The Checklist

by Addie Woolridge

  “I know what the EMP is. I live in an artist hive, not a bunker. I just haven’t actually been inside of it.”

  “You’re kidding. You’ve never been inside the Hendrix museum?”

  “Does riding the monorail through it count?”

  “You can’t keep telling people you were raised here. You gotta see it. Add it to the list.” It was Dylan’s turn to look incredulous. “Don’t act like there isn’t a checklist running through your head right now.” Mike’s good-natured smile returned as he poked fun at her.

  “Gee, you remember my absolute best traits. Thanks for that.” There was no point in denying “the list” existed, and they both knew it. “Now, tell me what you want to do.”

  Smirking, Mike began rambling around the room, pointing to various aspects of the space and noting planned changes. Sure, the alterations would cost more money than either of them had access to, but Dylan imagined defeat on someone like Mike would be more heartbreaking than she was prepared to handle. She didn’t regret her small albeit deeply impractical lie.

  “—like the Bezos Center at the Museum of History and Industry.” Mike’s words pulled Dylan back into the room. She’d missed whatever had prompted him to wave wildly at the back wall, but she was pretty sure that if it was named after the founder of Amazon.com, it was expensive.

  “Haven’t seen that one either?” Mike tried to mask a look that fell somewhere between offense and pity. “How can you be the child of artists?”

  “Don’t ask me questions based on the assumption of normal parentage. My parents think dogs are appropriate messengers.”

  “They’re whimsical, is all.”

  Dylan threw her free hand over her heart. “Aw, thank you. ‘Whimsical’ might be the nicest way anyone has ever called my family weird.”

  Mike shrugged a lazy shoulder, turning back toward the open doors. “What can I say? Whimsy suits them.”

  Dylan smirked. “I’m sure you want their whimsy in your life as much as you want a triple bypass.”

  “I don’t think your family is nearly as odd as you think they are,” Mike said, navigating back toward the construction light. “The whole feud thing aside.”

  “That’s because you don’t have to live with them.” Either she was missing something, or Mike had managed to locate a level of reasonable she had yet to see her parents display. Both thoughts were equally unnerving, albeit for opposite reasons, so she pushed them aside as she stepped carefully to the door, grateful to be away from the uneven flooring.

  As they walked back through the hall, she weighed her options. She didn’t have time for a pro bono project. Especially with Jared breathing down her digital neck every fourteen minutes. Still. There had to be a way she could sell using some of her time on this. It was obvious Mike needed help, and she could use a distraction. She’d poke around for a while and write a check to the museum when she left. Nothing massive, but certainly something bigger than “special donor” money. She had basically run Nicolas’s workplace-giving drive for the last two years. How much more time consuming could this project be?

  “Maybe you could come up with a list of some spaces I should see? Y’know, so I can get a better sense of what you want to do here.”

  “Dylan Delacroix, is this your way of trying to trick me into taking you out?”

  “That is not what I am asking.” Dylan rolled her eyes, refusing to let Mike embarrass her again.

  “Just checking.” Mike shrugged, putting one hand in his pocket. “You actually want to help? You aren’t just making a pity offer? I value honesty, and I promise I can take it if you really don’t want to do this.”

  “I’m being honest. I want to do this.” Dylan’s pro bono scheme was only half-baked, but she added extra emphasis on “want” anyway.

  “I know you said you would help. But I figured you’d tell me to open the windows in there and learn how to plug in a light.” Dylan narrowed her eyes, reinforcing the idea that he should choose his next words wisely. “Not, you know, actually invest your time. You have an important job and all.” He exhaled, his other hand dropping to his side.

  She let loose a laugh that sounded more like a groan. “Trust me, it is not as big a deal as it sounds. Besides, I might be able to swing this as a pro bono project for Kaplan.” Dylan regretted adding that detail the second it escaped her mouth. Mike’s smile was giving off a glow that rivaled the fluorescents in the hallway. “Don’t get too excited. That isn’t a promise or anything. And you’ll probably have to do most of the legwork—”

  “No. No. I’m happy with whatever you can do.” Mike cut her off mid-expectation-management speech. “I’m glad someone else even thinks it is a viable idea.”

