2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) Page 6

  “Sounds like—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Tell me that Sophie Watts is not the enemy. She is, Fynn. I know it. She might just be the Antichrist, or at the very least she’s Martha Stewart’s evil clone. She has everyone else snowed, but I can see right through her.”

  “I was going to say that it sounds like you had a rough day.” He stepped up to her and folded her into a hug. “And I’m not even going to ask about the cupcakes.”

  “Please don’t. That is all Tara’s fault anyway.”

  “Tara?”

  “It turns out that even from a distance she can screw everything up,” she grumbled against his chest. Because the cupcakes would never have been lost if she hadn’t had to put everything down to get out her phone because Tara was calling and hanging up and calling again and she had—to—stop—the—noise.

  “Do I want to know why Cara is preoccupied by Magnus’s eating habits?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You sure?”

  Catherine heaved a sigh, knowing it would come out eventually. Too many people knew. Not the least of which being Drew. “I forgot about Cara’s turnip costume. I remembered last night and rather than try to rig something up I called Drew. She happened to have a carrot costume left over from when Lyle was a carrot for Mrs. Karnes. Anyway, I didn’t want Cara to know I forgot about her so I told her that Magnus ate the turnip.”

  “You blamed the dog?”

  “I’m not proud of it,” she assured him.

  -10-

  “Feeling better after a nap?” Fynn asked, standing at the stove.

  “I guess,” she said warily. “So what’s the special occasion?” She motioned at the pots of sauce and pasta on the stove.

  “I just wanted to do something nice for you because you’ve been running ragged for days.” He avoided her eyes and kept his hands busy, turning to some bread he had left on the cutting board, attacking it with gusto.

  “Seriously?”

  He shrugged at the bread.

  “So, can Grammy Elizabeth and Pop-Pop come for a visit?” Cara asked breathlessly, careening into the kitchen.

  “What?” Catherine choked on the knob of bread she’d just stolen from the cutting board.

  “They want to come and I want them to come and you said someday soon they could come, so can they?”

  “What?” she asked, louder and more forcefully, directing the syllable at Fynn this time.

  “Yeah, about that… your mother called while you were sleeping.”

  “You talked to her?” she demanded.

  “For a few minutes.” Like that would lessen the blow or excuse him.

  Cara wandered off, bored.

  “Why didn’t you just let the machine get it? You shouldn’t have to deal with that,” Catherine shuddered.

  “I didn’t want the ringing to wake you.”

  “What did she say?” Her voice taut to breaking.

  “Hello, Fynn,” he said breezily.

  Catherine still marveled that her mother freely used his nickname. His name was Joel and Catherine had introduced him as such to her parents when they met him, yet her mother had taken to Fynn like everyone else. It seemed that Elizabeth Hemmings’ no-nickname rule only applied to her immediate family, including herself. No one but Cara called her anything but Elizabeth or Mrs. Hemmings. But Gramma Lizzy was a big softie.

  “And what did you say?” She was trying extra hard to stop herself from jumping down his throat for purposely dragging out her agony.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hemmings.”

  She eyed him darkly. “Seriously, what did she say?”

  “Please call me Mom.”

  “Fynn,” she growled.

  “She said that they would love to see us at Christmas, but she knows that you can’t travel right now, so they want to come see us.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t invite them for Christmas.”

  “Good.” A sigh of relief.

  “They want to come earlier than that.”

  “Earlier?” She glanced around the room as if expecting her parents to jump out and yell surprise! “What did you say?”

  “That it would be nice.”

  “So you lied to her?”

  He cocked his head in response, refusing to entertain her admonishment.

  “When exactly?”

  “I didn’t tell them to come; I just said that would be nice. Because it would be. For Cara. For all of us. They want to see where we live and meet their new grandchild.”

