Hearts in Motion

by Edie Ramer

  Some things a woman always knew.

  “The first time I saw you,” he said, “you know what I thought?”

  “No.”

  “That you were trouble.” He nodded then opened the door and headed outside. But even after the door closed behind him, she felt his stare on her face and body, as if it were burned into her skin. As if he’d branded her with his gaze just like Epic had branded Cara with her pheromones.

  Abby wrapped her arms around herself, a frisson whispering through her.

  Men. It was too bad she couldn’t put them in a little box and just take them out when she needed them.

  Which wouldn’t be that often.

  She mentally locked the box and imagined herself kicking it, the box going up, up, up in the sky, disappearing into the sun.

  Only then did she turn back to Cara and to her pets. Her reality. And though it would be great to have no money worries, and a lot of women her age already had a husband, kids, and a 401K account, she felt full inside. In this moment, she was alive and happy, and she had a little girl to take to a dog park for the first time in her life.

  And when they were finished with the park, then she would come home and worry about what came next.

  ***

  Will that man be at the dog park? Quigley asked. The one who came to the house the last time?

  Minnie hissed at Quigley’s reminder of Mom’s last mistake. If he comes, I’ll scratch him again.

  Lion said if he sees that man, he’ll bite him. A humming sound came from Quigley’s throat, and he jumped up to the top of the cat-perch ladder. I would like that. Mom should be more careful who she mates with. He was a bad man.

  Humans are like dogs, Minnie advised him. Epic was napping, and she thought it looked like a good idea. They’re too trusting.

  Is Cara’s dad good? Quigley asked.

  Minnie took a quick lick of her front paw. Next would be her back paw. I don’t know yet. Did you smell him?

  The air stank with his mating smell. Did you smell her, too?

  How could I miss it? The mating scent is stronger than tuna.

  What are we going to do?

  She lay down, not answering. She didn’t want to go through another of Abby’s romances again. She’d rather go to the bad place, the one called “the vet,” with the ladies who poked her with needles.

  Maybe this time will be better, Quigley said. Maybe he’ll be good for her. And good for us, too. Maybe he’ll help save us.

  She gave him a long look. He was younger but old enough to know better. We’ll do just fine without him, the way we’ve always done. Mom will save us, and if she doesn’t...

  I know, Quigley said, we’ll have to do it ourselves. And then he braced himself and hissed, the way he stood making Minnie think of a bird with its chest puffed out to attract the females, pretending to be big, strong, and wise.

  Human males did the same thing. And human females did it, too, only in different ways.

  The way Mom had this morning.

  Minnie hunched down. She had to trust in Mom...but maybe there was a way they could help her make everything go right.

  She would just have to watch out for the right opportunity.

  When it came, she would pounce on it.

  6

  Holden entered Ryan’s office, and Ryan’s eyebrows rose with surprise. He was sitting back, a phone to his ear. He held up two fingers, which Holden took to mean he’d be off in two minutes.

  Instead of sitting, Holden headed to the window and peered out at the view of the employee parking lot. Usually he drove in, parked in his reserved spot, and didn’t give the rest of the lot another thought. But here he could glance out and see the two empty rows in the back that used to be filled.

  In the view from his office, he could see the building that used to hum with workers and noise ten years ago. But he couldn’t actually see the emptiness. He couldn’t actually hear the silence in it.

  It helped him ignore the problem. But today he couldn’t ignore anything. He felt like the prince and the pea, and the pea was the size of a parking lot and damned uncomfortable, gnawing at his belly.

  “What’s up?” Ryan asked.

  Holden turned. “I saw your text about the Houston account.”

  “They’re downsizing. Judy has a couple new leads.”

  He headed to Ryan’s desk. “If this keeps up, we’ll have to downsize. So far, we haven’t laid off or fired anyone. We’ve just not rehired when people retire or quit. It’s not good. A company is either growing or dying. And we’re dying.”

  “Hey, I’ve been saying that for years.”

  “Funny, I haven’t heard you say anything.”

