“Are you kidding? You and your friends can have a proper girls’ holiday while we’re gone. I want you to enjoy yourself.” He kissed her exuberantly. “Now, tell me again, who all is coming?”
She knew he was trying to distract her from her sadness, but she appreciated the gesture. “Okay. You already know Melody Heath.”
“That’s your gloomy romance author friend, the one I first met at our wedding.”
“Right. She didn’t stay long. Her husband drove her down and was waiting for her at a bar in Wolverhampton. She said he wasn’t one for weddings and had bowed out, though we invited him, too.” She sniffed in disgust. Andrew, Melody’s husband, had picked her up at the wedding venue, the historic home outside of Queensville, to take her home before Jaymie had had a chance to visit with Mel, as she called her friend. “I don’t like him much. We visited her when we paused in Consolation on the drive up to the UP,” Jaymie said, of the small Michigan town were Melody lived.
The autumn before they were taking a mini holiday up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to see the fall colors, and had stopped to have coffee with Jaymie’s university friend. Melody was a few years older than Jaymie. She had started at Western, as the Canadian university was known, at the same time despite that, having suffered a few years of uncertainty. They were in many of the same classes, had similar interests, and had become close, remaining so as Melody’s romance fiction writing career took off.
“Her husband is a bit of an odd duck,” Jakob said, yawning.
“I don’t know what she sees in him.” Andrew was quiet and stuffy. To Jaymie he seemed standoffish, not even warming up to Jakob. Every guy loved her husband; he was one of those men who everyone takes to. But Andrew . . . not so much. Something in the man’s pale eyes was . . . off. Melody had confessed to Jaymie that she married him in a fit of loneliness. “I love Mel. I hope it all goes okay. She’s looking forward to getting away from Andrew, I think.”
“She doesn’t drive, though, right?”
“No. Rachel is going to pick her up.”
“And Rachel is—”
“Rachel Kimball. She moved into the house during my second year there. Wait . . . I have a photo album somewhere.” She jumped up, retrieved it from a shelf by the fireplace, and opened it, then plopped down next to Jakob, putting her feet up on the coffee table and propping the album on her legs. “Here,” she said, pointing to a pretty African-American girl with short natural hair. “That’s Rachel. She couldn’t come to our wedding, which is why you never met her. We got along famously. She went for her BA, but then continued on and got a master’s degree in Project Management. She’s project manager at an insurance company in Flint, now.”
“Why did she go to school in Canada?”
“Western has a good business school and she won a scholarship. She was a good study buddy . . . totally focused. I had a tendency to wander off and make brownies or cook a meal, or read a romance novel, and she’d haul me back to cram. She’s the reason I ended up on the honor roll my last year.”
Jaymie flipped a page and chuckled. “And that is crazy Brandi,” she said, pointing to a friend. In the photo Brandi stood on the roof of her car in the middle of a wild dance, bottle of tequila in one hand, maracas in the other. “Brandi Xylander, now, since her marriage. That was during homecoming week, which is why her face is painted purple and she’s wearing a purple T-shirt.” Purple and white were Western colors.
“What about this one, then?” he said, pointing to the next picture of Brandi wearing a green minidress, green plastic beads and a tall hat that said Kiss me I’m Irish. This time she was holding a yard of green ale in one hand and a stuffed shamrock in the other.
“That’s on St. Paddy’s Day, which is a big event for university students. Or at least the ones who drink. It was my one and only St. Paddy’s Day party. We were at a student bar downtown, which is why she has the yard of ale, and why it’s green. That girl was a party animal!” Jaymie sighed. “As much as I love her, she can be a handful. She behaved at our wedding, but that was a few hours. Brandi has a temper, hair trigger, and she’ll lash out.”
“That’s not good. She’s not violent, is she?”
“No, of course not! She’s . . . temperamental. Changeable. She can be moody at times. I don’t know . . . maybe she’s changed some in the last few years. I haven’t seen her much. She made up for her bad qualities, but you didn’t want to be in her way when she was on a tear.”
“She sounds a little difficult to deal with.”
