2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) (3 page)

Catherine headed up the winding drive, lagging far
behind Magnus, who was probably already at the street, greeting Cara as she
stepped off the bus. This was the daily routine they had settled into. Magnus
got first dibs. She got second. Fynn waited at the house, last in line. Routine
was so important. And presence. That was what all the books said. The ones
about raising grieving children. Routines made children feel safe and secure. Heck,
they made adults feel safe and secure, especially adults who were borderline
panicked about where life was heading and how fast it was getting there.

Soon enough everything was going to change all over
again. She wouldn’t be alone walking to the bus, but pushing a stroller or
wearing one of those baby carriers that was all straps and looked like a
torture device. She’d gotten one in the mail from Lacey, the sister-in-law she
wasn’t currently annoyed with, her brother’s wife who swore up and down by it,
though Catherine had a sneaking suspicion you needed to be double-jointed or a
downright contortionist to get into and out of it.  

She only got halfway to the street before she saw
Magnus bounding excitedly back toward her as if he hadn’t just left her in the
dust a couple minutes before. She ruffled his fur. “Silly boy, where’s Cara?”

But Magnus wasn’t talking, his communication
repertoire limited to licks and wags. Lassie, he wasn’t. More than a few
kibbles shy of a full bowl.

Cara came skipping over a rise in the driveway, her
bright pink backpack jostling along with her and a chaotic armload of mail in
her clutches. Her signature pigtails were lopsided as usual, her shirt sporting
a fresh stain. She was a little girl who threw all caution to the wind while
playing kickball, swinging on monkey bars, or eating chocolate pudding. No
flies on her.  

Sometimes it was all too easy to look at Cara and see
her own little sister at that age—the same age Josey had been when she died. Catherine
still felt the aching loss today, over twenty years later. A tear came to her
eye and she surreptitiously wiped it away with one shaky hand. She’d spent half
of Josey’s life wishing her sister would just grow up already and the other
half wishing she would stay out of her room and all her stuff. She’d been a
mostly-awful big sister and time had run out to become anything more.

Which made her worry how Cara would feel about having
her own little sister—if she would even see this baby as her sister. Or if she
would feel like she came in second to their real child. The one who
unquestionably belonged in their world while she had only ended up here through
misfortune. Catherine couldn’t help but wonder if this crazy little family they
were putting together with duct tape and paste and glue was going to stick.

“Cat!” Cara called out, breaking into a run that sent
envelopes slipping out of her grasp and scattering on the ground behind her
like a paper breadcrumb trail. She pulled up short, turning to look at the mess
she’d left behind. Magnus had taken to sniffing each piece in hopes something had
come for him, but found nothing of interest, so he wandered off to pick
something interesting on which to pee.

“The mail had a mind of its own, huh?” Catherine
offered, a smile spreading across her face as she saw what Fynn always liked to
point out: his girls were peas in a pod; clumsy, awkward, adorable peas. And
with their hair and eyes in similar shades of brown, at a quick glance and
certainly from a distance, they could be wholly mistaken for biological mother
and daughter. In that case, he was the odd one out, all blond and blue-eyed as
he was.

Cara nodded, backtracking to pick up the pieces and
handing them over for Catherine to carry the rest of the way to the house. That
much she could do; it was the bending and squatting to gather it all up that
was out of her wheelhouse for the time being.  

“So, what’s the news?” Catherine asked as they made
their way to the house. It was the same question her mother used to ask
whenever she came home. Elizabeth Hemmings was coming out of her mouth at an
alarming rate these days now that she found herself on common ground with the
woman for the first time in thirty-five years.  

“Kenny Rollins got a bloody nose at recess and it wouldn’t
stop for hours.”

“Hours?”

“A really long time. It happened right in front of me.”

“That must have been scary.”

“Nope. Except he tried to get me in trouble.”

“How?”

“He said it was my fault, but he should have caught
the ball. Or ducked.”

