2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) Read online

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Fynn said, hovering nearby, a dishtowel at the ready.

  “I’m not talking about the stuffing.” Catherine scrubbed and scrubbed, then scrubbed more furiously still, finally understanding a small part of her mother’s cleaning fetish. It was definitely a safer way to unleash her aggressions.

  “Are you okay? You’re huffing and puffing—”

  “Like the Big Bad Wolf!” Cara exclaimed, coming to stand in line, her own dishtowel in hand to dry that which was unbreakable when dropped.

  “Cara, sweetie, you’ve been a big help, now why don’t you go watch some TV?” Catherine offered, needing the space to vent or even just breathe her frustration like the Big Bad Wolf she was.

  “But what about the rest?” So sweet and innocent and completely unaware that she had delivered a crushing blow at dinner, at the behest of the teacher she adored.

  “I’ll try my best to manage,” Fynn assured her.

  Cara didn’t have to be told twice, dropping her towel into his waiting hand and galloping away, Magnus scrambling up off the floor to follow her.

  Fynn turned back to Catherine, slinging the extra towel over his shoulder in a move that said “Elizabeth Hemmings” so clearly that she huffed again. If her mother were here, she’d be judging her for not using a scouring pad on the dish, the ones she always had in stock and within reach under the kitchen sink. That’s what a mess like this called for. But Catherine wasn’t her mother.

  “Do you have to do that?” she demanded, reaching for a butter knife out of the cache of dirty ones in the dishwasher and attacking the char with it.

  “Do what?”

  “Stand there… like that… with the—” She gestured with the knife in the air rather than continuing.

  “What’s your problem?”

  “The towel. There. On your—God, you know what I mean.”

  “This?” He reached for the towel on his shoulder carefully—no sudden movements to scare the crazy person with the weapon.

  “You look like my mother with that,” she snapped.

  “And you look like a nutty version of my wife,” he chuckled lightheartedly. Unflappable.

  “You know she just doesn’t want me planning the party,” she blurted.

  “Your mother? What party?”

  Catherine hated that he was oblivious to her pain on any and every front. Actually, he was just plain oblivious. “Mrs. Karnes,” she said lowly, trying not to let Cara overhear. Cara loved Mrs. Karnes and she didn’t want to make her feel like she needed to choose sides—afraid Cara might choose the wrong one.

  “Not much of a segue,” he pointed out.

  Catherine chose to ignore him. “She doesn’t think I can do anything right.”

  “Your mother?” he guessed. Another fifty-fifty shot and still wrong.

  “Mrs. Karnes.” Gruffer still.

  “I’ve gotta tell you, you’ve lost me. All you ever talk about is how your mother judges everything—”

  “Leave my mother out of it. This is between me and Mrs. Karnes.” But of course Fynn was too busy thinking the woman was a saint for easing his wife’s pain by taking the Thanksgiving party off her plate… (at least that was pretty much what he’d said at dinner, give or take a few words about being overwhelmed and running herself ragged and all those things about “the last time”—yada-yada-yada and gobbledygook, as far as she was concerned).

  “Don’t tell me you’re planning some girl-on-girl action,” he said, bemused.

  “Oh, I’ll fight her alright. This whole class party thing has nothing to do with being kind and ‘saving me’ the overwhelming responsibility of so many holiday parties this time of year. This is about my fitness as a mother—a room mother. She would never do this to Sophie Watts.”

  “But you don’t even like being room mother,” he pointed out.

  “Yes I do.”

  “No. You don’t. You said it enough times before the Halloween fiasco.”

  “You mean party,” she said bitterly.

  “No, I think I have the right word. You were driving yourself nuts about it. And us too.”

  “That was just a time management problem. It was my first big event. The first big holiday of the school year. There’s a learning curve.”

  Fynn gave her a dubious look. “If I remember there was a lot of bitching and a fair amount of moaning and definitely some tears.”

  “Standard party frustrations,” she waved him off. “And the hormones.”

  “Which are still with you. Seriously, Catherine, you were ready to pack your bags and run away.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “And the baking… into the wee hours of the morning…”

  Catherine winced. She’d tried to make cupcakes from scratch. But there was that whole confusion between flour and all-purpose flour and self-rising flour. And then the baking powder versus baking soda dilemma…. She’d gone with her gut and her gut was wrong, all wrong, dead wrong—or at least flat wrong. And this from a woman with a mother who made everything from scratch.

  The saddest part? She’d been so cocky, so certain that she could crush Sophie Watts with homemade treats after being laughed out of the first PTO bake sale for bringing a store-bought cake (not a bakery-bought masterpiece like other non-baking mothers who knew proper protocol, but a grocery store special complete with its shameful “2 for” sticker that blared cheap and tacky and also called into question where the second cake was—the answer to that even more shameful still) that she hadn’t even bought a boxed mix to back her up. Even her own mother, the Elizabeth Hemmings, who had never made a boxed mix in her life, still had boxed mixes on hand. An emergency stash to back up her emergency raw cake ingredients stash, because you never knew when you might have a cake emergency. And this was the second cake emergency Catherine had had in a year! She should have known better. She was obviously prone. Hello, I’m Catherine Marie Trager, and I have a cake problem. She definitely needed to find some kind of support group. And get a twenty-four-hour bakery on speed dial.

