2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) Page 7

  Catherine’s phone buzzed in her purse and she fumbled for it with her bulky mittens. Tara again: CALL ME OR ELSE.

  She shook her head. Now Tara was resorting to threats. Empty ones at that. Back in New York such a message would have been followed up with a rock through her window and a Tara on her fire escape. I’ll take “Or Else” for five hundred, Alex, and a la-de-freakin’-da to you, Tara Delrio. She slid her phone back in her purse, feeling only marginally guilty about it. Tara didn’t know what she was up to at this very moment. She could be driving or showering or on the toilet. She could have her hands in a couple pounds of raw meatloaf or any number of places that made responding impossible, if she’d even read the text yet, which Tara couldn’t know either. In other words, she could wait.

  In the past weeks there had been at least seventeen calls unanswered, two promises to call back that were broken, and forty-two texts ignored. Any normal person would have already taken that as a sign that she didn’t want to talk or didn’t have time to talk or that she had skipped the country and left all her worldly possessions behind, including her phone. But Tara was relentless.

  Simply put, Catherine didn’t have time for Tara’s craziness, which inevitably came with any glancing contact she had with her. It could be the most innocuous thing on earth that started a conversation and the next thing she would be neck deep in something insane or criminal or both, and right now she had bigger and more conservative fish to fry. Her parents were coming! She was about to have a baby! She had a family to think about! Everything else was fighting it out for last place while she found her way through the next two weeks. And then there was Christmas on the other side of that. This was going to be their only “first Christmas” together. The first she celebrated as a married woman. The first Cara celebrated without her mother. The first ever for baby Eve. The start of so many lasting traditions for the Trager household.

  Maybe next year, Tara. She could even make a New Year’s resolution to reorganize her friendships and resolve things with both Tara and Georgia. When things settled down.

  Catherine stepped into the old hardware store that still eked out a business in spite of The Home Depot that had moved in just on the other side of town. The soothing spicy scent of bundles of cinnamon sticks in baskets flanking the door overtook her. Smart marketing, she realized as she grabbed a bundle for herself.

  The entire store had been overtaken by Christmas, but with a more discerning taste that was quaint and inviting unlike the bigger chains. No blow-up decorations to be found in here. No plastic molds of reindeer or snowmen either. Everything was either made of nature or twisted and formed to look like nature. And around the perimeter on the uppermost shelves was a fleet of little metal wagons in every color imaginable, shiny and sleek like new cars, ready for giving.

  Along the front windows was a line of pine trees, fresh and fully ornamented, each decorated by a different grade in the elementary school. She had been avoiding this display purposefully after being torpedoed by Sophie Watts, who’d probably snooped around and found out that she had a prenatal appointment the day that they were making ornaments. Sophie was probably friends with the nurse practitioner who also hated Catherine and they were in cahoots to ensure that she couldn’t reschedule for a more convenient time so she would be free for her room mothering responsibilities. A conspiracy for sure.

  All the ornaments were made by hand, and the six trees got progressively better looking as the students decorating them got older. For the most part, the first grade students were still in remedial art projects of magazine clipping collages and cut-and-paste construction paper Santas.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Oh, hi, Phil,” Catherine said to the owner as he approached from the back.

  “Well if it isn’t Mrs. Trager. Aren’t these trees a delight?”

  “That’s one way to put it,” she said, keeping it breezy.

  “You know, I get a lot of requests for that ornament there. They want to know if we sell it.”

  “Which one?” She squinted at the tree in front of them.

  “That one.”

  There, hanging amid the branches of the first-grade tree, was a little drum with halved Q-tip drumsticks. Her breath caught for a moment when she saw it. She had one just like it on the tree at home. Almost identical. She touched the little drum, lifted it to look at the bottom to see the name scrawled there: Cara Trager. Tears came to her eyes. Now she understood why Cara had asked for a Q-tip and why she’d taken a roll of toilet paper to school, though she would probably never know what happened to the toilet paper.

