2 Days 'Til Sundae (2 'Til Series Book 1) Page 2

  “We just decided,” Elizabeth said simply. “Besides, it isn’t like I am going to be a grandmother. I’m not needed nearby. They made that perfectly clear yet again. It’s not in the cards for them.” Her tone expressed the absurdity of it, and the hurt that she felt.

  Catherine couldn’t understand her brother’s certainty about not wanting to have any kids either; especially since, at thirty-four, her own biological clock was ticking so loudly it was like impending doom in her ears. But that didn’t mean it was time to pack up a forty-year life and move.

  “What she means is that I just finally persuaded her,” William corrected. He had accepted their ban from grandparent-dom much more smoothly; he saw it as beyond their control and beyond their ability to judge as well.

  “You?” Catherine was even more shocked that this was coming from her dad. He was the most content person on the planet. It seemed like he had no dream other than living out his life in simple routine in his own home. Moving seemed too dramatic for him.

  “Yeah, me. I think that it’s about time we enjoy the fruits of many years of labor. This is retirement—our golden years.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re getting an RV. I don’t think I can take it.”

  “Oh please! What do you take me for? Honestly, Catherine, don’t be so dramatic. You know I would never, ever ride around in one of those,” her mother said forcefully, eyeing her father as if to make the point absolutely clear to him that she was dead serious.

  “Couldn’t get her to buy into traveling the country in an RV,” he said dolefully, shaking his head as if that would have been his first choice.

  “Like you even tried.” Her mother whipped him with a red bandana she had been carefully folding to put back in Catherine’s box of clothing and textiles.

  “I would have, if I thought I might get somewhere.”

  “You know all you really want out of your retirement is a living room with a couch and a TV,” her mother jabbed.

  “And an RV has all that… plus it can take you places while doing those things.”

  “While who drives?”

  “Why you, my sweet.” He pulled his wife into a dramatic dip and kissed her full on the mouth.

  Again, Catherine couldn’t help but see why she was still single. This beautiful example before her was not the type of relationship one found in a club or bar. It certainly wasn’t an easy thing to come by… at least not in her experience so far. It hadn’t happened by chance, or by blind dates set up through friends, or through work relationships, or through that small stint of internet dating. Her parents were two peas in a pod—where’s my pod? and my fellow pea? Maybe it helped that her parents were both obviously totally insane. Maybe that was the secret ingredient.

  “All right. I get it. No RV. Parents moving…. Where exactly are you going?” Catherine asked wearily, just wanting to be done with the whole conversation that was upending everything she had believed about the pretenses of her visit. Her mother had said she was “cleaning house,” which had been a euphemism for many things over the years, but never moving. It was understandable Catherine had been caught off guard. Now she steadied herself, realizing that for all the hoopla and shock value of the word, she hadn’t considered that “moving” might mean across town to a smaller place, maybe a condo or seniors’ neighborhood where maintenance was done for them—just please don’t let them say they are going to try New York on for size. On second thought, her father would just as soon give up living entirely than give up having a lawn and mowing it—

  “Wyoming,” her father announced proudly.

  “What?” Her brain couldn’t compute what her ears had heard. The syllables were all wrong.

  “Wyoming,” they repeat in unison.

  “What the hell is in Wyoming?”

  “The word is heck Catherine Marie,” her mother scolded, continuing to right the wrongs of her boxes of junk.

  “Land,” her father said. “Yes, my daughter, ‘tis land we are in search of.” Suddenly he had become a frontiersman at the birth of the nation.

  “Since when?” she eked out, honestly befuddled considering they had always lived on a third of an acre in the suburbs. Nothing she knew of them led her to understand the admonition that they wanted to own land.

  “Actually,” her father piped up, “we’ve owned land in Wyoming for quite some time. After you lousy kids got out of college and we had some financial freedom, we bought some land—”

  Now we’re lousy kids too? The hits just kept coming.

  “—It’s about time we go and enjoy it.”

  “Enjoy Wyoming?” she asked blankly—the humph implied. “I don’t think even their tourism department tries to float that gimmick.”

  “Catherine,” her mother warned.

  She expected to see the presence of reason in her mother’s eyes, or maybe a look that pled with her not to let her father do this. That he was taking her against her will. She looked for something that made sense of the words that were shattering her illusions of the people who had raised her. But what she saw instead was genuine, unflagging certainty. Like it was a mission to close out this life and start a new one.

  “So what’s the house like?” she choked out, trying to sound as if she wasn’t mentally running through the list of institutions in the area.

  “Well….” her mother hemmed.

  “You’re about to tell me it’s a trailer, right?”

  “A double-wide,” her father said, as proud of that as he was of Wyoming in general.

  “Just for now,” her mother clarified.

  “Until our house comes,” he added.

  “Until it comes?” Catherine asked slowly, fearful of the answer.

  “It’s a prefab log cabin,” her dad explained. “Comes in crates and goes together like a puzzle. You know how much your mother loves a good puzzle.”

  -2-

  “Connor, maybe you could lay off the whole ‘no kids thing,’” she advised. “You’re putting tremendous pressure on my lonely old womb to be the savior of our genealogical heritage. You know it about kills Mom to think she won’t have little grandkids to spoil.”

