by Bill Alive
“You really are married,” I said, crushed.
Ed glowered. “And who the hell are you?”
“They’re private investigators,” Vanessa said.
“What the hell?”
“I’ve been telling you, Ed. I don’t feel safe.”
Her voice had a whole new tone … the wifely whine. Unlike our earlier groceries-in-the-trunk moment, this was an intimacy where I’d rather have opted out.
“Safe?” Ed repeated. “What the hell are you talking about? Don’t tell me you’ve been hitting on the milkman again.”
“Ed!” she screeched.
The milkman? I thought. Seriously? Another psychic floor collapsed, and I crashed down another level of depression. Not only was she already married, she was already off with some whole random other dude. She really did have issues.
Mark said, “I thought you got your milk from Helga Lubitsch.”
“Yeah, the old bag can gab all morning,” Ed said, “but sometimes her kid does the deliveries. He’s a real motormouth, but he’s got a wandering eye.”
Vanessa flushed. “Leave Kelsey out of this.”
“Oh sure,” Ed said. “Kelsey’s got enough to worry about.” He towered over us, talking too loud for the chic little coffee shop and swinging his bulging arms with dangerous energy. “What’s his favorite panic these days? Peak oil? A Chinese invasion? The zombie apocalypse? He’d just love to keep you safe.”
Vanessa crossed her arms, glared at the table, and muttered, “He’s never said one word about zombies.”
Ed beamed with malicious glee.
At the counter, the barista with gray bangs called, “Sir? What would you like to order?”
Ed scowled, then boomed, “Just a glass of milk. Pasteurized milk.”
Vanessa huffed.
Ed leered, then scraped up a chair and lumbered down, squeezing his wife toward the wall. He hunched over the table at Mark, still much taller than any of us. “I don’t know what the global crisis is this time, babe,” he said, talking to Vanessa but still glaring at Mark, “but you really think a couple private investigators are up to the challenge?” He smirked. “That sounds mucho optimistic.”
“We’re a full service agency,” Mark said.
“This has nothing to do with Kelsey,” Vanessa said. “And I wouldn’t need to hire men around if you made me feel safe.”
Ed scowled his darkest yet. But before he could answer, the barista clinked down a huge glass of milk. He took a long slurp, then literally smacked his lips.
“Mmm-mmmmm,” he boomed, long and slow and excruciating. For some reason, I finally noticed his “business casual” dark polo and pressed khaki shorts, and I imagined him dominating a business meeting, dragging through each presentation slide with the same insulting confidence that every tiny thing he did must fascinate.
“Mmm,” he said. “Love that taste. Good old creamy, pasteurized, factory farm milk. Loaded with dangerous antibiotics and tasty, tasty growth hormones!”
He looked our way, clearly expecting some major laughs.
Vanessa’s voice was cold. “You can buy your own milk whenever you want. You’re a big boy.”
“That’s not my job, wife.”
He pulled another noisy sip, then clacked the glass back down.
He totally had a milk mustache.
On top of his carefully trimmed actual mustache.
Part of me wanted to snicker. The other part got a PTSD flashback to my school cafeteria, circa third grade, where the resident bully might have a milk mustache, or pickle breath, or premature zits, whatever, and no one’d say a word, but God help me if I ever missed licking my lip.
I didn’t snicker.
But Vanessa chortled.
Ed stiffened. “What?” he demanded.
“Oh my gosh,” she gasped, practically giggling with contempt. “Your mustache! You are such a little boy.”
Ed felt his lip, flushed, and fumbled for a napkin.
Vanessa caught my eye and sparkled a mischievous smile.
I’d been craving this contact since we got here, but now I just squirmed.
Mainly because Ed was watching.
It didn’t take an empath to vibe the waves of hate and shame this dude was putting out. He looked ready to throttle the woman. But she was oblivious, trying to catch Mark’s eye now.
Ed made a tactical decision. He swung toward us, like a tank creaking its turret toward the easy target.