  She didn’t know what got to her more, the fact that Cara had tried and succeeded in making the same ornament that she had made when she was a little girl in school, or that she had coopted the Trager name. This was the little girl who was forever leaving her last name off of things at the school. The little girl who was registered as Cara Simms, her legal last name. Was this a step toward something more? A sign that she wanted to be more than just the ward of Fynn Trager?

  “I’m serious that I’ve had offers,” he snickered.

  She wiped quickly at her eyes, sniffed.

  “What can I get you today?” Phil asked, averting his own eyes.

  She pulled herself together. “I need some hooks.”

  “J hooks? L Hooks? C Hooks? S Hooks? I hope you have more to go on because we have the whole alphabet,” he joked. Or maybe he wasn’t joking. How the hell would she know?

  “Um...” A hook was a hook was a hook, right? Fynn was infinitely more qualified to shop the hardware circuit, but he was at home finishing the honey-do-before-my-parents-come-and-see-how-we-really-live list—tightening loose screws, changing out dead light bulbs, oiling squeaky hinges, caulking gaps, cleaning gutters (just in case her mother looked out the window and saw a mess in there). It didn’t matter that Fynn had pointed out the snow covering anything that was in there. She wanted it done and done right and he was about fed up.

  This was tit-for-tat busywork, him sending his pregnant wife into the cold and snow like this. An errand he’d thought up to keep her out of the way because she was driving him nuts with all her pacing and clucking (he’d actually said clucking). Plus there was her snipping and sniping. Even Magnus found her unnerving these days as he tried to escape the ever-running vacuum as she went at the rugs and curtains and blinds and furniture and even, for a moment, considering having a go at him.

  Right now Fynn was probably balancing on a ladder, decorating the outside of the house, which was imperative to make the perfect first impression. A single wreath on the front door was simply put, half-assed. Lights were necessary. But dignified ones. And real pine garland along the porch railing for a fresh woodsy fragrance upon entering and leaving. Just enough.

  “The kind needed to hang the stockings by the chimney with care,” she quipped. If it had been up to her she would have opted for stocking holders that she could pinpoint and buy in any store in town at this time of year, but in no uncertain terms Fynn had insisted on actual hooks he could mount in the mantel. Stocking holders were for people who didn’t know how to use tools (namely her and her ilk who had limited talents or were missing opposable thumbs). Plus hooks would be stronger too, so Santa could be extra generous, which landed Cara firmly on his side in a two-to-one vote.

  Phil led her down one of the aisles and pulled up short in front of a selection of different hooks. “Decorative or utilitarian?”

  “Um.”

  “I have these simple white C hooks that would blend in to a white mantel since they are so small and—”

  “We have a stained mantle.”

  “Then you could go brass.”

  She scrunched her nose in distaste at the shiny golden hue.

  “Or we have the oil rubbed bronze. That’s my bestseller. They’re bigger and more decorative in design but will hold a good bit of weight without a problem. I wouldn’t hang a hammock from them, but you could hang a Christmas ham, if you were in
to that.”

  Catherine snickered. “Thanks, Phil.”

  “No problem. Let me bring these up to the counter for you. Do you need anything else?”

  “Just these.” She held up the cinnamon sticks. “Uh… unless you have something here that will make my mother blind to dust, grime, or general messiness.”

  It was his turn to chuckle. “She coming to town to visit for the holidays?”

  Catherine rubbed her round belly. “My mom and dad. For a couple weeks before Christmas. Their first visit,” she explained.

  “Ohhh, the big one.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, I’m sure they will love it here.”

  Catherine twisted her lips in a show of uncertainty. Nekoyah, they would probably love. Her place? That was something else entirely, because she was raised better than to live in anything less than a surgically clean environment. It would be a smack in the face.

  -12-

  Cara came into the kitchen. “Do you have an envelope and a stamp?”