Jaymie shrugged. She didn’t want to run her friends down. “She has a good heart, though. Anybody needs anything, she’s there.” She chuckled. “Sometimes she’s more generous with other people’s money and time than with her own, but . . .” She shrugged.
“Who is the one scowling beside her?”
“That’s Gabriela. She’s not scowling!”
He squinted and stared. “Looks like a scowl to me.”
“That’s how she always looks. That’s Gabriela Smith, now Offerman. She has one of those faces . . . always looks faintly annoyed.” Jaymie examined her friend. She was plump in school and had gained weight since. Marriage and a kid, she joked online; it’ll do you in every time.
“Gabriela . . . so, Gabby for short?” Jakob asked.
“Never Gabby! Not unless you want a death stare and to be hated for all time.”
“No sense of humor.”
“Everyone has flaws; that’s one of hers. She could be sneaky at times—things like eating someone’s snack food and denying it—but she was afraid of us not liking her. I felt sorry for her. We had a running joke about her frown. She is nice. Quiet. A bit of an oddball. If you caught her in a lie, she would get all red in the face. She lied for the weirdest reasons, too; she borrowed Rachel’s sweater once and it got torn. She claimed she saw a rat in the closet, and that’s how the sweater was damaged.” Jaymie shook her head. “There was no rat, but she kept it up for weeks, always screaming and saying she saw the rat.”
“That couldn’t have been easy to live with.”
“There was no harm in her,” Jaymie said softly. “She could be fun. She was our resident gamer, always playing Xbox. It’s funny . . . she did not understand appliances, but she was good with electronics. She was the first one to have a cell phone when they were still a luxury to most of us.”
“I have a vague memory of her with her husband and a child at our wedding?”
“She’s married to Logan and they have a little girl, three and a half years old now. I think they’re trying for a second. I went to her wedding six or seven years ago, and to her baby shower. They moved to a town in Ohio a few years ago to be close to his family. Her and Brandi live in the same town, so they’ll be driving in together. It’s a miracle we dragged her away from home; she’s close to her husband.” She twisted and kissed Jakob on the nose. “Kinda like me.” She frowned and regarded him, head to one side. “You know, you should remember some of these people, at least the ones who came to our wedding.”
“That day is a blur. I remember nothing from our wedding but your face and your lovely dress.”
“Good answer.” She kissed him again.
“That’s it?”
“That’s the crew.” She counted off on her fingers . . . “Me, Melody, Brandi, Rachel, and Gabriela. Five of us for at least a week, maybe ten days. We’ll see. There used to be a couple more, but they’ve drifted off and we lost touch. This is the core group. We’re going to go up to Canada to the beach. We used to go to Grand Bend almost every weekend in summer,” Jaymie said, of the Lake Huron beachside resort town. “It’s close to London, kind of a wild beach town, lots of bars and partiers. I imagine we’ll go shopping, do lunch, hang out on the beach. Another night we’re going to do a dinner cruise on the St. Clair.” Jaymie sighed and closed the photo album. “School, and hanging out all the time and partying . . . it seems so long ago now. I hope we all get along.”
“Why wouldn’t you?
You’ve been together plenty of times since. You camped together every summer for a decade after school, right?”
“Yes, but . . . there will inevitably be tensions. Rachel is the cool one, the easygoing one. I’ve got no worries there. Other than that . . .” She shrugged. “Brandi and Gabriela never got along. There were fights. They have an intense relationship, either best of friends or mortal enemies. Someone was always stealing someone else’s clothes . . . or boyfriend. But maybe it’s different now, since they live in the same town and see each other so much more and have kids.”
“How does your writer friend fit into all of this?”
“Mel got along. Kind of. She would make fun of Brandi, though. She’s kind of high-strung.”
“Melody?”
“No, oh no, Brandi. She was always a handful, life of the party, as I said. But she’s a mom now. She has a twelve-year-old girl from her first marriage, and a four-year-old little boy from her marriage to Terry, her current husband. Or ex . . . I know they’ve been having some problems. Last time I talked to her they were in the process of splitting up. I think she’s looking after another child, too, some relative of Terry’s, or hers. So . . . I don’t know.”