  Dylan’s mind spasmed. This was hardly a viable idea.

  Mike’s excitement saved her from having to develop a response to the room’s usability. “But yes, I can put together a list of places to check out. I’ll drop it by your house next time I stop by my moms’ place.”

  “Great,” Dylan said, as much to reassure herself as to encourage him.

  Crossing back through the colorful entrance, she dodged a few eager third graders. School had let out, and the space was starting to fill up. Mike looked perfectly at home surrounded by roughly a hundred screaming children. Normally, Dylan would have found the entire thing overwhelming, but between Mike grinning and occasionally waving at kids who recognized him, the museum was suddenly the single most charming place she had ever set foot in.

  Hesitating at the visibly sticky door handle, Dylan decided the museum’s charm had its limits. Mike must have taken her reluctance to touch the door as a sign he should open it. Leaning in, he reached around her shoulder to push the handle of the door. The familiar and unusual heat of another body so close sent shivers through her. She stood in front of the open door a fraction of a second longer than she meant to, enjoying the sensation of being near another person. Particularly one who waved at kids and had a jaw sculpted out of marble.

  “So I’ll come by later?”

  “Yup. Absolutely.” Dylan wasn’t sure if he was asking a question or gently encouraging her to move out of the doorway and stop trying to snuggle with him. She hurried through the door, pretending to furiously dig around in her purse for her keys, as if they were not always in the second-innermost pocket. After shuffling around a lipstick and a few pens for good measure, she pulled out her keys, feigning a look of triumph.

  “Thanks for coming by,” Mike said, relaxing against the doorjamb. Dylan decided he probably tossed that same casual, seductive grin at anyone from fellow PhD students to benefactors. Whatever. It worked for him, and she needed to leave right now, before it worked on her too.

  “Yup. See ya!” Dylan waved and executed one of her better speed walks to the car, willing herself not to look back. She hopped into the driver’s seat, buckled up, and started the car with the kind of efficiency a NASCAR driver would envy. Exhaling, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror.

  “Okay, Dylan. For everyone’s sake, please never use the word ‘yup’ again.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dylan let herself sit idle in the driveway for a second, wondering if helping Mike with Crescent really made sense. Didn’t she have something good with Nicolas? Should she really be palling around with some other guy for a community service project?

  Pushing herself out of the car, she decided that there was nothing going on between herself and Mike that constituted a threat to her relationship with Nicolas. This was her mind making some impressive mental leaps. Her imagination really had nothing to do with the guy next door and more to do with her and Nicolas’s dry spell. It was just kind of hard to feel sexy when he was shouting into his phone all the time.

  “That you, Dyl?” Neale’s voice singsonged from the kitchen as Dylan crossed the front door threshold and shrugged off her coat. She looked down at her heels and then the rug and decided to keep her shoes on.

  “Coming.” Dylan pressed her cold finger
s to her cheeks to mask the flush, then pulled her shoulders back and strutted into the kitchen.

  Giving Dylan a once-over, Bernice scratched a fleck of dried glaze on her neck. “You’re home early. How was your day?”

  “Busy. I decided it’d be good for Kaplan and Technocore to pick a pro bono project.” Dylan felt the white lie slip off her tongue and hid it by turning toward the sink for a glass of water. Her mother could smell lies; she was sure of it.

  “Really? What is it?” Neale asked.

  “I think everyone at Technocore recognizes they haven’t been a community player, and Crescent Children’s Museum is looking to do some pretty cool cutting-edge tech stuff.”

  Dylan turned away from the sink as her mother’s eyebrow stretched toward her in-need-of-a-touch-up roots. “Oh? The good-looking boy across the street’s place?”

  “Mom. You know his name.” Dylan exhaled.

  “I know his last name. But I can’t blame you, sweetheart. The good-looking ones are always a bad idea. Don’t worry—we’ve all made that mistake. Trust me.” Bernice winked at Neale.

  If Dylan hadn’t already swallowed her water, she would have choked on it. “Mom. No winking. It’s gross, and I know for a fact neither Neale nor I want to hear the story behind it.”

