Читать книгу Million Dollar Dilemma - Judy Baer - Страница 11

Kiwi is God’s way of cracking a joke.

I peeled another of the hairy little critters, sliced the bright green flesh dotted with its circle of black seeds and added it into my developing fruit salad, to be tossed in a concoction of cottage cheese, black persimmon pulp and honey. The recipe sounds pretty scary, but sometimes it’s good to live on the edge.

Cooking helps me ease the loneliness I’ve been feeling.

I went to church this morning, and came back reluctantly to my empty apartment. I’m “church shopping,” going in ever and ever bigger concentric circles in the area of my apartment. I’ve been praying that the Holy Spirit will give me a big “thumbs up” sign when I find my church home.

The phone rang. I checked caller ID to make sure it wasn’t Ken again. Sometimes I’m just not up to being loved by him.

“Hi, Grandma?” I took the phone into the living room and sprawled across the couch I’d borrowed from Jane. “What’s up?”

“That’s what I called to ask you, my dear.” Grandma Mattie’s voice was robust and cheerful. I couldn’t help but smile just hearing her.

“I went to the market yesterday.”

“My, my, now what?”

I suppose she has a right to be apprehensive. I’ve been going a little overboard at grocery and specialty stores. For me, unfortunately, everything from canned rattlesnake to sushi tastes like chicken.

“Black persimmons—‘chocolate pudding fruit’? How could I resist?”

“It would have taken a saint, I’m sure,” Grandma said tranquilly. “I’ve heard that grocery stores and Laundromats are wonderful places to meet men—so clean and wholesome. And men who shop and do laundry at night obviously aren’t frequenting nightclubs….”

Visions of men too ashamed to show their dirty underwear by light of day invaded my thoughts. Ewww. “Grandma, have you been talking to Jane?”

“Your sister thinks you’re lonely.”

“My sister thinks a lot of things. That doesn’t make them all true. She’s sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“That’s where her nose has always been,” Grandma Mattie agreed cheerfully. “Are you lonely?”

There’s no use beating around the bush with Mattie. “A little. The people at work are great, but they live all over the city and none near me. My apartment building is quieter than I’d expected. In fact, I didn’t meet any of my neighbors until today…and I managed to make a royal fool of myself, too.”

“Oh?” Mattie can pack volumes into a single “Oh?”

“I didn’t expect the Cities to be like Simms, where I can dial a wrong number and talk for half an hour to whoever answers, but I also didn’t realize how much I’ve missed my friends until I followed a man into his apartment today.”

There was a long, potent pause on the other end of the line. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“There’s nothing much to tell, really, but he has the most awful cat….” I unfurled for her my long, wretched story. To my surprise, instead of asking where I’d gone wrong in the common sense department, she changed the subject.

“Do you like your job?”

“It’s fine. I’m still learning.”

“You’ll find something in your field soon. You didn’t get a degree in child development to waste it now.”

“I need to finish my master’s and maybe even my doctorate in child psychology, Grandma. Right now I’m a well-educated unemployable.”

“You left school to help your grandfather and me and didn’t complain once about your sacrifice. The Fifth Commandment and all.”

Honor your father and your mother.

Grandma, too, was accustomed to talking in biblical shorthand.

I recalled the day my grandfather had had his first heart attack. That moment had changed my life. I had known for certain that I couldn’t let Mattie struggle alone, and once I realized Grandpa Ben was disappearing in inches, a little each day, it became crystal clear that my place was with my grandparents. I would only have felt remorse if I had decided my own life was “too important” to spare them the time and had missed the opportunity to share so many powerful weeks with Grandfather before he died.

“You and Ben have been like my own father and mother in so many ways. You were there for us when our parents were away, foot soldiers right there in the trenches with us.”

“I never considered raising you two a war, dear. Of course, there were a few skirmishes.”

I winced, hoping she wasn’t thinking of that time Jane and I were so determined to play with the same doll that we pulled it in half. Or that nasty incident with the scissors while we played beauty shop. Of course, that did work out in the long run. Jane still wears her hair in a bob.