  She’d persevered though. Made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. Stayed up all night to get enough that were presentable. At least with cookies, they were supposed to be flat, so she had that part covered. Flat as pancakes. And ultimately no one could fault her for—

  “… Those cookies,” he shuddered. “One of the kids chipped a tooth.”

  “Baby tooth,” she clarified.

  A look of disbelief that she would split hairs like that.

  “I think it was something with the chocolate chips. They were obviously made wrong at the factory. They didn’t melt right. Hard, like little rocks. And it’s a known fact that kids are softer these days. Not as tough. Their teeth are probably softer too.”

  “Not your baking fault at all then?”

  “Nope. I might have burned a few of them, but beyond that—”

  “What about those mutant seven-legged spiders you made?” he continued.

  “Now that was an accident.”

  “Nuclear?” he smirked.

  “They fell off.”

  “Every single one lost the same leg?”

  “I was tired. I didn’t attach the pipe cleaners right.”

  “Or at all. Let me remind you that those ‘missing’ legs were never found.”

  “You can prove nothing, Mr. Trager,” she warned. “Besides, those decorations were even scarier that way, I think.

  “So I guess they hit the mark,” he offered.

  “Exactly.”

  “Seriously, Catherine, why do you care? The whole thing is a nightmare…. Which is what you gave the whole class with your ghost stories you told. In the dark.”

  “Pansies,” she mumbled. “It was the middle of the day with the shades drawn. Besides, I didn’t hear Cara whining.”

  “Cara is an odd fish,” Fynn noted.

  She shrugged. “Halloween is for ghost stories and haunted houses. Those kids need to learn that. The sooner the better.�
��

  He wrapped his arms around her, softened his voice to the consistency of melted butter. “Why can’t we just consider this a blessing? Less to worry about. Less craziness when the holidays are crazy enough.”

  “Being ousted, a blessing? It is one thing to walk away, but to be nudged out?” She shook her head. “I will choose when I’m ready to go.”

  “Just like you chose to sign up in the first place?”

  “Right,” she choked out.

  “You know, we still aren’t on that class email list,” he chuckled.

  “We don’t need to be. I’m the room mother and I know everything that’s going on,” she said smartly.

  “Oh, by all means, that’s a good reason to keep the title.”

  “That and the fact that I need something to do!” she exclaimed. “If you haven’t noticed I’ve been diminished to sitting around here and getting ever fatter, like I have no aspirations at all.”

  “You’re growing a child. Our child. And I love you for that,” he cooed.

  “A fat child,” she grumbled, pulling out of his embrace, back to scrubbing—now piteously.

  “Fat or not, I will love him or her just as much.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Because trying to get Fynn to see the forest for the trees when it came to idle hurtful chitchat was impossible. He never passed any of those tests. New haircuts went unnoticed. When asked if something fit right, he was painfully honest. He wasn’t about making her feel better. Just the facts. Raw and uncensored.

  “I’ll support you, but I still don’t understand why you would do this to yourself, and especially after you almost quit two weeks into the year.”

  “Because no one likes to be kicked out, even if they want to leave.”

  “This from the girl who broke up with a guy when she thought he might break up with her first.”

  She colored in embarrassment and retorted, “You’re too much of a guy to get it.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” he shrugged. “Can you just promise to remember that this is Cara’s class for the duration of first grade? The same teacher.” Like she was an idiot who didn’t know that.

  Tuesday, November 14th

  -7-

  “I think it is just wonderful that Sophie Watts offered to help—”

  “Sophie Watts?” Catherine blurted into Mrs. Karnes’ ear, gripping the phone tighter like she could strangle it and that woman by association.

  She’d tried to let it all roll off her back, let bygones be bygones, allow cooler heads to prevail, and all the other clichés that she’d now learned Fynn had in common with her mother—which was another sore spot. She made it fourteen whole hours. Tossed and turned through the night. Almost called Georgia at two a.m. to vent without regard for baby Nell or her husband Thomas or the fact that Georgia had been too busy with her New friends who lived in New York or in the upper reaches of suburban New Jersey just like the Love family, to bother with her old friend Catherine being blackballed out here in Nekoyah, Minnesota. Heck, she almost called Tara, but feared that she would actually answer and get her even more riled up… possibly enough to call Cara’s teacher right then and there rather than waiting till morning like a civilized human being. Which she had. A perfectly reasonable time for a perfectly reasonable conversation.

  And all that reasonableness wasted!

  But of course it was Sophie Watts behind this. Maligning her. Ginning up the story about her past failures to make a case for her future failures. For the good of the children who were at risk if Catherine Trager was left in charge of anything.

  “She has so much experience with these things and she thought that she could help ease the burden on you,” Cara’s teacher gushed, the bias apparent.

  That bitch.

  “We thought that we could give you a little break. Let you put your feet up. This time of year is just so busy with back-to-back parties and in your condition—”

  “You’re firing me because I’m pregnant?” Disbelief. This was discrimination for sure, and by other mothers who’d been in her shoes at that. Her stretched-out sensible shoes.

