2 Days 'Til Sundae (2 'Til Series Book 1) Read online

  2 DAYS ‘TIL SUNDAE

  Heather Muzik

  2 Days ‘Til Sundae

  © 2010 by Heather Muzik

  www.heathermuzik.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner, nor stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, except for brief quotations in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine, or journal.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintended.

  Cover Illustration by Michelle Black

  www.acoloraffair.com

  To Carolyn

  &

  The Golden Girls:

  Barbara, Liz, Margaret,

  Marie, Kate,

  Joan & Jane

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank everyone who supported my first book, Celia’s Journey, and all the wonderful people who hounded me for my next one—phew, here it is. To Deidre Pickering and Barbara Renzi, “the proof” is right here. To Kristie Worrell, for “linking” me to everything I need to know and giving me a little Jersey fix whenever I need it most (http://needcoffeeplease.blogspot.com). To Jane Leeds and Bill Chastain, for the timely news. To Michelle Black, for bringing to color and life that which used to only be in my imagination. To Joan Viscontini, Sam Kirchmann, and Joel Muzik, for your support, interest, encouragement, etc. To Margaret and J.S. Moyle, your honesty is brutal and necessary—you make me a better person. To Jack, for thinking I am way too girlie and humoring me anyway. To Jaxon and Dustin, for keeping me grounded.

  Table of Contents

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  Rediscovering Catherine

  -1-

  This was the last place Catherine wanted to be right now, maybe second to last behind a NASCAR race. Ideally she should be back in her apartment sleeping off Saturday night. But life is real, not ideal, her mother liked to remind her when things didn’t go as planned—which they seldom did.

  Coming to visit her parents was difficult enough on an average Tuesday, but filled with the vestiges of too much alcohol and too little sleep from activities Mr. and Mrs. Hemmings would not sanction, support, or even understand, it was bordering on torture. Not that her parents weren’t loving, wonderful people, but she’d been their prime disappointment these past several years—perhaps for the last decade. Unmarried at thirty-four, she was a failure in suburban time. Maybe there were tons of single ladies in New York City, working nine to five at successful careers—or at least life-supporting jobs—but back here in Chesterton she was an anomaly, a black sheep, a scourge on the principles of Middle America. Sure she made a good enough wage to keep her in a crappy walk-up apartment that was relatively free of crime. And she was able to keep herself in great designer clothes at a minimum monthly payment and reasonably awful finance charge. For all intents and purposes she was independent, unlike Rachel Craig who had moved back in with her parents after a nasty divorce—but at least Rachel had been married. Catherine’s lifestyle was hard for her mother to comprehend, and even harder for her to explain to the ladies in her book club, and practically impossible to justify to those in her church group.

  She scrambled the contents of the last box, digging furiously through the mostly meaningless bits and pieces of her past, taking stock of what was there. It didn’t seem possible that her eighteen years raised by Elizabeth and William Hemmings in suburban Pennsylvania had culminated in just three cardboard boxes filled with assorted flotsam and jetsam that seemed to characterize any girl anywhere—ribbons, metals, report cards, an old pencil case filled with beaded friendship pins and covered in liquid stickers (the stickers, she noted, still dutifully released a show of moving color when swiped with her finger). There was the scarf she had worn on her first date with Steven Fowler, a fluffy acrylic scarf with pink and white stripes that had served not to warm her neck in the middle of a decidedly gentle February but to cover the evidence of their make-out session in the back of the movie theater. There was also the jean jacket that still smelled slightly of pot from the concert she had gone to the night of her senior prom. Instead of getting overly made-up and corsaged to go dancing to a DJ, that night she and Natalie Wermor had been standing outside the Spectrum in Philly, trying to score tickets to the sold out Aerosmith show—priorities firmly in check. Now she realized she hadn’t even spoken to Natalie since high school graduation—priorities wack. As the memories started to fly, fast and furious, she recognized that what first looked like a random collection of anyone’s stuff was truly alive with the essence of Catherine Hemmings.

  “Really, Catherine, can’t you keep the mess to a minimum?” Elizabeth Hemmings asked as she came around the corner into what used to be her daughter’s bedroom—the tsk-tsk was implied.

  Catherine looked guiltily at the three open boxes in front of her that were now a riotous jumble, their contents intermixed—clothing with paperwork, knickknacks with CDs and books—instead of the neatly stacked and sorted items her mother had so carefully stored away.

  “Sorry, Mom, I’ll clean it up.”

  “More like you’ll shove it all back in the box and sit on it to make it fit.”

  “Maybe,” she mumbled. “What does it matter what it looks like inside as long as everything is away?”

  “I’m glad your father shared that gene with you,” her mother said derisively. “At least you will always have something to remember him by, but I can’t stand here and watch you make a mockery of my methods.” She made a move for the door, her obsessive organization disorder acting up again.