  “Actually—”

  “No, we don’t.” Dylan cut Neale off and shot her a look that wielded more than daggers.

  “Fine. Another time. Let’s just say your mom really lived her wild oats.”

  Dylan gagged, torn between repulsion and her urge to correct Bernice’s expression.

  “How did all this come about?” Neale asked, an unusually present look crossing her space-queen visage.

  “Today was tough. Trying to set up procedures with Tim.” Dylan ignored Bernice’s scoff at the consultant jargon. “So I went out and ate a hamburger, and I still didn’t feel any better, and then I decided on a pro bono project. A feel-good thing to wash the taste of Technocore out of my mouth.”

  “Who doesn’t love a ‘feel-good’ project in the middle of the day?” Bernice used air quotes around the words feel-good, as if her meaning might not have been conveyed by her shit-eating grin.

  “Mike Robinson is a pro-BONE-o project,” Neale snorted.

  “He probably tastes better than a hamburger too,” Bernice said, her deadpan playing to the extreme of Neale’s laughter.

  “Okay, ew. Sex jokes with my mom and sister. Yuck.” She felt herself giggle and swallowed the laugh, irked that a little piece of her mother’s humor had found a way to amuse her. Mike must have been rubbing off on her if she was starting to find Bernice’s jokes funny.

  “Dyl, that wasn’t even the best I could do. Mom and I haven’t devolved into jokes about washing your mouth out yet.”

  “Give us credit. We didn’t say that’s what she said or anything,” her mother cackled.

  “I’m not sure you deserve credit for only stooping to the second-lowest rung of raunchy humor.”

  Dylan was spared further indignities by the doorbell ringing, followed by Milo’s bellowing from somewhere on the second floor. Stacy didn’t actually wait for anyone to answer the door; instead, she walked in just in time to catch Henry shouting, “Don’t ring the doorbell. It makes the dog bark.”

  “Hi, Henry.”

  “Hello.” Her father’s voice carried remarkably well over Milo, whose fervor had died down to a half-hearted yowl.

  “Hey, Stacy. Don’t pay attention to Henry. He is in a conceptualizing phase. ‘Any small distraction.’” Bernice mimicked her husband, walking into the hallway to give Stacy a frigid hug. “Of course, you don’t need to ring the doorbell.”

  Stacy wrinkled her nose at Dylan from over her mother’s shoulder but otherwise said nothing about the Delacroix’s notoriously fickle relationship with their front door. She knew Stacy found her family to be a blend of endearing and strange, an attitude pretty much anyone who set foot in the Delacroix’s home more than once had to adopt.

  When they were younger, her friend had asked why her parents didn’t move to somewhere like Fremont, where all the other well-off artist types lived. With a motto like The Freedom to Be Peculiar and a giant troll statue under a bridge, Fremont was more the Delacroix’s speed. In the end, Dylan had explained that in Fremont, her parents were two of many peculiar artists. In Green Lake, the Delacroix had the distinct honor of defining peculiar. A long-standing feud with their neighbors was just poutine on whatever cuisine Bernice had managed to char that evening.

  “Ready?” Dylan reached for her coat around Bernice, who looked like she was about to invite Stacy in for another round of racy jokes.

  “My toes so need a pedi. Like, I-won’t-even-wear-my-flip-flops-into-the-salon-level bad,” Stacy said, shaking her head in disgust.

  “Want me to drive?” Dylan asked, snatching up her keys and hoping it wasn’t obvious she was trying to get them out of the door fast.

  “Sure,” Stacy said, waving to Neale, who was drinking the rest of Dylan’s water in the kitchen.

  “Are you girls coming back for dinner?” Bernice asked, her tone too innocent for Dylan to be comfortable with the question.

  “I don’t think so. Dyl, I was thinking we could try the new Ethiopian place by my house?”

  “Sounds great. It does look—”

  “Not as good as who you had for lunch,” Bernice interrupted Dylan with another cackle, which Neale echoed from the kitchen.

  “Okay, Mom. I love you,” Dylan said, wrenching the door open.

