by Julia London
If she allowed herself to dwell on it, she would plainly see that not only was she in the middle of a lot of family drama, but she was living a lifestyle she really couldn’t maintain any longer. She was on the verge of losing everything, and if that wasn’t enough stress, she was desperate for a day where she had nothing to do.
A single day.
A day of solitude during which she never changed out of her pajamas and lay in bed, flipping back and forth between Bravo and HGTV and Hallmark—she did watch TV when she had nothing else to do—while she ate from a giant plate of nachos, and someone would come by and quietly do her laundry and mop her floors and clean her toilets, then slip away like a sprite. When could she have that day?
Her life was running a little short of desperate. Like today, she’d had a game plan: follow up with two publications she was hoping would feature Victor’s work; follow up on two job applications she’d submitted last month and submit at least two more job applications; find an art show for Gordon to attend; and, oh, while she was at it—find her dog. But there was never a moment of solitude. Every hour was interrupted.
In the middle of a phone call with a magazine, her sister, Mia, had beeped her. Not once but several times, distracting Carly so much that she wasn’t sure what she’d said to the magazine in the end. When she finally answered Mia’s call, it was with a curt “What?”
“Don’t yell at me! I’m having a horrible day and I can’t find Mom, Carly. I’m afraid something awful has happened.”
It sounded like something awful was happening in Mia’s house. Carly could hear her niece and nephews screaming in the background. Early on, Mia and her husband, Will, had adopted the free-range parenting style, which meant, Mia had explained when she was pregnant with her oldest, that they wanted their children to do and be what came naturally to them and without intervention. Mia had worked for the state Department of Education before she’d married and started having kids, and had read all the studies about effective parenting techniques. But after one particularly bad Saturday that ended with all three kids breaking out in poison ivy rashes, Mia had tearfully confessed to Carly that those theories didn’t really work in the real world. Unfortunately, it was hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
“What do you mean, something awful has happened?” Carly asked loudly, so that Mia could hear her over the shouting. “Did you go to her house?” She rifled through her bag looking for a pen.
“No, but I’ve called her twice and she hasn’t responded, and she had a date last night, and you know how she’s going out with anyone who slides into her DMs.”
Carly stopped looking through her bag because she could not reconcile the phrase sliding into her DMs with her fifty-eight-year-old mother. Second, her mother had been on another date? That meant her mother had been on half a dozen more dates in the last three months than Carly had had in a year. There was no reality where that was remotely fair.
“Either that, or she is with Dad and doesn’t want us to know.”
“Dad! What is wrong with you, Mia? They hate each other. She’s fine,” Carly had said impatiently. “Hold on a minute.” She’d put Mia on hold and called her mother.
Her mother answered on the first ring and sounded groggy. “Mom? Is everything okay?”
“Well of course! Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Mia tried to get hold of you and you didn’t answer. She’s worried.”
“Oh, I’m fine, Carly. I slept in, that’s all. What time is it?” There was a pause. “Oh no! Is it eleven?” Her mother had giggled like a schoolgirl. “I was out pretty late last night, if you know what I mean.”
She did know what her mother meant, and she didn’t want to know any details. Not a single one. “Okay, Mom, as long as you are okay—”
“I have to say, I really like this new sexual liberation you young women have embraced. I wish we’d had more of it back in the day. Like I told your father, I might not have married him if I knew then what I know now.”
“Mom!” Carly said quickly and desperately. “I’m begging you, don’t talk about sexual liberation. It’s disconcerting and a little frightening. I mean, do you even know these men?”
“Guess it depends on what you mean by know,” she’d said, and chortled gleefully.
Carly had squeezed the bridge of her nose to stave off a tension headache she could feel coming. “Will you please call Mia? You know how she gets.”
“Well, do you blame her? Her husband is gone half the time and she—”
“Gotta go,” Carly said.
That disturbing call with her mother had been followed with a call from Carly’s dad. Because why not call his daughter during a workday just to shoot the breeze? “Hey, Peach! How’s my girl? Did you find Mia’s dog? What happened there, did you leave the gate open?”
Where had he gotten that idea? But Carly was not about to stop what she was doing and explain the entire, convoluted basset mix-up situation to her father, and tried very hard to get him off the phone, but he tended to ask a lot of questions and he indeed proceeded to ask a lot of questions, and she ended up explaining most of it. To which he said, “Well if that isn’t the most millennial thing ever, hiring someone to walk a dog. When I was a kid, we walked our own dogs.”
“Oh my God, that is not what any of this is about,” she said with a sigh.
“You need to speak to your mother about this dog business anyway. You know, I don’t want to talk bad about Evelyn to you kids, but she never showed so much interest in dogs until the divorce. And now suddenly she’s the Austin Canine Coalition ambassador to all of Austin—”
“Dad? I really have to go,” Carly said, before he could launch into his litany of all the things her mother did wrong now that they were divorced.
“Wait, wait, before you hang up,” he said. “Have you had a chance to look at the information I sent you? It’s a really good deal, Carly.” He’d begun to rattle through his sales pitch about the benefits of a time-share on South Padre Island. His postdivorce plan was to sell time-shares.