  He snickered faintly, but when he spoke he dropped into his professional tone. “That’s no reason to have kids.”

  “Oh, shut up! Can’t you just pull the giant stick out of your ass for a minute?”

  Silence greeted Catherine on the other end of the line. She was about to fill it when Connor’s voice came back at her, suddenly full of life. “Damn… are you calling me gay?”

  “If the shoe fits!” she cackled back, snorting in the Liggans’ way—her mother’s people.

  He sounded more like the pre-Lacey Connor for a change, the one who didn’t take himself so seriously.

  “You know if it’s a Jimmy Choo it’s going to fit, girl,” he said with an effeminate lisp.

  “The fact that you even know a designer’s name gives me the willies,” she giggled.

  “I’ve been in my wife’s closet before.”

  “Point taken,” she said tightly. Unfortunately three years had not taken the bite out of that word, seeing as how she’d gotten no closer to that title herself.

  “S’up lil’ sis? Why you trippin? Callin’ me at work?” he asked, sounding thuggish. She was actually older than him by a year, but he called her little sis because he got all of the height in the family and she got… a little extra girth—most of it in the right places.

  “I just wondered if you’ve talked to Mom and Dad recently.”

  “Not since Lacey and I went over for dinner a week ago.”

  Either he didn’t know the news or he was begging for a bitch-slapping by keeping her in the dark this long. Or maybe he was also doing extensive research into assisted-living facilities they might be able to afford—

  “Cat, is something up?” Connor asked, using the nickname he always used for her when their mother was out of ear shot.

  “Well….”

  “It’s Dad, isn’t
it? Is he losing it? Threatening to strangle Mom again?” Playfulness ran amok in their household, often tending toward dark humor about someone’s impending murder. Another reason that Lacey mixed like oil and water with their family.

  “They’re moving,” she blurted out, unable to play the game what with the pressure of the secret pressing on the inside of her lips.

  “Moving? Where? When?” he sounded genuinely shocked but not upset, which was surprising considering she would have been downright pissed if after she moved nearby they up and left.

  “Wyoming ASAP—to put it in Dad’s words.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Dead.”

  “Holy shit.” It was more a releasing of breath than actual words.

  She could imagine Connor sitting in his office, rubbing his hands through his already thinning hair. There was baldness all throughout the men in their family, so he didn’t really have a prayer no matter what side the genes came from.

  “Yeah, something like that,” she agreed.

  A moment of silence and a sigh of—is that relief? She couldn’t tell for certain, but it sounded like he was possibly even happy. Maybe living within a half hour of the parental unit was turning out to be a nightmare.

  “Good for them,” he said.

  “You’re not worried?”

  “Worried about what?”

  “That they don’t have a clue what they’re doing.”

  “They’ve been at this thing called life a lot longer than we have,” he pointed out. “By now they have it pretty much figured out.”

  “But moving out of nowhere like this? To Wyoming? Maybe they’re going senile, or they could have Alzheimer’s—they could be going nuts.”

  “Cat, what’s the deal? Why are you so hyped up about this?”

  “They’re piddling away their retirement on a whim, and when it’s all gone, they’re going to end up living with me…. I’ll be changing their diapers, Connor.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic—you don’t even know if they’re going to need diapers.”

  “Funny,” she groused.

  “Cat, didn’t you ever pay attention when they were talking at the dinner table?”

  Her silence was her guilt.

  “As I suspected,” he said grimly. “Dad used to talk about saving and investing all—”

  She faked a snore—like she used to as a teenager during those dinner conversations.

  “You’re a lost cause.”

  “I am not,” she pouted.

  “I’m just saying that Dad always had it all figured out, planned and budgeted.”

  “How? I thought we were poor.”

  “In Chesterton? Hardly,” he scoffed.

  “Then why did we only have sale… well, everything? Why did we use coupons and eat microwaved leftovers. Why did we drive around in an old Buick?”

  “It’s called being frugal. Maybe you should give it a try.”

  “Why are you so… okay with this?” she demanded, ignoring his slam about her lifestyle that was decidedly anti-frugal. She considered it a revolt against her childhood during which she was denied all the frivolous things for the wear-like-iron good solid basics that everyone should own. Now she let the trends blow her any which way. She filled her closet beyond max capacity and afterward she bought takeout and trashed the leftovers.

  “Because it’s their life.”

  “But Wyoming? What did they do, play pin the tail on the donkey with a map?”

  “At least it wasn’t a world map,” he offered. “It could be Libya.”

  She groaned at his cavalier reaction—“Your optimism is unwelcome.”

  “Well you sound like a brat.”

  “It’s going to ruin Christmas,” she whined, pulling out all the stops.

  “They have Christmas in Wyoming, you know.”

  “It just isn’t going to feel right,” she pouted.

  “Grow up little girl. I think Santa will find you… even there.”

  “Screw you,” she groused.

  “So, are they selling the house?” he asked, absorbing her jab like it was a slap from a feather.

