with a good job opportunity in another city. I can’t control that. And it wouldn’t be smart to get involved with someone—let her get involved with my children—and then have her leave. That’s too close to what’s already happened to us.”
“So quit letting things happen to you.”
That felt a bit like a direct hit. I turned to face him. “You know nothing about it,” I said, my voice more steely and pointed than I’d expected to hear it. “Losing Linda was not something I could control, Cal, and you know that. You have no idea what it was like to lose her, to watch my daughters lose their mother. You have no idea how that changed us, how the house became suddenly cold without her there, how our lives got sifted down to the bare necessities.”
Second Chance Spring Page 16