  “You act like he’s dead, Mom; he’s down in the family room watching golf.”

  Her mother stopped and stood there, folding the dishtowel she had been drying her hands on. Undoubtedly this particular dishtowel was on its way to the laundry room hamper, but Elizabeth Hemmings would send it there in style, folded three ways to Sunday and then placed gently on top of the folded jeans and shirts that were also awaiting the wash. Just because they’re dirty doesn’t mean they should look unkempt—what if a neighbor happened by?

  “Is this it?” Catherine asked, her hand clutching the lifeless arm of her wool letterman’s jacket that saw more wear on a hanger than it ever did on her body and yet still warmed her heart to see again. She’d gotten it for Christmas her freshman year. Her mother had stolen her varsity tennis letter that she earned that fall and sewed it on the back before wrapping it. She remembered how proud her parents had been of what she accomplished mere months into high school—she’d obviously peaked too early.<
br />
  “What do you mean?” her mother asked.

  “Is this all my stuff? …. This is all that I left behind?” Sixteen years had melted away while looking in these boxes and the memories that surfaced had evoked more memories of other things that weren’t in attendance here. Her cotillion dress—her first strapless number—was nowhere to be found. Same for all her collections from her desk drawers that had certainly been labeled trash and thrown away since her mother had been in charge of cataloguing what was Catherine Hemmings. And she didn’t see her purple pearlized Jordache purse with the all-important white horse-head emblem—the one she had looked for high and low in every drugstore and department store in east Pennsylvania until she was sure she would die without ever having one of her very own because red or pink or black wouldn’t do—the one her father found and brought back from a business trip to Florida, much to her wondering eyes and great squeals of delight—the one she repaid him for with countless hugs… before she turned into a snippy, crabby tween and then a bitchy, self-absorbed teen, who had forgotten all about that damn purse. Also gone was her grandfather’s King Edward cigar box where she had stowed away the guitar pick she caught at that Aerosmith concert senior year, and a business card with a spritz of cologne embedded in the paper (Hugh Karr’s cologne—her major crush all four years of high school), and the cigarette butt her friend had stolen from an ashtray outside a café on South Street in Philly and wrapped up for her birthday, swearing that it had touched the actual lips of none other than Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Trash, she humphed to herself. She should have realized just how unimportant it would all look to the amateur’s eye.

  “This is the last of it,” her mother said with finality… and more than a bit of relief. She seemed happy to be releasing the vestiges of her daughter’s childhood, moving on to a new phase of her life that didn’t pretend to be saving anything for posterity—for the grandkids she had become militant about no longer expecting.

  “But—”

  “But what? That’s it. And your brother picked up his stuff the last time he was in town with Lacey. We’re finally free of you two.” She swiped a hand across her brow like parenthood was a dicey situation.

  Catherine couldn’t help but notice the slightly sour twist of her mother’s lips as she said her daughter-in-law’s name. Elizabeth Hemmings always tried to be diplomatic. She tried not to speak ill of anyone. But her mother really didn’t like Lacey one bit. Lacey was a testament to what the sisterhood had created with the whole liberation movement and bra burning; she didn’t fit into the family. Catherine knew her mother couldn’t understand why Connor would have anything to do with a woman so—unlike his mom. Weren’t boys supposed to marry a semblance of their mothers? This newest Mrs. Hemmings wasn’t even Mrs. Hemmings, but Mrs. Stemple.

  “I just thought—”

  But her mother wouldn’t even let her finish. “Oh, don’t give me that face. It’s not like I’m purposely withholding your old crap so I can keep it for myself, Catherine Marie.”

  God forgive me, but she hated it when her mother used her Christian name.

  “Spill it,” her mother said, noticing the wounded expression on her face.

  “I was just looking for—hoping to find some other memories packed away in the boxes,” she said honestly.

  “Well I have news for you: they’re in your head. Only stuff can fit in a box. Memories are kept closer to you,” her mother said practically. She laid the wet, folded dishtowel on the bed and started straightening up and refilling the boxes that Catherine had just emptied. No ceremony. No moment to pine for what was lost. Move on. But that is just what Elizabeth Hemmings did—always going forward, cleaning up, and making things perfect.

  Catherine looked at her mother, momentarily taken aback. Not that the woman wasn’t known to whip out a real gem now and again, but it never ceased to amaze her how it happened so effortlessly. It wasn’t that her mother wasn’t sympathetic to feelings; she just didn’t like stuff because it made life too messy and neatness was the goal.