  “What do you think?” she challenged, realizing she’d never even bothered to ask. They didn’t have a sign out front or anything. At least she didn’t think so. Admittedly she hadn’t even looked for one, seeing as how she had been preoccupied mourning the death of her favorite new, deliciously expensive, as yet not paid for, self-designed Nike running shoes that she had zero intentions of actually running in. Two steps from the car, she’d landed right in a heaping gift from Miss Kitty, the ancient basset hound that had always lived next door. Miss Kitty had no regard for property lines (half-blind was no excuse). And it wasn’t just sole-reaching stank, but a mountain that swallowed the fabric too. After bemoaning the fact that she didn’t have shoe insurance for such incidents and didn’t think that Nike would replace only her left shoe, she’d had to make a tough decision: listen to her father who insisted he could pressure wash the sneaker with his newest garage-worthy acquisition, then air it out a day or two until it was good as new; or her mother who was certain the sneaker was a goner that needed to be thrice bagged before hitting the trashcan—you know, just in case poop could travel through plastic. She sided with her mother (based on pure ick factor) and put it and its mate down as humanely as possible, certain that no matter how clean her father could get it, the pair would be tainted forever as “poop shoes.”

  “You should buy it!” Connor exclaimed suddenly, bring her crashing back to the present.

  “’Cuz being single at thirty-four isn’t hard enough; now I should up the ante and switch out the convertibility of a lease in living, breathing NYC to hole up in a permanent dwelling in a decidedly un-single town,” she said caustically.

  “You always said you loved that house.”

  “I do. But I would also love to be married someday, and I have already checked out the pickings in Chesterton. Not good. Either guys I already caught and threw away… or ones I never wanted in the first place. I think I’ll stay where I’m at.”

  “Because that’s been working so swimmingly.”

  She could practically see him shrugging on the other end of the line.

  “Listen, Cat, I gotta go and get some work done—”

  “One more thing,” she said quickly. “Did you take some stuff from home?”

  “Sure. A couple boxes.”

  “Have you looked through them?”

  “Not really. They’re in the garage.”

  “Could you check in them? See if there is anything of mine that got in your boxes by mistake?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything pink and frilly,” she joked. Honestly, she didn’t even know quite what she was hoping for him to find, just something more.

  “I’ll check.”

  “Before Lacey sends it all to Goodwill, please?”

  “Come on. Be fair,” he said tightly.

  “I’ve seen your house. None of your childhood stuff is entering the premises.”

  “Fuck you,” he said good-naturedly, acquiescing to the truth.

  “I love you, too.”

  She hung up the phone, already missing him. Before Lacey had gotten in the way and turned him into some kind of executive automaton, she and Connor had regularly talked like this. Now it was almost seven o’clock and he was still at work, and these types of conversations were few and far between. Sometimes growing up sucked.

  The boxes she’d brought back from her parents’ stood sentry just inside the door—two stacked to one side and the largest one alone on the other, where it was just in the way of the door swing as if her past was an impediment to living in her present and moving toward her future. Considering she’d gotten in past midnight on Sunday, hauling them this far had been good enough. But now it was two days later and the stack was fast becoming a makeshift mail and keys and cell phone center, as it was in the way of her entry table that had been purchased to do that very job.


  She was avoiding the task—choosing laundry and dusting, her usually dreaded chores, over figuring out what to do with all of it. Being faced by the ghosts of her youth in the comfort of her childhood home had been a pleasant surprise, but here it was just creepy. It was like she could hear murmurings through the corrugated cardboard about what she ought to be doing with her life—marriage, house, kids—all the things she at one time had taken for granted as… inevitable. She really didn’t want her younger self as a nonpaying roommate. Miss Catherine Marie Hemmings was too idealistic and unjaded and certain that everything would just fall into place—yuck!

  -3-

  “Dammit!” Catherine exclaimed.

  “Hey, what’s with the language?” her much more mild-mannered friend and ex-college roommate called out from the floor, where she was lying on her back with her legs hooked over the chintz ottoman that matched nothing in Catherine’s apartment and didn’t even have the courtesy to look cool and shockingly unexpected—just dull and old. Georgia had surrounded herself with yearbooks and papers from the box marked “Catherine Marie’s Books & Docs” in Elizabeth Hemmings’ careful hand. It was like her permanent record had been regurgitated onto the rug.

  “Sonofabitch!”

  “Now that’s just uncalled for,” Georgia warned. “Gratuitous swearing!” She held up her finger in a scolding motion, giggling. Then she propped herself up on her elbows to get a better look at her drying toenails—“Plum Ready,” said the color on the bottle that was looking decidedly purple on its second coat. “This is so not what I was going for,” Georgia groused, flicking the closed bottle into the nearby trashcan on top of Catherine’s report cards from elementary school that were covered with Gs and VGs and comments reiterating the same thing quarter after quarter and year after year—too much talking.

  Georgia reached for her massive goblet of red wine—her motto: if you’re going to drink, do so heartily. “This is what I was trying for,” she said, holding the goblet out toward Catherine. “I’ve already tried ‘Wineberry’ and ‘Merry Merlot’ and those were wrong too. When will they be able to make a freakin’ nail polish that looks the same on the nails as it does in the bottle?”