“This is supposed to be a time for you all to forget being wives and moms and be those crazy university students again,” Jakob said, stroking her hair.
“I guess,” Jaymie said. Did she want to forget being a wife and mom? Did she really miss the old days? Sometimes, when life was tiring and complicated she daydreamed about it—the freedom of no one depending on her—but she had a sneaking suspicion “back then” wasn’t any simpler than now. “Let’s go to bed. I want to make the most of tonight.”
Two
Morning dawned humid, with clusters of dark clouds piling up on the horizon, distant thunder rumbling as they packed the car and drove to the airport. It had not been an easy parting. At the last minute Jocie had been whiny and upset, clinging with sobs to Jaymie. Close to tears during their goodbyes, Jaymie worried it was her own sorrow communicating itself to their sensitive daughter. She took a deep breath and calmed herself, then had a talk with Jocie, kissed Jakob goodbye, and saw them through security before letting her tears flow.
The weather held until then, but to make her misery complete a deafening thunderclap roared and rain poured as she ran across the parking lot to her SUV. She sat for a while in the car, letting the defogger clear the windows and the air-conditioning kick in, then she drove north along I-94. It was hard to tell sometimes if the mistiness was rain or her tears. She played an audiobook of Melody’s latest romance to try to ease her melancholy, but it was a long, dreary, teary drive home from the airport.
Her composure returned as she entered their log cabin. Lilibet, Jocie’s cat, was staying with Jakob’s brother, Helmut, his girlfriend Sonya, and their kids, Jocie’s cousins, for the duration. Jaymie washed and dried the breakfast dishes, folded and put away the laundry, then locked up the cabin and took Hoppy with her in her roomy white Ford Explorer. She was going to stay in Queensville for the night, before her friends arrived on the island the next day.
The Queensville house, a big yellow-brick Queen Anne she co-owned with her sister, Becca, was cheery and comfortable even in the rain, but as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t linger. She told Hoppy to stay and headed right back out to go over to Valetta Nibley’s place. Her best friend was on vacation too and had home projects planned. Today she had handymen scheduled to give her an estimate on expanding her “catio,” the outdoor cat enclosure that gave Denver—once Jaymie’s cat but now Valetta’s—room to roam outside in safety.
Valetta’s home was a cottage close to her work as pharmacist, her pharmacy counter stationed within the Queensville Emporium, a store on the main street of town that sold a little of everything. It was so close she could walk to work and home for lunch. Jaymie pulled up behind a battered pickup truck in the drive, eyed the pouring rain, and decided she’d better make a dash for it up to the covered porch.
Valetta, barefoot and in a T-shirt that read That’s MISS Crazy Cat Lady to you!, answered the door, her face red and her expression annoyed. “Thank goodness you’re here,” she said, standing back to let Jaymie in. “A friendly female face. I’m going mad listening to those baboons.” She pushed her thick glasses up on her nose and slammed the door, the glass window rattling. “I’m fed up and ready to tell them to go stick it.”
“What’s going on?”
Valetta looked down the dim hall toward the kitchen, from which boisterous voices could be heard. “These two handymen that Brock suggested, Mario Horvat and Kory-with-a-K, they’re both—”
“Val! Val, come here,” Brock bellowed. “The guys have a question.”
Valetta rolled her eyes. “Follow,” she said to Jaymie. “I’m coming!” she yelled.
Jaymie trailed her friend through the living room to the kitchen, where Val’s older brother, Brock, stood with two fellows in stained khaki cargo shorts, work boots and torn, stained T-shirts. The older of the two, a guy with coarse tanned features, a high forehead that climbed into wild graying sandy hair, sweat beading his furrowed brow, gave Jaymie a thorough perusal that made her feel uncomfortable. She pulled her sleeveless tee away from her body and shifted.
“What’s up?” Val asked.
Brock, a neat enough man with slicked-back dark hair and a wide-mouthed, loose-lipped face, smiled and said hi to Jaymie, then turned to his younger sister. “These guys need to know dimensions. Like, what are you thinking?”