  “I do not want my mother in the delivery room.” Eyes wide in a panic, imagining her mother trying to tell her how to do that too. That she wasn’t pushing hard enough. That she had to relax and trust in her body. And stop swearing, Catherine Marie, or I’ll wash that mouth of yours out with soap. Because even her friend, the perfect Georgia Love, had brought her even more perfect little daughter Nell into world with a stream of screeching fucks! Catherine’s own inevitable Tourette’s-worthy explosion was hardly something she wanted her mother to witness.

  “I’m not going to let her in the delivery room,” Fynn assured her.

  “You? Stop her? You’re a complete pushover. Look how far she’s already gotten with you. She’s halfway here and just look at this place.” Catherine’s eyes darted around the room, seeing everything as if through her mother’s eyes. All the things that would be judged not clean enough or organized enough or Elizabeth Hemmings enough for her sensibilities.

  “I told her you would call her. It’s up to you.”

  “Fat lot of good that does me. Now I’ll look like a jerk if I say no. She knew exactly what she was doing, talking to you first. She probably planned it that way.”

  “Planned to call while you were napping?” he humphed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous.”

  “I want our kids to be close to their grandparents. They’re lucky to have them,” he said soberly, stopping short of saying, they’re the only ones they have, but she still felt appropriately shamed.

  The hazard of cohabitating with a man who was an orphan—an adult orphan, but an orphan nonetheless. His parents had both passed away, leaving their family at a whopping two—him and Drew. Family was important to him, coming from so little. He didn’t know the pain of extended family. Aunt Judy came to mind, and last New Year’s Eve during which rumors of Catherine’s lesbianism had spread like wildfire and almost given her mother a heart attack.

  The phone rang and Fynn put down the bread knife to grab it.

  “Don’t bother. We’re about to eat,” Catherine waved it off. “Elizabeth Hemmings’ rules.”

  “But it’s probably your mother.”

  Catherine shrugged. “She made them. It didn’t matter who it was: my best friend, the cutest boy in school who I’d had a crush on for months and he finally realized I was alive and got my phone number and I couldn’t even answer his call. He ended up going out with Jenny Martin, by the way. So my mother can wait just like I did.”

  He looked back at her dubiously.

  “I’ll call her back later.”

  “Tonight.” Firm.

  She paused. Sighed. “Tonight.”

  “I’m serious. I don’t want to get on my mother-in-law’s bad side.”

  “Don’t worry, you, she loves. It’s me she has a problem with…. Now let me have a nice last supper before being tortured,” she said dramatically.

  Cara came skipping into the room, narrowly missing the island in her excitement. “—and I was a carrot that had to say, ‘Hi-ho, farmer Joe, pick me please, I’m ready to go. On your table for a treat… I am good for you to eat.’ I was ‘sposed to be a turnip, except Magnus got hungry and ate my costume all up, so I was a carrot instead. And even though the other carrot was a silent carrot, Mrs. Karnes said to say my turnip lines anyway.”

  Catherine’s blood ran cold as she realize
d Cara was on the phone a half second too late. “—Yup, she’s right here. I love you too.” Cara held the phone out to her. “It’s Grammy Lizzy. She wants to talk to you.”

  “You answered the phone?”

  “Uh-huh. And I was real polite too. Mrs. Karnes says being polite is very important.”

  “Oh.”

  Catherine took the phone and put it to her ear, completely done in by a first grader. “Hi, Mom,” she said robotically.

  “Catherine, you are close to impossible to reach. Thankfully I had a wonderful little talk with Fynn earlier. I am sure he told you the news.”

  “Um… yeah—I mean yes.” Her mother hated the laziness of things like yeah and gonna and sayin’ and all kinds of relaxed speech. Speak with structure and pride.

  “We do not want to be any trouble. We just want to see you. All of you. And since we will probably wait forever for an invitation….”

  And there it was, the hanging judgment. Just enough left dangling there to say her daughter was a terrible hostess, daughter, person. “We were planning to come see you after the New Year,” Catherine said lamely. They hadn’t planned any such trip. She was just grasping for any purchase.