“What exactly happened?” Catherine prodded, trying to
piece together whatever story was just out of her grasp, wondering if there would
be a school conference in her future, like when Cara got into a fight when a
third-grade bully tried to take her friend’s lunchbox and she took him out, knocking
him in the head with her own lunch—a conference
and
a new lunchbox that
time. So she already had a “record”.

“It was kickball. But everybody stopped playing when
they saw the blood. Now we can’t play kickball at recess. Only at gym with
teacher supervision. Unless Kenny gets another bloody nose and ruins it.” She kicked
a rock in her path.

“Is he okay?”

“Yeah. He cried but he’ll live,” she shrugged.

Cara was entirely unsqueamish about things that most girls
found totally
eew—
girls like Catherine Marie. Maybe she would be a
doctor someday. Dealing in blood and guts. Saving lives. A single doctor, most
likely, since she was going to scare all the boys away by then. Two down
already. And Fynn wouldn’t mind that in the least.   

Suddenly she stopped in place. “Oh, and I got picked
to play a turnip in the fall play!”

“A turnip?” Catherine said in surprise. Cara had gone
off to school saying she wanted to be the farmer in the play and now she was a turnip?
And
happy
about it? Frustration bubbled up inside, certainty that a
travesty had occurred. Probably some kind of nepotism or sexism or fascism or
some other –ism that had relegated Cara to vegetable status—
or is it a root?
are roots also vegetables? carrots are definitely vegetables…I think… or maybe
a turnip is a tuber?
Catherine shook her head clear because none of that
mattered. Whatever a turnip was, it certainly wasn’t a farmer. And even worse,
it was likely just some made-up last-minute part since nobody ate or even
thought about turnips anymore. Not in at least fifty years. Sophie Watts probably
had something to do with it, standing in the way of Cara’s wishes because
Catherine was standing in the way of her wishes.

The woman had been on her last nerve since the first
day of school. It seemed Sophie Watts had four children and had been room
mother for each and every one of them, every single year, until little old Catherine
Marie had bested her. An outsider, a guardian, not a real mother at all, had
broken Sophie Watts’s perfect record of room mothering. And on this, her last
child’s school journey. She’d probably have to have another kid just to cope. Not
that Catherine had even been competing for the position. She’d signed up as
room mom accidentally, thinking it was a class email list—the sheet next to it
that she hadn’t signed—and fallen bass-ackward into the path of Sophie Watts’s
ire.

“So, can you?” Cara asked. She was on her knees,
hugging Magnus with the exuberance of unabashed adoration.

Obviously Catherine had missed the main piece of the
conversation and had learned in recent months not to answer when she was caught
unawares. She had said yes to a mouse that way, whose cage she had to help Cara
clean out every week. And a sleepover that included nine additional
six-year-olds on Cara’s birthday. Two things she had not been ready for and,
had she been listening, would have pushed off at the very least. The mouse,
probably forever. But Jimmy was part of the family now—named after jimmies
because he pooped a lot and his business looked just like the chocolate
sprinkles Catherine could no longer bring herself to eat on her ice cream.

“I told Mrs. Karnes you’d be able to do it,” Cara
said, like it was a given, standing up, oblivious to the dirt that was now on
her knees.

“Do what?” Fearful of what she might have been
volunteered to do (although the word of a six-year-old should hardly count as a
hard-and-fast commitment).

“Make me into a turnip.” Her tone making the “silly”
part unnecessary.

“If you want to be a turnip, I’ll make you a turnip. The
queen of the turnips,” she asserted, like she was being asked to pop a straw into
a Capri Sun—which she had proven herself more than capable of doing most of the
time. Of course, she had no idea what a turnip looked like, and she was pretty
certain it wasn’t a costume you could just buy at the store. Which meant
sewing. Which she didn’t know how to do because she had scoffed at her mother’s
attempts to educate her in the lost art that had kept people clothed and
sheltered for generations before her own ignorant one. She could always search
no-sew turnip costumes online; someone must have made a video tutorial on the
process by now.

“Oh no, I’m the only one,” Cara assured her.

In class? In the country? On the planet?

“My teacher said that it’s a very unique vegetable.”

So it is a vegetable.