It was official—both of her parents had gone off the rails since they’d divorced.
“Think how often you could get down to the coast and take a break from that kid you work for,” he said, wrapping up his sales pitch.
“Victor is not a kid,” she’d said defensively, and then thought the better of defending that statement. “Anyway, I can’t get into the advantages of youth when it comes to creative genius, because I really have to run.”
She’d ended the call from her dad, had managed to return one single email when she got a call from her other client, Gordon Romero.
Gordon was the son of an old Austin family who had made a name in oil and land development. At the age of seventy-two, he’d come into a vast fortune. He’d quit his law practice and had grabbed on to his hobby with both hands—specifically, hand-carved wooden objets d’art that he was interested in promoting and selling. Except that his objets were really just large and funky circles of wood, carved and polished to a high sheen.
Like Victor, Gordon was great at making his art but terrible at getting the art into the world. Gordon was convinced that a hand-carved bit of wood that was not quite a perfect circle and not quite an oval had a wide market in the United States. He believed that he would make a small fortune if he could get his circles in front of the right people. The only problem was, Gordon didn’t want to go out of his way to make that happen. He just expected it. Felt a little entitled to it, truth be known.
Carly wished she had half his confidence. Or the confidence of any old guy who had always gotten his way and rarely had been told no, if ever.
One of her former coworkers at DBS had told Carly about him and his desire for some publicity. “He’s too small for us,” Alexis had said. “Maybe you could pick him up. He’s shopping around for a publicist now.”
Carly had done
a lot of research into the art world and had discovered there was not a vast market for hand-carved wood art, and none for circles that she could find—but nevertheless, she’d put together a great plan for exposure and had submitted it. Gordon had called her in for an interview. At the interview, she’d handed him another copy of her proposal, of course, along with her résumé, both of which he’d promptly set aside and said, “If you think you can do it, I’ll give you a shot.”
Carly had been astounded. “Really?” She’d felt herself puff up a little. She’d done it. She’d studied the problem and had put together a kick-ass proposal, one that he could not possibly turn down, and she’d won this job with her creativity and assertiveness, just like Megan said she would. She was good at this. She could do this on her own! She was badass, and she had on her big girl panties, and she was going to get a plum job in New York. This man, this artist, had seen her talent and recognized genius, and so would someone in New York. “That’s . . . that’s amazing!”
“Yeah,” he had said with a flick of his wrist. “You’re the only applicant I had and I need the help. I’m willing to give you a shot.”
She had deflated, the air leaving her so quickly it was a wonder she didn’t fly all over that nicely appointed study like a punctured balloon.
Nevertheless, she’d taken that job to build her portfolio. Turned out, it was a much greater challenge than she could have anticipated, because good ol’ Gordon liked to second-guess her at every turn. That, and he had the computer skills of a Neanderthal.
“How in the fuck do I get into this damn blog?” he shouted at her on the phone earlier.
It had been Carly’s suggestion that he start a blog, nothing more than one entry per week, just talking a little bit about what he was doing and showing his work in various stages of creation. Well, actually, her original suggestion had been Instagram, which she thought would be much less work for him, but he’d scoffed at that. “I’m not some teenager looking for followings,” he’d said.
Followers, she’d corrected him in her head.
As she suspected, Gordon had once again confused his username with his password when trying to get into his blog. She had to hold the phone away from her ear as Gordon launched into a profane tirade of opinions about computers and technology. Carly had promised to drop by as soon as she could and fix it for him, and she would probably end up writing the blog for him while she was there, and then she would do what she always did, which was stick a Post-it on his computer with his username and password and beg his dumpy, sour-faced housekeeper, Alvira, not to throw it away. Alvira was delightful—she grunted at Carly when she came around and glared at Gordon when he asked for a drink.
“Well, okay,” Gordon said reluctantly when she’d offered to swing by today or tomorrow. “But can you please wear something normal, for God’s sake? Those clothes you like will have my neighbors thinking a hazmat team had been called out. You could cause a mass panic around here.”
“Very funny,” Carly had said. At the time, however, she did think she would love to put on something a little less constricting.
She was thinking that now. She was so close to her house—what would it add, another fifteen minutes to this impossible day? She glanced at the clock. It was already a quarter past six and traffic was still crawling. This dog exchange had thrown a huge wrench in her plans.
Carly picked up her phone to text Gordon and let him know she’d come by tomorrow in regular clothes. She hated making him wait, but this was the overextended life she’d been living for a little over a year, since she’d walked out of the door of DBS carrying her cardboard box of personal belongings and had to create her own livelihood.
Nevertheless, Carly remained optimistic. She just refused to look at her savings account until she absolutely had to.
Megan said to always look forward.
Five
Max was beginning to fear she’d ditched him. Maybe she’d decided Hazel was a better dog than Baxter, and who could blame her? Baxter was great, but Hazel was amazing. Why the hell hadn’t he gotten Carly’s full name? At the very least, her number? Why hadn’t he asked more questions? Why hadn’t he gone with her? What was the matter with him?
He could be so naïve at times, so distracted by a pair of pretty eyes. He was like a seven-year-old kid in a toy store.