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Karnes said quickly, smelling a lawsuit. “We appreciate all volunteers. And that you would give so much of your time is just wonderful. You’re still room mother, certainly. We just know that you are juggling so much right now. You’re due any day now, and a newborn is a lot of work on top of every—”

  “I have a month before my due date.”

  “Oh.”

  There was so much in that curt utterance that Catherine wanted to punch her right through the phone. This chick thought she was a whale and an imbecile who couldn’t juggle a big belly and one measly party, while Sophie Watts could handle her three rightful class parties for her other children plus steal a forth right out from under Catherine’s fat ass. Like that.

  She gritted her teeth against saying all the unsavory things on her mind. “Believe me, Mrs. Karnes, I am not overwhelmed. I have it all planned out already. Started right after Halloween.” Lying with righteous indignation.

  “You did?” Shock.

  “Yup. All planned and ready to go. Nothing overlooked.”

  “Oh, well, I… guess that’s… great.” No enthusiasm whatsoever.

  “I’m really looking forward to it.”

  “And you’re sure you have everything covered?” Mrs. Karnes, hoping her uncertainty would be catching.

  “Absolutely everything.” Not wavering one iota. Not giving her the satisfaction.

  “And you know about the list of food allergies?”

  “Of course.” Now. Thankfully little Johnny Capshaw could sniff out a peanut from across the room and, better yet, knew to avoid them. Otherwise the chipped baby tooth back at Halloween wouldn’t have been the only casualty of the party and she would have been thrown off her post rather than being patronizingly usurped. “No peanuts on the menu whatsoever.”

  “Good,” the teacher said tightly, making it obvious that she still wasn’t over it. “And the gluten-free options?”

  “Covered.” She remembered the days when she was in school and parents brought whatever they wanted to the class party or for their kid’s birthday. There was no list of approved snacks and there were no rules about allergies or nutritional expectations. They just jacked the kids up on soda and dessert and sent them outside for some extra recess. Even the dentist’s kid had brought chocolate cupcakes with sky-high frosting, and then dispersed party favors of pencils emblazoned with “Dr. Savitz, DDS, Cavity Cop” (should have said “The Dirty Cavity Cop”, first giving you cavities and then filling them).

  “Have you collected the funds yet?” the teacher asked in a last-ditch effort to prove some oversight that would lead Catherine to recognizing her need for assistance.

  “I was going to send out an email to the parents tomorrow, actually. I was holding off for the last of the expenditures rather than over-collect.”

  “Well…” A heavy pause. “I guess that’s it then.” Mrs. Karnes dragged the words out slowly, leaving plenty of time for her to reconsider.

  “Yup. That’s it.” Catherine jabbed her finger at the calendar on the side of the fridge. Wednesday the 22nd. The day before Thanksgiving. No problem. Plenty of time.

  “So when will you be ready to set up on Friday?” A note of resignation apparent.

  Catherine was quiet.

  “Mrs. Trager?”

  She coughed, trying to expel any evidence of confusion before speaking calmly and evenly. “Whenever you need me.” She peered closer at the calendar where it was quite clearly marked and color-coded that this Friday was the last day before Thanksgiving break. A whole week off. Not a four-day thing like she’d had in school. Something a decent room mother or any mother of school-aged kids would know. She flicked the calendar page loudly.

  “Is this Friday going to be a problem?” Hopeful all over again.

  “Of course not.” H
earty, upbeat, unfazed.

  “Because I can certainly call—”

  “No need to call anyone.”

  Catherine hung up and dialed back out before the line even fully disconnected, groaning and cutting off the phone again, listening for a dial tone before pressing the eleven digits like lightning.

  “Everything go okay?” Fynn asked, coming up behind her and placing a hand on her back.

  “Oh, fine. Just fine.” Though her fines were not like all his fines. Definitely. Not. Fine. “Did you know that Cara is off from school all next week?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Could you maybe have told me?”

  He reared back and away. “I thought you knew.”

  “And how is it you know?” she accused.

  He shrugged, like it was common knowledge he had picked up along the way. Something any old idiot would know. Which made her less than an idiot, or maybe it was more of one—whichever was worse.

  “What’s up, chickadee?” Georgia’s voice rang in her ear.

  Catherine let out an audible sigh of relief to hear a friendly voice, rolling her eyes at Fynn and walking away, uninterested in reasoning with the rational male mind. “You won’t believe what I’m dealing with here.” The words rushing into the phone before she even made it out of the room.

  “What did Fynn do this time?”

  “It’s Sophie Watts.”

  “Fynn did who?” Georgia exclaimed. “An affair?”

  “No! Never!” Shocked that her friend would even go there.

  “Oh.” Noticeably less interested now.

  “Anyway, she went to the teacher and told her I need help; that I’m not right in the head and the kids will all end up—”

  “Stop. Back up. Pull over. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sophie Watts! That bitchy mom from Cara’s school who’s always breathing down my neck. She’s trying to weasel her way into my position as room mother because she’s always room mother, for all of her kids, and she thinks she’s the only one who can do it right.”

  “The position you complain about every time you talk to me?”