“I was going to wait and raise my hand for the farmer,
but I didn’t want to be just any old farmer,” Cara admitted, skipping ahead. “Watch
me, I’m turnipping around!” she exclaimed, whirling and skipping with awkward
abandon. “This is what the veggies are supposed to do while the farmer harvests
us.”

“So you
asked
to be a turnip?” Catherine
clarified.

“Uh-huh. Unique, just like my teacher said.”

“How’d your appointment go today?” Fynn asked, brushing
off sawdust as he came in from the garage.

Catherine glanced up from the dish she’d just taken
out of the oven. “Could you do that
before
you come inside?”

Hands up in surrender, he backed out, giving himself a
vigorous wet-dog style shake.

They had been working on things like this for months.
Ever since she moved in. Not that she was a perfectionist, but cleaning up
after what he tracked in would be an endless task if she didn’t stop it at the
door.

“So?” he prodded, stepping back in with a dustpan and
whisk broom.

“Huh?” She was biting her nails, staring at the
casserole dish, wondering where she’d gone wrong.

“Your appointment at the OB?”

“Oh, fine,” she waved him off, just like she had when
he offered to go with her. There was nothing thrilling about these checkups. Mostly
just a weigh-in and she didn’t need him there to see that nightmare.

“Just fine?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Distracted.

“Anything I should know about?” he nudged, putting
away the broom and dustpan.

“Nope,” she sighed, resigned that there was nothing
that could be done but to serve up what she’d made and hope for the best. Maybe
it tasted better than it looked.

“You sure?”

She finally looked up at him. “God, I don’t know,
already. I didn’t ask. They didn’t tell. I’m still just as much in the dark as
you,” she blurted with force.

It wasn’t getting any easier to lie to him. Not that
it was her fault that she’d accidentally seen something. It was the nurse who’d
left her file open wide on the counter. Baiting her. Begging her to look. And
since it was important to Fynn that he
not
know, it was only right to
allow him the surprise that had been so casually ruined for her. This was her
duty. So they both waited anxiously—him to find out and her for Eve to arrive.
Because that was what Catherine had taken to calling her. Eve. The perfect name.

Fynn stared hard at her, trying to gauge her honesty.

She gave him the hairy eyeball.

“I’m impressed,” he relented. “But that isn’t what I
was asking.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her into the family room.

“Fynn, honey, as much as I would love to have a
quickie right now I don’t have time—”

He stopped in front of the table where the answering
machine sat and pressed the button.

“Yo, Cat, stop avoiding me. You know I’m not going to
let him come between us. Just because he’s your husband now doesn’t mean our
relationship has to suffer. He doesn’t even have to know. Girl-on-girl action isn’t
cheating. Remember, no penetration means no adulteration. Call me.”

Catherine’s face flushed bright red. It was just like
Tara to do something so gauche. The woman didn’t understand boundaries or
proper decorum or any of the stuff that normal people were concerned about.  

“What’s adulteration?” Cara’s small voice asked,
enunciating the word slowly and carefully.

“Nothing.” Catherine shuttled her away even though the
machine was silent now, guiding her to the kitchen and dinner that would
hopefully keep her from asking anything further.

“I’ve seen girl-on-girl action before,” Cara said.

“What?” Fynn exclaimed from behind them.

“Sara and Lisa were fighting and Sara was on top of
her. That’s girl-on—”

“It’s time for dinner,” Catherine cut in.

“Does Tara want to fight you, Cat?” Cara asked,
worried.

“No, she doesn’t want to fight me.” Although she
probably did. For ignoring her. That message was her pulling out the big guns
and forcing the issue after countless voicemails on her cell and so many texts
had gone unanswered. It was an act of war, breaching her home like that.

“If she does want to fight, maybe you should wait
until after the baby is born. You’re kind of slow now.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Catherine said through
gritted teeth. “Now why don’t you go wash up and set the table so we can eat?”

“Okay.” Cara skipped away.