“I don’t know what the hell she told you,” he said, and his voice had a dangerous edge. “But we are not spending my hard-earned money on a couple of joker detectives.”
Vanessa instantly sobered up. “Ed!” she whined.
“We’re done here.” Ed stood, shoving back his chair so hard it jarred the next table and jostled a nice old lady’s smoothie. He didn’t even look.
Vanessa gave us a last, mournful gaze, like, “What can I do?” Then she got up too.
Ed pressed the small of the her back, and she walked away without a backward glance.
He folded his massive arms and glowered down at us. “I better not see either of you again,” he rumbled. “You read me?”
Mark arched an eyebrow. “More than I’d like.”
Ed clenched his jaw, and my chest spiked with panic. I thought he might take a swing at Mark right there. But he held it down, managed to look even more pissed off, and then marched away after his wife.
I watched them go, desperately hoping that Vanessa would flick back a last reassuring wink. But she just breezed through the glass door out into the sunlight, unconcerned, stalked by her gigantic simmering husband.
Who could pretty much snap her in half.
Chapter 13
Neither Mark nor I took the whole Vanessa thing very well.
Mark had already been a bit touchy and existential about the whole “Am I real detective yet?” thing. Missing that his one client was actually married … wasn’t exactly a confidence boost.
By the end of a very long, quiet weekend, it was clear she wasn’t going to text. This left us not only without a client, but probably without any future check for a full morning’s work.
On the “actual income” side of things, the whole Olivia funeral attempt had only managed to alienate Theodore, losing Mark his only current web gig.
Under normal circumstances, I’d have done my best to rally Mark, pointing out all the other leads we could still follow up with Olivia. If he was between web gigs anyway, we could at least catch another murderer.
But I had my own reasons for grieving that Vanessa had turned out to be married. Not to mention kind of a jerk.
So, yeah … long weekend. I never thought I would binge-watch TED talks. Not recommended.
By Monday morning, I had a new problem. Work.
Sure, I could drive Thunder. But that would require motivation to do something besides lying sideways on my lumpy old mattress and letting the next TED video play. (I never used to binge-watch before I moved in with Mark, by the way. Holmes had cocaine, Mark has whole seasons that drop at once.)
I might have lain there all week, but the network glitched, freezing a super earnest entomologist who had me totally convinced that mosquito mating patterns held the secret to avoiding divorce. In the temporary brain silence, I knew what I had to do.
And it involved using my phone to actually call someone.
“Pete?” Ceci said. “It’s Monday morning, I’m heading out the door! Please don’t tell me you need a ride.”
“Um,” I said.
“Gyah! Pete! You’d better be ready!” she said, and she hung up before I could even say I just wanted to hang out.
When I got in her car, she had that rushed-shower-and-makeup look, complete with harried frown, and her hair was loose and wetting the shoulders of her cheerfully flowered nurse shirt. She smelled like bar soap, which meant she’d missed applying whatever added her usual work scent of Faintly Professional. This smell felt more like Hurried Mom … which,
oddly, was comforting.
But guilt for making her rush flickered in my gut. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Just wanted to hang out.”
“You did?” Her frown smoothed into a smile. Then she checked the car clock and lurched the car down our gravel slope. (I did say Mark and I live almost at the top of a mountain, right? For real.)
“It’s nice to see you too, Pete,” she continued, in a gentler voice. “But that’s why we have weekends. And evenings. And pretty much any time besides Monday mornings.”
“I know, I know,” I said dully. “Sorry.” I really wanted to talk about Vanessa before we ran out of time, but I realized it was only polite to make sure the conversation was mutual. “How’s work?” I said.
“Work?” Ceci eyed me in surprise. “Work’s pretty good, I guess. Actually, we have this awesome new supervisor, she just got back from helping start this free clinic for kids all the way in Kenya—”
“I can’t believe she’s MARRIED!” I blurted, then palmed my face with both hands.
