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

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 4
^th
 

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.

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 into 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.  

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.

“They take potatoes and dry them into flakes, then you
add water to them and you get mashed potatoes,” Catherine explained in layman’s
terms—stated by a layman who had little to no knowledge of just how flakes were
made out of potatoes.

Cara’s face screwed up in disbelief, like it had to be
a joke.

“They are completely real,” she insisted.

“They don’t taste real. They taste like something that
is
like
potatoes. Not potatoes.”

She didn’t think they tasted much like potatoes
either. At least not like the potatoes she grew up on and loved, especially
when covered in her mother’s gravy. But she hadn’t paid any attention to those
potatoes growing up. Other than eating them.

“Are these the potatoes we have to have on Christmas?”
Cara asked, turning her fork upside down to test them against gravity. “We
could
have French fries, right? I
love
French fries. I could eat them every
single day. Even on Christmas.”

“We don’t actually have to have potatoes at all,”
Catherine said, as if that fixed any problem therein.

“But we
have
to have potatoes with turkey. And
French fries are the best potatoes in the whole world!”

“I don’t know if we’re having turkey,” Catherine noted
casually. Cooking a whole bird? By herself?

“No turkey?” Cara asked as if that were ludicrous.

“Maybe we’ll have ham.”

“That’s for Easter.”

“Do you know Elizabeth Hemmings?” she challenged under
her breath. Cara sounded like a pint-sized version of Catherine’s mother, structured
and certain, and unwavering in her perceptions.

“That’s Gramma Lizzy’s name, right?”

“Yes,” Catherine sighed.

“Whatever you want to have for Christmas dinner is
fine with me. Peking duck or cheesecake or KFC,” Fynn said helpfully.

“Duck?” Cara was aghast.

“Duck is a very traditional meal for holidays,” he
pointed out.

And something I would be even less able to cook,
Catherine
thought.

“But we like to feed the ducks at the lake.”

“It wouldn’t be those ducks,” he said.

Cara’s brow furrowed.

“We’ll figure something out,” Catherine jumped in to
stop the helpful man who was helping her into a whole new kind of problem. One
that could spread to other things Cara was perfectly happy eating at the
moment. Like those nuggets on her plate that she hadn’t yet equated to running
around and clucking chickens on farms.

“Why don’t we go to Andrew’s for Christmas dinner, like
on Thanksgiving?”

“Andrew’s?” Catherine asked, confused.

“Aunt Drew’s,” Fynn said slowly, for his dumb wife.

“She makes gr-r-reat mashed potatoes!” Cara cheered,
like Tony the Tiger over his Frosted Flakes. Problem solved. A good meal could
always be found there, while Christmas by Cat was going to be questionable at
best.

Ouch.

“Aunt Drew and Uncle Klein are going to visit his
family in Kentucky for Christmas,” Fynn explained.

“So we could go there.” Simple as that to a
six-year-old.

“But Uncle Klein’s family isn’t
our
family.”

“Are they Aunt Drew’s family?” Another wormhole.

“Well, yes, they’re her in-laws.”

“In-laws?”

“That’s what they’re called. When you marry someone,
their family becomes your in-laws. Uncle Klein’s parents are Aunt Drew’s
mother-in-law and father-in-law.

“So Garret and Lyle and Jake have in-laws?”

“Well, no.”

Cara looked confused all over again.

“Only the one who is married in has in-laws. Aunt Drew
is their daughter-in-law and they’re her in-laws too. They are legally family
because of the marriage. Aunt Drew and Uncle Klein’s kids, though, are all
related to his family by blood—” He stopped there, looking stricken that he was
getting into where-babies-come-from territory when Catherine knew he would be
quite content to have Cara believe babies were ordered off of Amazon.com and
delivered by a big brown UPS stork.

“By blood?” Cara asked.

“Garret and Lyle and Jack are Aunt Drew and Uncle
Klein’s kids together so that makes Uncle Klein’s parents their grandparents by
blood.”

“Because Aunt Drew carried them all in her belly,”
Cara offered.

“Yup.”

“Like my mommy carried me in her belly,” she smiled.

“Exactly.”

“So, since you and Cat are married, Gramma Lizzy is your
mother-in-law and Pop-Pop is your father-in-law.”

“You got it,” Fynn said, relieved to be off babies and
bellies.

“Then they are my in-laws too.”

It hit like a punch to Catherine’s gut.

“Because you’re my legal guardian and you two are
married. So I have in-laws.”