Be My Neat-Heart (9 page)

W
hen I'd opened my front door to see Jared standing there my first instinct had been to run and hide under the bed with Imelda. Then I remembered that he knew nothing of Molly's informational report of the conversation he'd had with Ethan.
Whew.

Jared shifted uncomfortably, as if he, too, was wondering why he was here.

Maybe I'd made him curious and he wanted to see if I practiced what I preached.

That's the theory Wendy had come to and vocalized over dinner last night.

“You're a curiosity to him, Sammi. Look at the man. He's incredible-looking, smart, wealthy, has great clothes and a sports car. He's not accustomed to women not being interested in him. He's not used to women playing hard to get.”

“I'm not
playing
‘hard to get'!” I'd said. “I don't want to get got!”

“Whatever
that
means,” Wendy had said, grinning.

But it is true. I'm not
playing
hard to get. It's no act. Every vibe I give off should tell him that this is no game. Why Jared
and I seem to be the only people who don't look at each other as a romantic opportunity in the making, I don't know.

“He doesn't realize that getting close to you now is going to be like climbing Mount Everest in tennis shoes and jogging shorts,” Wendy had observed. “He simply isn't prepared for you.”

Well, I'm not prepared for him, either.

I wish everyone would quit playing matchmaker and philosopher and let me live my life without their offerings of pop psychology. For one thing, if Molly hadn't told me about Jared's conversation with Ethan, I'd be a whole lot more relaxed right now.

“I was in the neighborhood and I thought I'd drop by and deliver this.” He pulled a Bently fountain pen from his pocket. “Is it yours?”

A wash of relief spread over me. This visit had nothing to do with me at all, other than the fact that I owned and had lost a very expensive pen. “You found it! Did I drop it at Molly's?” I reached out for pen gratefully. “Thank you. It was a gift from my friend, Ben. Every once in a while he surreptitiously checks to see if I'm still using it. I didn't look forward to telling him I'd lost it.”

Jared raised an eyebrow but said nothing. The pen was an expensive one—upwards of two hundred and fifty dollars, and no doubt he was wondering what kind of relationship I had with a man who would give me such costly gifts.

The truth be known, the pen said very little about my relationship with Ben. He'd purchased the pen because he thought it was funny—Ben and
Ben
tly. He's always chosen to purchase his clothes at Goodwill and lavish gifts on his friends and family instead.

My good manners finally welled to the surface. I gestured him toward the kitchen. “As long as you're here—and have
already cleaned my furniture—would you like a cup of chai or coffee?”

“Coffee is fine.”

Jared sat at my small stainless steel-topped table and took in the room while I brewed the coffee. My kitchen has a Nordic feel with its simple maple cabinets and blue and white color scheme. There are the painted red Dala horses I love, beautiful blown glass bowls and a family of trolls decorating the tops of my cupboards, but I prefer to have nothing on my counter but the coffeepot and a cluster of yellow and red tulips in a bright blue glass vase. I like things simple, tidy and spotless. Wendy says that the man I should be dating is Mr. Clean.

I set the coffee cup in front of him with a plate of cream-filled pirouettes and butter cookies. He looked like a bull in a china shop looming over the delicate things so I went to the freezer, pulled out another container and extracted four chocolate chip oatmeal cookies the size of salad plates, put them in the microwave and defrosted them.

When I brought those to the table, Jared gave a sigh of relief.

“Sorry about the girlie stuff. I forget men like cookies bigger than their little finger.”

“You have a lovely home,” he said politely.

“Thanks. I've lived here over a year now.”

“Just moved to the cities?”

“Oh, no. I grew up here.” I folded into a chair and looked at him with palpable curiosity. “And you?”

“Me, too. Kenwood area.”

“Not too shabby.”

“I suppose not.”

The conversation ground to a halt. Jared seemed almost relieved to have Zelda jump into his lap, put her overlarge foot pads on the front of his coat and jam her nose under his chin. For a moment, he didn't know what to do with his hands.

“She likes you!” For some reason it pleased me inordinately. “She usually doesn't warm up to people so quickly.”

Jared stroked her back.

She's soft and warm to the touch and when she arched into his hand, I knew Jared could feel her boney spine beneath his fingers. Despite her weirdness, there is something endearing about Zelda. She is blissfully unaware of anything but the force of her personality and she was turning it all on Jared. He scratched her and she purred. He gathered her to his chest and she snuggled in. He talked softly into her ear and she kneaded his arm approvingly with her claws. He slipped off his watch to keep it from catching on her skin. She tipped her head and her rhinestone collar flashed in the light.