Okay, maybe I could have been more mutual.
“Who’s married? My supervisor?” Ceci said. “I think she’s single, actually, but she’s over fifty, Pete. You aren’t seriously … wait.” Her voice went hard. “You mean Dr. Kistna, don’t you? Could you at least save the official mourning until after that poor woman gets to redo her wedding?”
“Not her!” I snapped, giving her a glare I hoped was suitably brooding. “Vanessa!”
“Who? I can’t keep up with you.”
“Vanessa is this gorgeous girl we were following around—”
“What? Pete! You were stalking again?”
“That was not stalking and Vanessa was paying us.”
“Okay, that’s just creepy.”
“Would you just listen to me?” I said. In halting sentences, steeped in pain, I told the tragic story of Vanessa so far.
Well, as far as Ceci let me get. I admit, I could have lingered less over each separate incidence of eye contact.
“Oh my gosh, Pete!” she interrupted. “I don’t want to hear every last detail of your stupid infatuation with another married woman.”
“Dr. Kistna isn’t married yet!” (I always feel gauche calling her Jivanta with Ceci.) “And I didn’t know Vanessa was married!”
“You couldn’t check her ring finger? And Mark didn’t get one ‘vibe’ about her freaking husband?”
“He did get a vibe,” I said, judiciously tabling the ring question. “But she was shielding, it felt more like a secret than a husband.”
“Maybe it’s a secret from her husband,” Ceci snapped. “Like, oh, I don’t know, an affair? Since the woman flirts so bad you can’t even tell she’s married?”
I winced. Maybe Kelsey the milkman was offering more than just milk, and Vanessa really was worse than a tease. And if so, the sidebar here was that Ceci had figured out the ‘secret’ in ten seconds flat. On the other hand…
“You didn’t meet her husband, Ceci,” I said. “He’s all big and super jealous.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“He totally doesn’t get her! Right in front of her face, in front of us strangers, he ordered pasteurized milk!”
There was an awkward silence.
I tried to explain, but Ceci cut me off. “What is it with men?” she said. “How can you get so worked up over some woman you don’t even know? Just because she’s hot.”
“What do you mean just?” I said. “You can’t say someone’s just hot. There is nothing like it in the world!”
“Yes, it,” Ceci snapped. “You said ‘it’, not her. The way she makes you feel. ‘It’ may as well be a drug.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, though the analogy gave me a creepy flashback to Mark’s story with Akina. (Did I mention that already? Right, it’s free, I’ll give you the link at the end.) “When you score eye contact and a smile, that’s not a drug. It’s like … total affirmation. Like for once you know that everything about you is amazing.”
Ceci frowned. In a calmer voice, she said, “That’s what parents are for.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Pete! Your parents are great!”
“Sure, but they don’t make my brain melt! Why, is that how you feel about your stepdad?”
She slapped my shoulder, a bit too hard. By now we’d gotten down to the fast country highway, and the move made the car lurch.
“Well, come on,” I said. “Parents don’t count, they’re parents, they’re contractually obligated to love you. But you get some hot girl, she chooses you. She could have chosen anyone else, out of gazillions of guys, but she chose you. That’s the Holy Grail, Ceci.”
“Why is it all about you?” Ceci said. “You sound like we’re just affirmation vending machines. Except only if we happen to be hot.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to! You think you’re so much ‘deeper’ because you want more than sex, but great, so you crave affirmation? Especially when, like, ninety-eight percent of women are automatically disqualified?”
“That sounds a little high—”
Ceci groaned.
“What? It does. I wouldn’t ‘disqualify’ more than … ninety percent? Eighty-five? I mean, we are talking the under-thirty cohort—”
“Pete! Why don’t you ever think about making her happy?”
I snorted.
She whipped me such an angry look that we nearly veered into the oncoming lane. “Oh my gosh, you really do think we’re vending machines!”
“Of course not!” I snapped. “You read me totally wrong.”
“Then what’s so funny?”