It was half past seven when he finally saw the sweep of car lights into the drive. He stalked to the front door and threw it open, prepared to give her a piece of his mind. But that piece of his mind crumbled into ash when Carly got out of her car. She’d changed out of her costume and was wearing yoga pants that fit her very well, a zip-up hoodie over a T-shirt that said Back in my day we had nine planets. She’d pulled her sleek dark hair into a ponytail at her crown and he guessed the thing that startled him the most was that not only did she look normal, she looked delightfully curvy. Curvy in all the best ways, his testosterone receptors whispered.
No wonder it had taken her so long. She probably needed a team of people to extract her from the contraption she’d been wearing.
She gave him a wave from the drive and then opened the back door of her car. Hazel leapt out with the agility of a show dog and raced to the front door.
“Hazel!” Max exclaimed and went down on one knee to accept the lash of her tongue and to hug her for a long moment. “I missed you, girl,” he said, scratching her behind the ears. That’s when his brain registered the fact that Hazel was wearing a tutu. He stood up and frowned as Carly strolled up the walk.
She grinned, her eyes sparkling. “Cute, right?”
Cute was not the word that came to mind. “Umm . . .”
“It’s a tutu.”
“I noticed. Is it a joke?”
“A joke! Ha! Of course not. They make clothes for dogs other than bandannas, you know.”
“Yeah, but why is—”
From somewhere in the house, Baxter let out a deep bay that startled them both. That was followed by the sound of Baxter running. Not just running—racing at full bore.
“Baxter!” Carly went down on one knee, prepared to accept the eager greeting of her dog. But Baxter didn’t race for her, he raced for Hazel. He ran so fast that he couldn’t stop himself on the slick Saltillo tile floors and crashed into Hazel. The two basset hounds spilled out into the yard, tumbling over and around each other, running together in the grass with Hazel in that ridiculous tutu.
Carly and Max watched a moment in mutual stunned silence as the two mounds of black and brown and white fur tumbled over each other before righting themselves and racing again. “Wow,” Carly murmured. “I didn’t know Baxter had a turbospeed.”
“Same here,” Max said. “I guess they’re friends?”
“I guess? I didn’t know he had those sorts of feelings about . . . anything.”
“Same again.”
Hazel raced in a circle and headed toward the front door, Baxter in hot pursuit.
Carly and Max hopped out of the way just before they were bowled over by the dogs. “Curious . . . what is the deal with that tutu?” Max asked as the two dogs blundered past them and into the house.
“She was a bridesmaid.”
Max shifted his gaze from the dogs to Carly and caught her looking at his hair. “A what?” He self-consciously put his hand on the top of his head on the chance that his hair was sticking up after removing his knit cap.
“A bridesmaid. At a prewedding photo shoot.” Her gaze flicked down his body. Max looked down. He’d changed his shirt for a sweater and had removed his contacts—he really needed to get his prescription checked—and had put on glasses.
Carly lifted her gaze again, and the corner of her mouth curled up in a strange little smile.
What the hell? Did he look weird? Did he have pizza sauce on his face? “I’m sorry—is something wrong?”
“Nope.” She pressed her lips toget
her, caught her ponytail, and flicked it over her shoulder.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.
“Like what? I’m not even looking at you. Everything is fabulous. I found my dog, I saved the day for Bubbles—excuse me, Hazel—and, yes, I’ve had a very productive day. Thank you for asking.”
“That’s great,” he said, his gaze locked on her. “I didn’t know I’d asked.”
“Well,” she said, her gaze locked on him, too, “you looked like you were about to.”
There seemed to be some weird energy flowing around them that Max couldn’t quite decipher. But before he could, she said, “I’m just going to, ah . . . go get my dog.” She pointed to the interior of the house.
“Right,” he said and with a bend of his head, indicated she should come in.
Carly walked into his living room where Hazel had Baxter pinned to the floor by his neck. Carly didn’t seem to notice. She shoved her hands into her hoodie and her gaze flicked quickly over him again. “You have a cute house. I really didn’t notice the first time. I like the Spanish style. You don’t see so many of them around town anymore. You know . . . the tech millionaires.” She glanced away from him.
The tech millionaires. Was that supposed to mean something? Had he missed some innuendo, some social cue, maybe even part of a conversation? Was he crazy, or had the mood done a definite shift into a weird, dithery space? She had those blue eyes that sort of pulled you in, and maybe he’d been pulled in for a moment too long and had shot past something vital. “I don’t . . . not following,” he said.
“You know . . . buying all the houses and turning them into mansions.” Carly pushed a bit of hair behind her ear. Only there wasn’t any hair to push back, and he wasn’t certain she even realized it. What had happened? Earlier, she’d been ready to bust his balls for having failed to have Baxter’s chip scanned. And now she seemed almost nervous. It made him feel uneasy, too, and they stood there for a very awkward moment, their gazes locked again, the air around them bubbling hot like dry ice in warm water. But Max didn’t like the awkward standoff, and in an effort to end it, to sound completely unaffected by the strange vibe, he said breezily, “Oh, hey, looks like you lost the sleeves.”