  “But it has already been too long. We have never even seen Nekoyah yet. Or your house. And once the baby is born, it will be awhile before you are ready to travel,” Elizabeth Hemmings pointed out, seeing the story for what it was—a mirage that would disappear as it approached. “Besides, you will have way too much going on to have to pick up to come see us. We have it easy. Just a suitcase and we are on our way.”

  “I thought you were spending Christmas with Connor and Lacey, though.”

  “We will be long gone before Christmas, not to worry. We just want to help out in the last weeks before the baby comes.”

  “Weeks?” Catherine choked out.

  “Yes, Fynn did tell you, I hope. Two weeks.”

  Two weeks! That was a long time. That was an eternity. That was impossible.

  “I am sure you have more than enough things to do in preparing for the baby and Christmas too, and we can occupy Cara and help lessen the load a bit.”

  More judgment, her mother assuming she was leaving everything to the last minute when she had all kinds of things ready. The nursery paint was almost picked out, the battle between two paint chips still waging on the wall. She knew exactly where the crib was, at Finnegan’s Furniture just waiting for her to slap her Visa card down on it—

  “Did you tell her about the signs, Elizabeth?” It was the sound of her father’s voice in the distant background.

  “No, William, I did not.”

  “What signs?” Catherine asked.

  “It is nothing,” she insisted. “Just a bit of ridiculousness that—”

  “What?” Now Catherine needed to know.

  “They are not even signs,” Elizabeth Hemmings said, brushing the whole conversation off on a technicality. “Just a few posters around the neighborhood—”

  There was a click on the line and a scuffling sound and a few unintelligible grumbles, then her father’s voice right over her mother’s. “Can you hear me? I’m on the crap cordless phone in the bedroom.”

  “I hear you, Dad.”

  “They’re wanted posters. Tons of them. Wrapping the lampposts up like presents. And the sign at the front of the neighborhood too. It’s plastered with them. Covered the whole thing up.”

  “Wanted posters?” Catherine eked out. All sound was coming to her as if through a tunnel. Her parents’ voices. Her own. Suddenly her mind was filled with thoughts of a murderous madman on a rampage in her sleepy little hometown, where her parents still lived.

  “Do not bother her with that, William. She has more important things—”

  “Are you guys safe there?”

  “Oh, we’re just fine,” her father pshawed. “You might want to stay out of Chesterton for a while, though.”

  “Me?” she blurted in shock.

  “Do not worry her,” her mother chastised her father. “It is nothing, Catherine. Nothing serious at all.”

  “What is going on?” she demanded of both of them. Someone needed to fess the hell up.

  “They’re for you,” her father said bluntly.

  “They are not police-issue,” her mother clarified.

  Her father again. “There’s a bounty out on your head.”

  “A bounty?” Incredulous. “Who would do something—this has got to be some kind of joke.”

  “Catherine Hemmings, a.k.a. ‘The Cake Devil’.” As if her father was reading it right off the poster to her.

  “Cake Devil?” Catherine felt a bit faint and sat down in her chair at the table. This was something Tara would do, all in fun, to get a rise out of her…. But Tara had been the mastermind behind the whole cake robbery; her prints were all over it. “Rachel Craig,” she breathed. Still mad about a cake that didn’t even survive long enough to make it to Catherine’s wedding anyway. A cake that was hers first. And in the end nobody got to have it. No need to make a federal case out of a defunct baked good.

  “So you know,” her mother said, in a tone that told her Elizabeth Hemmings knew exactly how worthy her daughter was of the alias.

  “We never liked each other but that’s still a little harsh,” she choked out.

  Her mother humphed in response. “You do realize that we have to live here,” she added. “I run into people. Your actions reflect on me as a mother. I raised you better than that.”

  Her father then: “They’re calling your mother—”

  “Never mind what they call me,” Elizabeth Hemmings asserted boldly, showing she was above name calling and all the snarky things that her daughter was still up to her eyeballs in. “Just tell me why you would steal a bride’s wedding cake? How would you feel if someone had stolen yours? Not that anyone would, seeing as how it was… questionable.”