  “Probably,” Catherine said. “In that drawer over there. But if you’re mailing something, remember, you only need one. They aren’t stickers.” A lesson learned the hard way when Cara helped prepare the invitations for her birthday party and pasted several stamps on each one because they were pretty decorations.

  “I know,” Cara sang out.

  “Are you writing to a friend?”

  “Yup. I send him a letter every year.”

  “That’s nice,” Catherine chuckled as she emptied the dishwasher so it would be clear for the dinner dishes to come. An endless cycle she had avoided all her long single life.

  “When I finish, can I take it to the mailbox?”

  “Yes, but ask Fynn to walk you up there. It’s getting dark already.”

  Ten minutes later, Fynn, Cara, and Magnus came barreling back through the front door, bringing a rush of cold in with them. Catherine heard the sounds of disrobing—coats and gloves and hats—and then Fynn came into the kitchen. “That was a dirty little trick; it’s colder than a witch’s tit—” He stopped. “Wait a second, when I left things were getting better around here and now… what happened? I thought this was DEFCON 1: parents arriving in nineteen hours, seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds.”

  “Very funny, Mr. Trager,” she said brusquely. This was no time for jokes. There wasn’t enough time in the world for his breezy, take-it-in-stride attitude. No matter how she explained it, Fynn failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. Tomorrow was their Judgment Day—no offense to God, but he was more understanding than her mother.

  “You have been crazed about cleaning up for weeks, so why are you making a mess instead of—”

  She shook her head at his naivety, continuing to sort and stack plastic containers. A spastic mess. An impending avalanche. Chaos. This was called averting a crisis and Fynn was looking at her like she was the crazy one. He had no idea what it was like to have Elizabeth Hemmings in your home. She sensed when things were in disarray. She knew what was lurking in closets and under beds. A surface cleaning and straightening was hardly going to fool the woman who’d raised her.

  “Catherine?” he prodded, obviously seeing she had slipped into her personal nightmare world all over again.

  “You know we’re going to have to vacuum again tomorrow.” Her tone bordering on accusatory. She thumbed toward the family room. “There should be lines in the rug. Lines, Fynn. They won’t survive through Cara tumbling around in there with Magnus.”

  “Whoa, wait a second, don’t you think you’re going a little overboard?” He held his hands out in a calming gesture.

  “It’s the way it has to be.” Definitive. “My mother didn’t even let us go in the living room—not even just to walk through it—unless there was a good reason, like we had company over and they were already in there. Certainly never before company came.”

  “Good thing we don’t have a living room,” he quipped.

  She eyed him darkly. That was so not the point.

  “Maybe we should just pitch a tent and live outside until they show up then. Use the woods as our bathroom so we don’t mess up those either.”

  “That would work,” she agreed.

  “Catherine, seriously, you have to chill.”

  “You don’t know my mother.”

  “Of course I know your mother. She loves me.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “You should be happy that she loves me.”

  “Not when I’ve put thirty-five years into my relationship with her and have at best achieved ‘tolerates’.”

  “Were you always this dramatic? Because that might explain the prob—”

  “Fynn, I just want everything to be perfect so my mother sees that I’ve finally done it.”

  “She knows you’ve done it.” He pointed at her massively rotund self.

  “Is everything a joke to you? I’m serious. I want her to realize that I’ve accomplished all of it. Great house. Great husband. Great family. I have it all and I don’t need the state of my plastics to cut me down a peg.”

  “What?”

  “Tupperware. Rubbermaid. Plastics!” Catherine shook the lids in her hands. “You can measure a woman by the state of her Tupperware.”

  Fynn scanned the leaning towers of containers covering every square inch of counter space in the room, his vague uncertainty turning into a smirk of out-and-out disbelief.