Zelda was doing her magic act and Jared fell under her spell.

“So how do you feel about my naked cat now?” I watched them as I sipped my coffee.

“Not what I expected.”

“Things seldom are.”

“She's amazing.” He looked down at Zelda, who was batting with one paw at the tip of his shirt collar.

“The breed is very intelligent and friendly. Zelda is always ready to cuddle or to play. In fact—” and I reddened a little “—she likes to sleep under the covers with me.”

Fortunately, before Jared had time to think about that, Imelda pranced into the kitchen looking, as many labradoodles do, like an oversize, curly-haired toy, carrying her favorite high heel like a bone between her teeth, her bright purple-and-pink toenails clicking on the hardwood floor.

After he left, I began to wonder how Jared really saw me—a green face print on the seat of my chair, my wiry fur-challenged cat and goofy flop-eared dog who Jared insisted on calling a retrievapoo instead of a labradoodle. When Imelda wasn't chewing on a high heel, she was sitting on it,
protecting it from who-knows-what—other dogs with shoe fetishes, perhaps. I'm sure none of it fits with the brisk, no-nonsense woman he thought he'd hired to help his sister.

And why that even mattered to me made no sense at all.

“A
nybody home?” I pushed Molly's door open and walked inside. Today was the day we'd planned to organize what Molly calls the “inner sanctum”—her bedroom. Molly's home reminds me of a delta, layer upon layer of sediment, stuff washed up upon more stuff until it becomes a new land-mass all its own. It's no wonder Molly is overwhelmed and has given up trying to sort through this.

We'd cleared the floor in one small spot on the carpet yesterday and I'd left her with the assignment to keep excavating. I know it was slow going with Molly squealing every few minutes over a sweater she thought she'd lost or a missing earring revealed. It was like being on an archeological dig—slow, tedious and with the tantalizing promise of intriguing discoveries at the end. In this case, the discovery was Molly's bedroom floor.

I suppose I should thank her for toughening her brother up for me.

I recalled last night when Jared had shown up at my front door bearing my lost pen, and cringed. Why he hadn't run off screaming, I still haven't figured out. I'd looked as bizarre as
Zelda. I never say Zelda is bizarre in her presence, but she
is
pretty peculiar when compared to others of her species. I'd smelled like compost, looked like death warmed over—except for my sparkling white teeth—and been as clumsy as all three Stooges. If I
had
wanted to impress him, it was all over now.

Once I'd gotten over the shock of seeing him at my front door I'd realized that we do have something in common. He'd known exactly what to do to get my face print off the seat cushion, he'd put his own cup and saucer in the sink when he was finished with his coffee and he'd even plumped the pillow he'd rested against as we visited on the couch.

If he weren't so determined to fire his own sister and make her life miserable, I might actually have considered seeing him socially. Oh, well. There have to be more tidy fish in the sea.

“Molly? Are you here?” Odd. She always welcomes me the moment I knock. In fact, Molly is always happy to see me. She believes I'm her lifeline, a way out of the messes of her own making.

I heard a small noise in the bedroom and followed the sound.

“Molly?” I peered through the doorway to see her curled into a ball on her chair, feet tucked under her. Tears ran down her cheeks and when she looked up at me, there was desperation in her eyes.

“Sammi, what's wrong with me?” was her greeting.

“Nothing is ‘wrong' with you other than you're crying. What's happened?” I hurried across the floor to her. Still in her pajamas and slippers, she looked like a pink, fuzzy little girl curled there on the chair with a soulful, heartbroken expression on her face. Sometimes Molly seemed so vulnerable it was difficult to remember she was not still a teenager.

“Nothing! Can't you tell?” She gestured toward the room, which looked exactly the same as it had when I'd left the day before. “I didn't get a thing done. I started, but then I found
some mail and went to the kitchen to get a knife to open it. That reminded me that I hadn't eaten dinner so I fixed myself something to eat as I read the mail. Of course there were bills so I had to get my checkbook out to pay them. In my checkbook I found the phone number of an old friend I'd been meaning to call. Next thing I know we'd talked two hours and it was midnight and I was exhausted. My brother is right. I am hopeless!”

“Did he say that?” I felt a surge of anger within me.

“He didn't say it.
I
did. And it's true. I've spent my whole life muddling things up and he's had to bail me out. I can't even get this done properly! I'm like a hummingbird that flits from one flower to another. I can't stay in one place long enough to make any headway whatsoever.”