  “I don’t get it,” Stacy said, looking bewildered.

  “Long story. I’ll explain in the car.”

  “Okay. Bye, Delacroix,” Stacy called over her shoulder as Dylan nudged her out the door.

  Pressing unlock on her keys, Dylan sighed in exasperation as the car lights flashed. “As soon as she asked about dinner, I knew she wasn’t done with the jokes.”

  “What was she talking about?” Stacy asked, jumping into the high seat of the SUV.

  Dylan started the car and carefully backed out of the driveway, aiming her gaze and her words over her shoulder and away from Stacy’s prying eyes. “It’s just my family making fun of me for agreeing to help Mike Robinson with a project. This happened over lunch, so now she is making snack jokes.”

  “She really can’t help herself. The dirty jokes are part of her charm.”

  “You might be the only person who finds her jokes charming.”

  “Come on, she’s funny. She isn’t that bad.”

  “Remember the salad dressing incident at the volleyball game?”

  “Okay, that was bad,” Stacy said. “But it was like fifteen years ago. Plus, I like when a woman in her sixties can laugh at sex. Everybody likes to pretend women stop even knowing about sex after menopause. I like that Bernice isn’t playing the no-sex-for-women game.”

  “Bernice has never played a societal-expectation game in her life,” Dylan said, shrugging as she turned left. Stacy might have been right about her family making slight improvements in their behavior, but Dylan would rather be present for the freezing over of hell than admit it to her friend.

  “Well, that’s true,” Stacy capitulated as a sly smile crept across her face. “So you are working with Mike, huh?”

  “Yes. Don’t make that face.”

  “I’m not making a face.”

  Stacy was absolutely making a face. She lacked any form of subtlety, and behind her hot-pink lipstick she was trying her hardest to suppress a smile that said more than enough.

  “If you start making Bernice jokes, I swear I’ll turn around and drop you back off at my parents’ house.”

  “Fine. No jokes,” Stacy said, throwing her hands up, then letting them fall to her lap with a smack. “But isn’t he cuter than Ghost Boyfriend?”

  “Why are you calling Nicolas ‘Ghost Boyfriend’?”

  “Because no one but you can see him.” Stacy laughed. “He’s tethered to your Texas apartment, Casper-style.”<
br />
  “You spend too much time with Neale.” Dylan’s chuckle came out in an unladylike snort-laugh. “Nicolas isn’t a ghost. He just isn’t big on the cold and eating unfamiliar foods. It makes travel tricky.”

  “And you are okay with that?” Stacy asked, her lip curled slightly.

  Dylan paused. She’d stopped asking herself that question after Nicolas had freaked out over Thai green curry on a date. She just chalked it up to his quirks about deviating from known quantities and ate whatever she wanted when he wasn’t around. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to eat Thai food. It was just that he was a creature of habit, which she liked most of the time. Hell, his dedication to structure was what had drawn her to him in the first place. Their life was the exact opposite of her childhood, which Dylan found comforting. Or at least she’d thought she did, until Stacy had brought it up.

  She glanced over at her friend, trying to prepare an answer, when Stacy’s expression relaxed. “Whatever. If it’s what you like, then I guess it works for you.” She shrugged before adding, “For the record, I agree with your family. Mike looks delicious.”

  “Please. I have to see this person regularly. I don’t want a bawdy laugh track running through my head every time I talk to him about fundraising or our parents’ latest fight or whatever.”

  “Bawdy, huh? Impressive use of SAT words.”

  Dylan flipped on her blinker and turned into the parking lot of Richie Nails. “Tell me what’s new with you.”

  “I want you to know I’m giving you a free pass. Don’t think I didn’t notice the subject change. We are so coming back to Mike.” Stacy unbuckled her seat belt and jumped down from the car with a dainty hop. “Actually, things have been great at work. I got a tiny pay bump.” She held the door of the salon open with one hand and her thumb and forefinger together in front of her face with the other, emphasizing how little her pay raise was.

  “That’s fantastic. Congratulations!” Dylan squealed as she walked through the nail salon’s door.