  “It was delicious,” her father offered.

  “It fell apart and rolled away,” her mother said with a twitch.

  “Only some of the Ding Dongs. The rest was still perfectly sanitary and edible,” Catherine objected.

  “And I love a good Ding Dong. Your mother won’t buy them for me.”

  “I just don’t understand you,” Elizabeth Hemmings said, ignoring her husband. “I know that you girls had something to do with that. You and that Tara who is always getting you into trouble.”

  Catherine felt like a little girl being reprimanded all over again, and she suddenly felt a visceral desire to protect Tara and herself by throwing the other names under the bus. Her mother obviously thought that Lacey and Georgia had nothing to do with it.

  “I just hope that such things are behind you now. You are a mother and young ears and small eyes are always about.”

  It was my wedding cake first, Catherine thought righteously, thinking of the craziness of planning her wedding and then losing everything. The whole thing. All she wanted was the cake. Her cake, that Fynn had picked out.

  “I’ve said my piece, now, regardless of all that craziness, we want to see you and that means coming to you. Plus, our granddaughter would love to see us.”

  Catherine couldn’t believe how diabolical her mother was that she would try to wield her power with the wishes of an as-yet-to-be-born grandchild.

  “I’m sure Cara is terribly excited about Christmas and we could help keep her busy while you go into the home stretch.”

  “Oh, Cara.” Jealousy surged that her mother was so easily able to identify her place in the little girl’s life while she, herself, stumbled all over it.

  Catherine could hear her mother through the earpiece, shuffling around—probably washing something or ironing something or dusting baseboards and fan blades like a proper housecleaner would do—like she had only ever done when her mother was due for a visit.

  “Mom, you know, I’m really going to have to call you back. We are just about to put dinner on the table.” As if hanging up now—not responding to the offered
visit—would simply make it unhappen.

  “Oh.” The voice was brittle in her ear.

  “I’ll talk to Fynn about it. Not that it wouldn’t be lovely to have you, but just let me—” She stopped herself before she dropped the “warn” word that was on her lips. Warn him. Change the locks. Move without a forwarding address.

  As she hung up the phone, Cara was right there beside her.

  “When are they coming?”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “I hope it’s soon. I can’t wait!”

  She was obviously too young to understand that having Pop-Pop and Gramma Lizzy come was like taking a trip to H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

  Making a List

  Monday, December 4th

  -11-

  Snow had fallen overnight, refreshing the dirty remnants from the last storm that had come through, sugarcoating Main Street all over again. Picture perfect. Exactly what Christmas should look like. And come night there would be six figures of twinkling lights aglow in what seemed like some sort of seasonal magic rather than the hard work of several town employees. Wreaths and bows and snow-dusted greenery were everywhere, and Catherine was proud that at least something would be beyond Elizabeth Hemmings’ reproach…. Although Mel’s unadorned diner would definitely raise her mother’s eyebrow.

  Every town had its Scrooge and Mel was Nekoyah’s. No wreaths. No jingle bells. No Christmas tree. No lights. No Christmas carols piped through speakers that didn’t exist. The only background noises in the diner were the ones heard year round—plates knocking together, food sizzling in the kitchen, and people murmuring over their day-to-day lives.

  All around businesses embraced the season, surrounding their customers with pointed offerings: Christmas-scented candles in stores, Christmas treats at bakeries, Christmas flavors for creamer and ice cream, Christmas shapes for cookies and crackers. Companies were alive with the spirit of profiting off of holiday fare and customers were literally eating up the ploy. Catherine had certainly partaken. And willingly.

  But Mel didn’t go for gimmicks. She didn’t offer a special menu of eggnog or hot cider or Santa-shaped pancakes. The menu was the menu was the menu—every day the same since its inception. And the décor was the décor from the moment she first opened. Stubborn and set in her ways, Mel.