She looked at me with bleary eyes. “I know you aren't happy with Jared because he's grown tired of the messes I create, but it's not his fault. It's mine!”

“I'm not exactly unhappy with Jared,” I began tentatively.

“Yes, you are. I can see it in your eyes. You don't even
like
my brother, do you?”

Her question hit me like a slap. For someone who considers herself nonjudgmental, I'd certainly fallen into the trap. Jared is a conundrum for me. I'd seen him angry and cordial, loving and hard-nosed, determined and gentle, and still I was clueless as to who he was as a man. And, no, I didn't like him, if for no other reason than for the way he treated Molly.

“Go take a shower. You'll feel better. Then we can make some headway in here.”

But Molly, for once, was suddenly difficult to distract.

“You really don't like him.”

“It doesn't matter what I think….”

“It matters to me. I'd do anything in the world for Jared. He's the best brother a woman could have.”

“Even if he fires you?”

Molly winced and was quiet. She couldn't find a way to argue with that.

 

By evening, we had made remarkable progress. Her closets looked like
Better Homes & Gardens
material, there was a place for everything and everything was in its place.

We sat on the floor in her bedroom and admired our work.

“It's perfect,” she said breathily. “I'm going to visit here every day.”

“Visit?”

“If I move to a hotel, I wouldn't be here to undo our work. What do you think of that?”

I stared at her for a moment before I realized she was teasing. I put my hand to my heart and sighed. “You scared me. For a minute I thought you were
serious!
”

“I'm like Pigpen in the
Peanuts
comic,” she said ruefully. “There's a little cloud of clutter floating around me all the time, wherever I go.”

I decided to ask the question that's been burning in me. “Molly, do you ever think that your brother might be unfair about you? Do you think he's too harsh, threatening to fire you?”

Molly chewed on her upper lip. “You don't know the whole story, Sammi. All I can say is whatever Jared does, I deserve. He's a great guy. If you'd met him without me in the picture, I think you two would have hit it off.”

She sighed. “Here I am messing things up for Jared again. Maybe, just maybe, under different circumstances, you could be my sister-in-law instead of my mentor. What would you think of that?”

“Sister-in-law?” I was speechless. So that was the direction Molly's mind was turning in. Suddenly I was in a very big hurry to be done with this job and out of Jared Hamilton's life.

 

“You can quit slamming pots and pans around, you know. He's not here to bug you.” Wendy sat at the table knitting while Zelda and Imelda unrolled her ball of yarn and tangled it around chair legs as they played.

“I'm making dinner. This has nothing to do with Jared. I can't believe you said that!” I punctuated the sentence with an extra clank of a pan.

Wendy narrowed her eyes and stared at me. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

“What does Shakespeare have to do with anything?”

“I've heard a dozen times tonight that you think this Jared Hamilton is a jerk…or a cad…or a creep. He must have some redeeming qualities. What about those?”

“Flushed down the toilet, that's what. Molly Hamilton brings out something protective and nurturing in me. Weirdly, I feel driven to protect her from her own brother.”

“So, then,” Wendy said, wisely changing the subject. “Have you seen Ben lately?”

“He was over last night. He wanted to hook my TiVo to my alarm clock so that I could wake up to
The Brady Bunch.
”

“The man is a genius and a wreck waiting to happen.” Wendy knitted and purled awhile before she spoke again. “Have you noticed that even though you are the most organized person in the world, you attract messies like me and Ben…and Molly?”

I hadn't really thought of it, but what she said is true. I love tidiness—and people who aren't.

“Maybe I have a missionary complex,” I offered. “I want to save you from yourselves.”

“Hah!” Wendy jabbed the knitting needles into the scarf and dropped it to the floor. Zelda and Imelda pounced and I knew that in a few minutes they'd undo all the work she had
done. I bit my lip and stayed silent. It was Wendy's scarf. If she wanted it to look like the snarled underside of a tapestry weaving, so be it.

“This job has got your dander up,” Wendy said bluntly. “And I think it's Jared Hamilton who's really got you going.”

“Not
me.
Look what a state he's got his sister in.”

“It's not your business.”

Wendy was right, but somehow I'd made it my business anyway and I wasn't happy about it.

 

That night I dreamed that I was rubbing my hand over Jared Hamilton's strong, masculine, stubbled jaw and he was loving my touch. He even hummed softly in my ear, a contented sound…a purr. Then I woke up and realized I'd been stroking Zelda, who'd burrowed into my arms and allowed me to hold her in a warm embrace.