Catherine got out the plates and started dishing them
up, grumbling under her breath. She wondered if Tara would ever grow up.
Friendships waxed and waned over time and she had been waning on her end, too
busy for Tara’s childishness. Heck, even she and Georgia, who had been friends
since college, had grown apart somewhat since hundreds of miles and marriage
and now parenthood had gotten in the way. And she and Tara had been work friends,
who no longer worked together. They had little in common, and much less now
that she was no longer single and Tara was committed to remaining single. If
not for being forced to share a cubicle in the first place, they probably never
would have been friends at all (come to think of it, exactly like the way her
friendship started with Georgia, paired as dorm roommates by a computer of all
things).  

Fynn came up behind her, whispered, “You make sure to
tell Tara that I don’t subscribe to her theory on adultery. And in the future,
if she could avoid questionable topics in the range of young ears—”

“I’ve got it. I know. She’s out of control.”

“She just misses you,” he reasoned. “But that being
said, she’s got to watch the language.”

“That
was
her watching her language. Not a
single swear word, didn’t you notice?”

“Just highly inappropriate content.”

Pretty much,” Catherine sighed.

“So, am I ever going to find out if I’m going to be a big
brother or a big sister?” Cara asked, coming back in.

“You’re going to be a big sister either way,” Fynn
pointed out, chuckling, pouring the milk.

“Really?” Like he had to be kidding.

“Yup. And you’re going to be a great big sister,”
Catherine noted, carrying her plate and Cara’s to the table, leaving Fynn to
fend for himself. Women and children first in an emergency and in a meal.

“Well, I think that if it’s a boy you should name him Branch,”
Cara said, getting silverware out.

Catherine looked to Fynn, but he seemed too amused to
be helpful. “That’s not really a
people
name,” Catherine said carefully.
It wasn’t a name at all, actually, but she was trying to be diplomatic.

“Is so. I have a Branch on my bus,” Cara assured them
as they sat down.

Catherine choked on a sip of milk. “Really?”

She nodded. “Branch Hornton.”

“Does he have a brother named Twig?” Fynn chuckled.

Cara shrugged. “All I know is that I like that name
too.”

Thank God we aren’t having a boy—Twig Trager
,
she shuddered.

“I have lots of girl names too,” Cara offered. “Like—”

“Whoa, let’s not share them all at once. We have
plenty of time to pick a name—” —and avoid the topic of girls’ names completely
if possible. She had read somewhere that it helped older siblings transition to
a new baby better if they were included in preparing for the baby, but there
were other options beyond helping to pick the name, like picking the paint
color for the nursery, from a handful of already approved paint chips. Limits
were good for kids—she’d read that too.

 “What is this?” Cara poked at the mound of brown
stuff on her plate like it was icky, unlike the blood coming out of Kenny’s
nose that afternoon.

“Stuffing,” Catherine said, looking up from her own
plate just in time to catch the look between Fynn and Cara that told her she
was on her own in that assessment. It looked more like the charred remains of
something than an actual something.

“With hotdogs?” Cara asked, bewildered.

“We needed a side. And it’s better for you than potato
chips,” Catherine asserted.

“But it isn’t as good as potato chips,” Cara pointed
out.

“It isn’t as good as stuffing,” Fynn chipped in.

Catherine darted a warning glance in his direction.
“You know I’m trying out stuffing recipes for Thanksgiving. That’s what I’m
bringing to your sister’s for dinner and I want it to be perfect. This might
not be the best recipe, but I’d rather find out now than try to serve it to
everyone.”

“So we’re your guinea pigs. Soon to be
stuffed
guinea pigs. Get it?” Fynn winked at Cara.

“My friend has a guinea pig named Cork,” Cara offered.
“We’re definitely not guinea pigs. We don’t look anything like him.”

Catherine stifled a smile, never ceasing to be amazed
at all of the common expressions that went right over her head. “You want to
take this one?” she asked Fynn.

He raised his eyebrows at the challenge and she
watched him tap the table three times before showing a flat hand to her just-landing
fist. Catherine sighed. A loser yet again. Rock-paper- scissors was their
standard means for solving any impasse. She imagined many more shootouts in
their future when the baby arrived, what with endless diaper changing on the horizon.