“Me making anyone happy.”
Now she looked stunned.
“Would you just watch the road?” I said. “I don’t mean I’m a big loser, I just mean…” I scrunched my forehead, trying to work it out. I hadn’t ever really thought about this. “She’s got to already be happy. She can’t need me, that’s just weird.”
“But you get to need her?”
“That’s different.”
“Oh gosh.”
“Listen, fine, I wouldn’t exactly say need—”
“You can’t have it both ways, Pete. She can’t make you worth loving, or you weren’t worth loving to begin with. Either you’re already intrinsically awesome, and any woman is lucky to find you, or else you’re a loser trying to trick some hot girl into letting you drain her awesome. Like a vampire.”
“I thought girls all were into vampires now. They brood.”
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t think I’m a vampire just because I’m holding out for a woman who’s way more awesome than I’d ever deserve. Of course she’s got to be a super amazing goddess. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
To my shock and dismay, Ceci’s face contracted with sadness. Her eyes glistened, and she bit her lip.
“Whoa,” I said. “What’s up?” I reached out to rub her shoulder.
She flinched away. “Don’t, Pete,” she said, her voice low and hard. “And don’t talk to me about your crushes anymore.”
“What? What’d I say? We’ve always talked, Ceci! You’re my rock! I don’t know what I’d do without—”
“No more, Pete,” Ceci said. She pulled into the lot at Valley Visions, stopped at the door, and looked me right in the eye. “I’m done.”
My stomach flopped with dread. Did she mean, like, done done?
“Hope you enjoyed our hangout,” she said, ice cold. “You talked. I listened. Like always.”
Technically, she hadn’t exactly been mute, but this wasn’t the time. “Ceci, wait. Let’s do coffee. My treat.”
She looked skeptical.
“You talk this time, and I’ll listen,” I said. “I promise. You free tonight?”
“Actually, no,” she said. “Work’s looking crazy for the next week.”
“Fine. Next week. When?”
“I’m already running late,” she grumbled, but
she pulled up her calendar on her phone, and we worked out a time.
Then she drove away.
As I watched her pull into the busy four-lane road, I felt the sudden bleak assault of exhaust, and concrete, and all these drivers doing their own thing without me. They’d never even know I exist. To the rest of the world, I was just one more background NPC, a non-character, a prop in the strip mall scenery.
Well, Ceci knew me. That one little white car in the crowd held an actual friend. I’d never really thought about how much I’d hate to lose her.
I’d have to be careful when we went for coffee. Actually listen. Nothing about Vanessa. Who would have thought she’d get all mad?
She couldn’t ever really be “done” with me. Right?
I turned and dragged open the store’s door. Something fell and crackled on the carpet. Ugh. The stupid ward. I fumbled to fasten the bundle of dried herbs back on the hook over the entrance, reminding myself for the gazillionth time to get a stupid new battery for the stupid drill, so we could move the stupid hook up six inches, so the door wouldn’t knock the stupid ward down every single stupid...
Wow, I really felt terrible.
That never happened with Ceci. She always made me feel better.
Great. Even Ceci might not be there for me anymore. What was going on with me?
For some reason, I suddenly thought of Roger at the funeral.
Right away, he’d sensed I wasn’t happy. But he’d also sensed that I had … how did he put it? … huge spiritual potential.
I brightened. Maybe it was that simple. I just needed to get serious about my spiritual life. Meditate. Eat right. Do more yoga. Okay, any yoga.
For someone who worked full-time in a New Age store, you’d think all this would be a no-brainer.
But maybe I wasn’t the type to go solo. Maybe I needed a team.
And Roger had invited me, hadn’t he? When he’d practically just met me. Maybe I’d finally get some friends who were serious about this stuff too. Maybe I was right on the cusp of a whole new era.
Now I felt pretty awesome. Who needed Vanessa to feel good? Or even Ceci? Not me. That whole conversation might have worked out for the best.
Yeah. Sure. Except.