I heard a knock and a voice in the background on Mattie’s end of the line. Then she said, “Can I call you back, dear? I’ve got company.”

“Don’t worry about it, Gram. Call me when you aren’t busy.”

Because I certainly won’t be.

It should be the other way around. I should be telling my grandmother how to adjust, not vice versa. She has taken to city life like a duck to water. Mattie turns down invitations from Jane and me because her social life in the assisted living center is so busy. While Mattie is enjoying her social whirl, I already have all my photos in photo albums and my recipes typed nicely and filed in a box. I’m going to alphabetize the spices and the cleaning products next, then refold the bath towels in a new configuration I saw in Good Housekeeping. I’ve even started to iron.

The phone rang again. Twice in a day. A new record. I picked it up without checking the ID, only to hear “Are you ready to come home yet?”

The familiar, proprietary voice set my teeth on edge. “Hello, Ken. How are you?”

“Don’t play games with me, Cassia. I miss you and I know you miss me. You can be here in time for the spaghetti feed before the baseball game tomorrow if you pack tonight. What do you say?”

“I’m fine, thank you. How nice of you to call. Now, if you’ll just excuse me…”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry I jumped into it like that, but you are driving me crazy, darlin.’You don’t belong in Minneapolis. You belong in Simms with me.”

I could just see him, hair the color of ripe wheat buzzed into submission, that intentional three-day stubble of beard that so many men wear these days, pristine white T-shirt with tight sleeves stretching over refined biceps. I could imagine his even white teeth with a wad of gum lodged between the back molars and his practiced sneer, an expression he hoped looked just like Elvis’s. A fine specimen of a man he is, even if Ken thinks so himself.

“You don’t need me in Simms. The game will go on without me.”

“So will the Twin Cities.”

“We’ve discussed this a dozen times….”

“And you never get it quite right. I love you, Cassia. I want you here with me.”

“But I don’t love you. Not like that…”

“Sooner or later you’ll realize that love isn’t about hearing bells and being swept off your feet. Love is about the time you’ve put into the relationship, the history you share.”

But I want bells. I want to be swept off my feet. Besides, this romantic deductive reasoning comes from a man who considers venison, codfish and sauerkraut gourmet foods.

“Then you should love your pickup truck and your dog, Boosters, very much. I know how much time and history you all have together.”

“I can see this wasn’t the right time to call.”

Finally, a glimmer of intuition on his part. I’d practically hit him over the head to make him understand that I wasn’t going to fall in love with him, but Ken refused to take no for an answer. His persistence had made him an unlikely success in the construction world, and the business he based in Simms had flourished across the state. Apparently when something worked once, Ken figured it would work again.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he says, not realizing that there’d really never been anything between us to fix. But we had dated—showed up at the same places within twenty minutes of each other, actually. In Simms that counted for something. “Sooner or later you’ll have to realize that I’m not coming back to Simms to be your wife. I can’t be much clearer than that.”

“Sure, that’s what you think now, but you’ll come around.” Gum snapped loudly in my ear. “Hey! The guys are here. Gotta go. We’re going skeet shooting at the gun club tonight. You hang in there, babe. Love ya. Bye.” And the phone went dead.

My left temple pulsated and the pounding in my head increased. That conversation had been a total waste of time. Ken hadn’t believed—or even heard—a word I’d said. He is so convinced that the city is an immoral and inhospitable place to live—and that Simms is as close to Eden as one can get on earth—that he thinks I’ll wake up sooner or later and scuttle my little self back to paradise. And he’ll be waiting with a told-you-so grin on his face and his latest big showy house, ready to carry me across the threshold.

“I’ll build you anything you want, Cassia,” he’d told me. “You name it—ranch, two-story, Colonial, saltbox, even contemporary. As many bedrooms as you want and a bathroom in every one of them. I’ll put a fireplace in every one, too. You want a pool? Fine. A bowling alley? I’ll see what I can do. I’ll even build a place for your grandma so she can be back in Simms and close to you. Won’t she love that?”