  Elizabeth Hemmings’ expression was a mixture of pity and amusement. “Look, I saved your blankie and Squeak the mouse—your irreplaceables,” she said, pulling a charcoal gray mouse out of the box by his tail and dangling it in front of Catherine as if she held a dead rodent in her pincer grip rather than a stuffed animal with huge round ears and plastic whiskers that curled out from around his lime-colored plastic button nose (from a shoddy nose job back in ‘79 after a run-in with their dog, Mr. Peebles—jealousy was the motive; guilty, the verdict). Squeak’s plump belly was full of beans so he could sit upright on the bed or a desk or any number of places of honor he had held through the years, until college and life got in the way and he found himself ass-up in a brown cardboard box.

  She grabbed Squeak from her mother’s grasp, feeling that familiar surge of empathy for the feelings of a stuffed friend stuck in an awkward position. That same feeling was why she still couldn’t walk into a Stuffed World store at the mall without needing to upright all animals, and un-squish them, and generally make sure all tigers were with tigers, parrots with parrots, etc.—so order was in her bones somewhere. Anything to help all the animals find homes as soon as possible. For her, Stuffed World was almost as bad as going into the pet shop and having to see the sad faces of the real puppies and kittens and rodents and reptiles that wouldn’t be going home anytime soon.

  Hugging Squeak to her chest, she tried not to think of what it must look like for a woman of thirty-four to be cradling a matted stuffed rat to her breast—like a picture of the reason why that woman was still single.

  “Bringing people to tears again, is she?”

  Catherine turned to see her dad’s bodiless head peeking around the doorjamb. He spoke with a twinkle in his eyes and an edge of pride in his voice. After forty years of marriage, he didn’t have to be anywhere near his wife to know what she was up to—telling it like it is.

  “Oh William,” she protested, noticeably flustered as evidenced by the chameleonic change from pale ivory to soft petal pink and then back again.

  “I try to tell her to tone it down, but—”

  “You do not!”

  Catherine watched them, always amazed by her parents’ interactions. Even after all these years, to see her father still treating her mother in a way that made her feel flirted with…. No wonder they never seemed to get any older. And no wonder I can’t seem to settle down. They had ruined her for most men with their example that proved okay wasn’t good enough in a relationship. She looked from the jolly bald head in the doorway to the slender gray-haired beauty who was busily folding a box closed on her past, realizing she knew exactly what she wanted. But how the hell do I find it in this day and age? .... At my age?

  “Dad!” she called out just as his head was slipping from view, his desire to inject himself any further obviously gone.

  “Yeah?” he called from the hallway.

  “Do you know if there is anything of mine left in the basement?” It was common knowledge that her mother didn’t ever venture underground—death alone would find her there. That much of the house was completely her father’s domain. It was the only untamed space at 117 Fir Lane.

  “So this is what all the fuss is about,” he said, coming back into the room.

  “What fuss?” her mom chimed in.

  “You’re calling your little chicks home to roost. This isn’t a simple desire to see them, but a plan to pack up and clear out the house.”

  “Oh pish,” Elizabeth said, like a proper old lady even though she hardly seemed her sixty years.

  “What?” Catherine asked, her ears suddenly alert to the possibility of something far worse than seeing her childhood room turned into a gym, which they had actually done at one point, only to find that neither of them liked it so much as the idea of it. Since then her room had been returned to a semblance of its former self—minus the posters plastered on walls and the accoutrement of her childhood that had been packed a
way in these boxes. At least her bed and the rest of her furniture had been reinstated, alongside neutral paint and understated decorations that made the space seem like an oddly familiar hotel room whenever she came to stay for a visit.

  “William,” her mother cautioned. She always used his full name. Other people through the years had shortened it to Will or Bill, but her mother always stayed true to William. Just like she never called her daughter anything but Catherine, or Catherine Marie when she was making a point. And she was always Elizabeth—but for the few times Catherine had heard her father whisper Lizzy in his wife’s ear.

  “What? What is it? You baited me to come here and get my stuff. What’s the deal?” Catherine demanded, looking from one to the other, trying to gauge who was more likely to crack.

  Elizabeth and William looked at each other, their eyes conveying an unspoken parental conversation.

  “Oh, all right. We’re moving,” her mother said dismissively, like they were deciding to wallpaper the bathroom or go to the Poconos for the weekend.

  Catherine’s mouth dropped open in genuine surprise. It wasn’t like they didn’t have the right to go wherever they pleased, but this was the first she’d heard a thing about them even wanting to go anywhere else. Other than vague complaints about the weather and taxes in Pennsylvania, she thought they loved it here; that they would live right here in the house she grew up in… forever.

  “You’re catching flies dear,” her mother said, and went back to tidying up the mess, snatching Squeak from Catherine’s grasp and stuffing him inside the box he’d come from.

  “D-does Connor know?” she stuttered.

  “No,” her mother said.

  “Well… shouldn’t you tell him?”

  “Of course we’ll tell him.”

  “He bought a house a half hour from here to be near you guys—six months ago! Don’t you think he might like to know this? .... Maybe he would have liked to know before closing?”