“A guinea pig can be a rodent, like Cork, but it’s
also something people say when they talk about trying something out on
someone,” she explained. “You guys are the first to taste my stuffing, so you
are the ‘guinea pigs’ who will decide if you like it.”

“But why guinea pigs?”

Catherine didn’t want to get into a discussion on the
origins of animal testing and what was ethical or not. Or how ethical it was to
serve inedible food to her own family for that matter. She looked helplessly to
Fynn, begging him to step in, but he shrugged back like it was above his pay
grade.

“Why not parrots or zebras or alligators?”

“Because alligators might eat you
and
the
stuffing, and then what good would that do? How would you know if it was bad?
And who would be left to fix it?” Fynn asked, causing Cara to fall into a fit
of giggles and making Catherine swoon with relief.

Cara went back to poking at the mound, excavating
pieces out of it and examining what she unearthed. “What are the green things?”

“Herbs.” Catherine said.

“And what’s this thing?” Cara held up her fork to
display a shrunken red mass.

“A cranberry.”

Her lip curled distastefully.

Catherine looked over and found Fynn was similarly
unimpressed. “If you’re gonna be that way about it, you don’t have to eat it,”
she said gruffly.

“No. I will. And I think it’s great that you’re contributing
to Thanksgiving dinner… I’ve just never really cared for stuffing much.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t even know—”

“It isn’t something that comes up often. A few times a
year. No big deal.”

“I would have offered to do something different,”
Catherine huffed.

“I’ll eat it. I just don’t prefer it.”

And there it was:
prefer.
A nasty little word
and the thing about this man that grated on her nerves more than anything else.
She could handle the toilet seat being left up and the whiskers in the sink and
the socks on the floor and even him forgetting to lock the doors or turn off
all the lights at night before bed. But this? It truly drove her up the wall. The
love of her life was just so damn painfully
meh
about stuff… like, it
turned out, stuffing. She couldn’t be that way about anything. Love or hate, strong
feelings either way.
There was passion in fiery opinions and feelings
and tastes. In hating cabbage and in loving pie. In loving cozy nights by the
fire and dreading the dentist. In adoring Aerosmith and cringing at the sound
of The Rolling Stones. But Fynn was just so
Fynn-ish
about everything.

“I don’t need your charity.” She shoved a heaping
spoonful of stuffing into her mouth and almost gagged on the tiny dry
breadcrumbs, while at the same time the tartness of fresh cranberries assaulted
her taste buds and the charred flavor battled with the herbs and won. She
wanted it out of her mouth. Right. Now. But she fought against the impulse, not
wanting to give Fynn the satisfaction of seeing her squirm. She forced herself
to chew and swallow, shooting a hand out to push Cara’s poised forkful back
down onto her plate, saving her life.

“Needs some tweaking,” she choked out, wishing she had
more than a glass of milk to wash out the taste in her mouth.

“You know, you can always just make Stove Top. You
don’t have to go crazy with it,” Fynn reasoned.

“I’m not bringing a boxed mix to your sister’s dinner.
Not when everything else is homemade.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Helping would be telling me you don’t like stuffing…
before
I have to make it.”

“Mommy used to make Stove Top back at home. Why can’t
we have that instead of stuffing?”

“That is stuffing,” Fynn pointed out.

“Really?” Cara turned wide eyes on Catherine like
she’d been holding out on her the whole time. “I prefer that to this for sure.”

Great.
Now she had two of them on her hands.
“Well, far be it from me to deny you two the good stuff,” she muttered. No need
to show off. She’d been to Drew’s for the holidays last year and already proven
that she wasn’t side dish material. The only reason she’d tried to take this on
was to start a tradition for Cara and make it seem special. But if Cara’s
tradition
was
Stove Top, then so be it. Maybe a taste of home that could
be found in any grocery store across this New World, was just what was called
for.

Looking on the bright side, “I guess it frees up my
time to plan for your class party,” she said to Cara.

“But Mrs. Karnes says you don’t have to do the party,”
Cara said, taking a bite of her hotdog.