If money or prestige had mattered even a whit to me, it might have been tempting, but grandiose displays of wealth turned my stomach. If Ken had offered to give away some of that money to help others, then maybe…

But he hadn’t. He’s a good man, but it probably wouldn’t occur to him. He looks at the world in terms of dollars per square foot, concrete blocks per basement and the distance between two rafters. That, more than anything, made me sure I could never fully love him. Now I felt more empty and isolated than ever. Mattie was busy, Ken was being obtuse and Jane was doing who-knows-what. And I was all alone.

I built myself up for a great pity party and was planning the exact moment I’d open the Chunky Monkey ice cream in my freezer—should it be before or after I finish the Oreos and the fruit salad? Then a cold, wet nose nudged itself into my palm. Beady black eyes peered at me through a fringe of taffy-colored bangs and a raspy tongue laved my hand.

I knelt and took my dog’s gigantic fluffy head in my hands. “You’re my best buddy, aren’t you, sweetie? I don’t need anybody else when I’ve got you. How about a brushing?”

Unfortunately facing an evening of dog brushing and eating two quarts of Black Persimmon Surprise fruit salad didn’t exactly fill my social calendar.

“The city isn’t that much different from Simms, Winslow. I’ll do exactly what I always did in Simms when I was in the doldrums. Remember how we’d take a plate of Mattie’s cookies to the neighbors and have a visit?” But I didn’t have any homemade cookies. I would have to make do with what I had on hand.

I wondered how Adam Cavanaugh felt about tangelos and persimmons.

I almost lost my nerve when I saw that the door to his apartment was open. I smelled frying bacon and heard the coffeepot gurgling. My cheery idea to be neighborly rapidly withered. After deciding that Cavanaugh was probably the last person who would want to see me, I decided instead to offer my salad to the people who lived on my floor. Unfortunately, no one was home. Adam’s was the only apartment in the building with any signs of life.

Pepto lay in the doorway like a palace guard waiting to attack anyone with designs on the king. I studied him from a distance, gauging my safety. One incisor hung over his bottom lip, and his mauled, droopy ear made him look like the feline version of a marauding pirate.

Still, the door was wide open and I could see Adam hovering over the stove in overlarge gray sweatpants and an equally washed-out red sweatshirt. His dark hair was damp, his feet bare, and if I had to judge by the sound of pans and lids clanging harshly as he flung them about, his mood was foul.

When I’d moved in, the landlord had assured me that the occupant of this apartment was “a nice guy who works for a newspaper or something.” I probably should have paid more attention. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement for a person’s sterling character, but the landlord also told me that if I ever got into a jam I could safely knock on this guy’s door and ask for help. Since I’d had no intention of doing anything that I couldn’t handle on my own, I hadn’t asked any more questions. Now I wished I’d given my curiosity full range.

Maybe I’d just take my salad home and eat it all by myself.

Unfortunately, the cat chose that moment to yowl like a banshee. I looked down to see if I’d stepped on his tail, and when I looked up again, Adam was at the door staring at me with those disconcerting eyes of his. On the front of his faded sweatshirt were the words Don’t Mess With Me.

Wishing desperately I’d heeded that advice much earlier in the day, I did the only thing I could manage. I thrust the bowl into his hands and blurted, “Salad. I made too much. Since you just came home, I thought you might not have anything in your refrigerator.”

“But you brought me flowers already. You’re too generous.” He was laughing at me, so I laughed, too.

“Sorry I’m being such a hick, but this is how we do it back in Simms. I’ll just go back to my place now and spend some time getting sophisticated. I’ll be back in twenty years or so.”

An odd expression flashed in his attractive eyes. “Don’t get sophisticated. I hate it when that happens. It ruins perfectly nice people.” He stepped back, and with his hand indicated that I should enter. “Want some eggs and bacon?” he offered. “I don’t have any bread, so I made a few pancakes to go with it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“No bother. Come in. Scram, Pepto.” The cat slithered away, looking back at me with a disgruntled expression.