Valetta took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, once more: I gave you a drawing, and there are dimensions on it. Can’t you read numbers and English?”
Jaymie’s brows climbed her forehead. Normally unflappable, Val was unusually irritable today. There must have been quite a lot of idiocy preceding this. She followed the group back through the living room and into the spare room. Mario opened the window as Denver, huddling in glowering fury in his bedroom, hissed and scooted out of the way of the handyman’s clumsy boots.
He pointed through the window to the small catio Valetta already had. “Now, see, here you’ve got your thingamajig attached to your window frame, but in the drawing you did, you don’t say that.” Mario looked up at Val. He waved the drawing in his hand. “You don’t indicate that anywhere.”
Val again took in a deep lungful of air and let it out slowly, rounding her mouth and releasing a long yoga breath. It would take either medication or many cups of tea to recover from this. She jabbed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “Because, as indicated,” she said, snatching the drawing out of his hand and pointing to a spot on it, “I am proposing a whole new entry and exit method for Denver. I want the catio to be attached to the siding instead of the window frame, and a platform attached to the window frame instead, kind of a launching pad for the dude. The catio is going to be a lot bigger. In fact, it will reach right down to the ground, where I would like a cement pad poured first.” She handed the drawing to Jaymie. “Tell me if this is clear,” she asked her friend, still glaring at Mario.
Jaymie perused it. The drawing was amateur, of course, but perfectly laid out with dimensions clearly marked. Valetta wanted a cat patio that would have, as its base on the ground, a cement pad, which she was going to line with outdoor carpeting. The dimensions were printed in neat block letters and numbers, with materials noted. Two-by-fours framed a large enclosure, six feet wide by four feet deep by seven feet tall. She had listed proposed materials along the side: wire mesh made up the enclosure walls and was stapled to the two-by-fours, and a rippled opaque polycarbonate roof covered the enclosure to keep out rain; the ripples were to channel rainwater away and must be pointed down. She wanted it affixed to the side wall of the back portion of the house, which had clapboard siding. The polycarbonate roof would be sealed to that siding with silicone or something like that, to prevent leakage.
“This is perfectly clear,” Jaymie said, handing it back.
Val hand
ed it over to the handyman. “I want an eight-by-five-foot cement pad poured first, with drainage channels so water won’t gather, and then the new catio built and installed. So . . . can you or can you not do it? I need to know soon, and I want an estimate of materials and labor.”
Kory-with-a-K, a younger whiskerless fellow with light brown long hair tied back in a ponytail, snickered. Mario whirled, glared at him, then looked back to Val. His cell phone pinged repeatedly, and his hand strayed to his shorts pocket, but he didn’t look at it. “Now, Ms. Nibley, I’m sure we can handle all your needs. This is the kind of thing I specialize in, you know, room for your . . . pussycat.” Kory stifled another chuckle. Brock shot a dirty look at him, eyes squinted. “Now, I just need to look outside,” Mario continued with a gentle, mansplaining tone. “To see if there’s room for what all you’ve got planned. We can’t know that until we take accurate measurements, you see, because we need to be so far from your neighbor’s house, and we need room to get in there with a wheelbarrow.”
“There is room!” Val said emphatically, vibrating with anger. Her fingers moved convulsively, like she wanted to tear her hair out, or claw at someone’s face. “My neighbor’s house is eleven feet away from mine, plenty enough room to get a wheelbarrow in or one of those small portable cement mixer thingamajigs, the ones on two wheels. For an eight-by-five cement pad four inches deep you need thirty-six fifty-pound bags of concrete mix. A portable cement mixer is an absolute necessity. I measured the area myself, and I have my neighbor’s permission to build it, as long as you don’t tromp on her hostas,” she said, glaring down at Mario’s big boots.
“Calm down, now, no need to get hysterical. I want to check and make sure, miss,” the handyman said, his hands splayed out in a soothing gesture guaranteed to irritate any intelligent female. He then gestured to Kory. “We need accurate measurements, you see. Come on outside with me,” he said to his buddy, taking out his measuring tape. “Come on, Brock; I need your opinion.”
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