  “That’s what my mother thinks.” When he didn’t soften his expression, she continued, “Stains.” An accusatory finger toward a pile of containers with the telltale orange haze of tomato sauce set into the finish. “Scars,” she added, aiming at another pile where whitish marred and melted surfaces bespoke of improper microwave practices. “And the orphans,” she shuddered. “If my mother ever filled a container in my kitchen and was unable to find a proper fitting lid?” She shuddered yet again. “And all of it should be properly stacked in the most efficient manner. By size and shape. Or else—” She stopped speaking and drew a finger across her throat.

  Fynn guffawed.

  “You laugh, but Elizabeth Hemmings worships at the altar of the Tupperware gods—”

  “And I thought she was Catholic.”

  Catherine gave him a grim look.

  “So no talking about where and when we last went to church… or about plastic storage containers?”

  “Exactly,” she sighed. They’d already had the discussion about church, enough of a discussion to know they weren’t ready to make any kind of decisions. Which was another good reason to be relieved that her parents wouldn’t be around for Christmas and the inevitable discomfort that would arise since her family had always gone to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. It was bad enough that they would be around for two consecutive Sundays to find out that there would be no visits to the Lord’s house. At the very least she should make sure her house of plastics was in order.

  A buzzer went off and for a second Catherine was at a loss. “The nuggets!” she blurted, rushing to the oven to rescue dinner and dish up plates. The plastics would have to wait.

  “Well, I for one think this meal looks good enough to… eat!” Fynn announced, making Cara giggle as they sat down at the table in their usual seats, a routine that had become second nature. A real family.

  “I can’t wait till tomorrow!” Cara fidgeted in her chair like she had ants in her pants. The exact opposite of the energy Catherine was feeling, but the general jitteriness that resulted was the same. Neither could sit still for long, popping up and moving about the house—Cara to dance about and Catherine to bustle about, checking this or that to make sure it was still just so.

  “I can,” Catherine grumbled, picking up her fork, realizing that she had finally found something to deaden her appetite. Time had passed in a blink since Thanksgiving. So many things taken care of. The nursery was now complete, finished in appropriate gender neutrals to continue the not-knowing charade. There was also another trip to the doctor for
her and one for Cara over an ear infection, of which she seemed prone. Plus the dentist. And ballet. And karate. All for Cara, and none of it quite up her alley. She gagged whenever they tried to take x-rays of her teeth and on the fluoride too. When it came to ballet, she was too karate, but when it came to karate, she was too… talkative, twitchy, squirmy—you name it. The instructor said she lacked discipline, but Catherine believed it was more that they had a surplus of boredom for sale there. Amidst all of it, time was like a rug pulled out from under her. Now tomorrow was almost here—they were almost here—and she, for one, wasn’t ready.

  “What can I do to help?” Fynn asked, thinking that there was always a solution to every problem. His optimism was completely annoying that way.

  Catherine waved him off with her fork. It was pointless. “No matter what I do she’s still going to pinpoint something that isn’t—” She didn’t bother finishing. Elizabeth Hemmings was a tough nut who played a perfectly nice, polite, and pleasant person. She could kill you with courtesy, all the while making you feel about yea-big. There was simply nothing more that could be done short of finding a new mother to adopt her and inviting her to come for a visit instead.

  “What are these?” Cara held up a forkful of white mush.

  “Mashed potatoes, silly,” Fynn said, popping a loaded fork into his mouth.

  Cara shook her head. “Nuh-uh.”

  “Yes they are,” Catherine assured her.

  “Nope. I’ve had lots of mashed potatoes and these are nothing like them.”

  “They’re mashed potatoes,” Catherine shrugged. “Said so right on the package. Idahoan. Where potatoes are born.”

  “It said that?” Eyes wide.

  “Well… no,” she admitted. “But they are Idahoan potatoes. Haven’t you heard of instant mashed?”

  Cara shook her head.

  But of course you were raised from scratch. From scratch equals love. A proper mother’s love. All I can do is follow instructions on a package and usually get it right.