Adam pushed his door wide open and beckoned me in. He made no move to close the door after me. Sometimes I surprise myself, but I’m still an old-fashioned girl at heart and I appreciated his thoughtfulness.

He moved to the cupboard, took out two pottery plates and handed them to me. “You’ll have to move the mail to one side while we eat.”

The table was piled high with important-looking letters and a gargantuan stack of magazines, most of which were news publications and journals, with the occasional glossy print piece.

He peeled back the foil on my bowl and peered curiously inside.

“Fruit salad,” I offered, hoping to clarify.

“Not like any I’ve ever seen.” He stared at the oddly colored stuff for a minute before picking out a piece of star fruit. He bit into it and his eyes narrowed. “It reminds me of a soft-shelled crab.”

“I went a little crazy in the produce section and bought one of everything.”

“I thought that was how you shopped for flowers.” He put down the bowl and went to retrieve the frying pan and a stack of pancakes. He set the hot pan on a pile of magazines, his version of a trivet.

“It’s getting out of hand. My new hobby is trying out everything exotic in the grocery store—and compared to Simms, it’s all exotic. You can’t be picky when shopping at a combination grocery store, post office, feed supply, hardware, beauty parlor, pawn shop, you know.”

“No wonder you’re having fun.” Adam slid scrambled eggs and three slices of bacon onto my plate and some onto his own. He rolled an unbuttered pancake into something that looked like a soft-shelled taco, put it beside his plate and reached for my salad. As he dished it up, I winced. The persimmon dressing was not an appetizing color.

“It’s not bad,” he said finally. “You want some?”

“Since you haven’t grabbed your throat and fallen off the chair, I suppose I’ll try it. Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure I was brave enough to taste it myself.” Actually, the prayer I whispered to myself was more a petition for safety—from my own cooking.

“I’ve eaten stranger things lately,” he said enigmatically. He poked at his chipped plate. “I don’t have much in the way of dishes. I usually use paper.”

“These are fine. I never ate on a paper plate at home. My grandfather didn’t believe in waste.”

“No kidding?”

“He also hated throwing anything away if he still considered it ‘good.’ Once we got something, we used it until it fell apart. Then we repaired it and used it some more.”

“Why didn’t you just buy new?”

“Psalm 41:1.”

He stared at me blankly until I remembered that outside my family, giving only a Bible reference was rarely enough.

‘“Happy are those who consider the poor. The Lord delivers them in the day of trouble.’ My grandfather wouldn’t spend an extra dime on himself if he thought he could give it away. My grandmother still jokes that the widows and the orphans had better things than we did because Grandpa was more generous with them than with us.”

“Was that a problem?”

“No. It wasn’t as though we were involuntarily poor. Poverty was a choice for us, a challenge. How much could we give up in order that others might have more? Believe it or not, Grandpa managed to make it into a game. I learned early how little we actually need.”

“Interesting.” He stared at me with those velvety chocolate-colored eyes and once again I felt a little weak in the knees. “Probably considered loony in this day and age, but definitely interesting.”

As I pushed my chair back from the table and started to say goodbye, a furred cannonball landed in my lap and began to rumble.

“Pepto?” Adam stared at the cat that had just launched itself into my arms. I was equally startled, but Pepto redoubled his purr, turned around twice on my thighs and sat down. “What are you doing, crazy cat?”

“He’s fine. I like animals.”

“No, he’s not. He’s never done that before. Even to me.”

“Animals and small children seem to like me,” I told him as I stroked Pepto’s fur. It felt much softer than it looked. “Grandma says it’s a sign of my ‘pure nature.’My sister Jane says it’s because I wear perfume that’s a combination of catnip and cotton candy. Either way, I don’t mind.”

As Pepto tilted his head upward as if he were looking at me, I scratched that tender dip beneath his chin, and his purr turned to a happy roar. When I lifted my head, Adam was staring at me in disbelief, as if I’d made roses grow out of a dirty ashtray. I chuckled inwardly. It was easy to woo the cat. I’m just glad it’s not on my agenda to win his master’s heart.