  Ryan’s face reddened. “Maybe I haven’t said it, but I’ve been thinking it. It’s the reason I went to Miami instead of Italy last January. And I’m more careful with my investments. If the business goes under, I should be good.”

  Hot anger surged through Holden. “What about our workers?”

  “Most of them are older.” Ryan got up and stepped to the window then turned to face him.

  Like two gunslingers standing off in a saloon, Holden thought.

  “If we go under,” Ryan continued, “they’ll be okay.”

  “But what about the city?” Holden gestured toward the heart of the city. “Eagleton Furniture is a mainstay of the community. We still have 435 workers. They buy groceries here, go to schools, restaurants, clinics, the movies. They shop here. What we decide to do, even the smallest decisions, have a large ripple effect on Eagleton’s economy.”

  Ryan shoved his hands in his pockets. “Anything we do, the Asian factories can copy and do cheaper a month later. We still have the high-end stores buying our stuff, but even there...” He shook his head. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

  Holden didn’t reply right away, the silence stretching between them as a truck drove down the parking lot, its motor rumbling, and a hawk flew by Ryan’s window.

  “We need to stop being complacent,” Holden said. “We need to stop letting ourselves off the hook.”

  Ryan took his hands out of his pockets. “That’s easy for you to say. It’s not as easy to do.”

  “Maybe it’s not supposed to be easy. Maybe life isn’t supposed to be easy. I don’t think it was easy for our great-grandfather to start the business, either.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Holden shook his head. “We’re stale. We need to do something.”

  Ryan braced his legs. “No matter what you think of me, our reps aren’t slackers. We’re aware that we’re losing customers to cheaper foreign competitors. We’re doing everything we can to find new markets.”

  The anger leaked out of Holden. “You can’t fix it until I fix it. We’ve gotten stale. We need to revitalize the company. Shake things up.”

  Ryan’s eyebrows rose again...then kept on rising. “What the hell did you do with my brother?” He grinned. “Funny, I thought having a child killed brain cells, but it’s fired up yours.”

  “Something has,” Holden said, and an image opened in his mind of Abby laughing. Since he’d seen her on Monday, his brain wasn’t his only organ that had fired up.

  This was the fourth day this week he’d seen her. When he’d dropped off Cara this morning, he’d tried to stop himself from looking forward to Abby’s grin and the way she seemed to laugh at him and, at the same time, laugh with him. As if they shared a secret.

  But besides Cara’s parentage, his only secret was the way his body reacted around her.

  Ryan headed to his desk, diverting his thoughts. “Are you going to call a meeting?”

  “Not yet.” He spoke slowly. In his mind, he could feel...something. His hand tingled, the way it did sometimes when he was alone at night, or even in his office, and he needed to paint. “Let’s both of us think about it.”

  He took long strides to the door. “Call if you have any ideas,” he said and headed across the hall to his office. After letting
Sherry know he didn’t want to be interrupted, he brought out his paints. Normally he didn’t do this here, but once in a while, the need became irresistible. The way he imagined a junkie needed a hit or Sherry, a self-proclaimed chocoholic, needed her top drawer filled with chocolate.

  Methodically, he prepared for the painting. He cleared his desk and set down this morning’s newspaper to protect his desk. He got out his paints and a canvas. He went into his private bathroom for water.

  He did all this in a trancelike state, his conscious thoughts at a minimum. He finally sat down at his desk and stared at the blank canvas for a long moment.

  Then his hand twitched, and he chose a cerulean blue. Squirted it on the plastic plate he used as a palette. Then he added some white. As he dipped in his brush, mixing the colors, he didn’t know what he was going to paint....

  He’d never told anyone, not Juliana, and certainly not Portia, but at times like this it felt as if his subconscious ruled his actions.

  Taking a deep breath, he put brush to canvas, and his brush started to fly.

  ***

  He set down his brush, looked at the image of a cat with red-gold hair and green eyes. The colorful cat sat on a purple velvet chair with wheels, like a cross between a fairy-tale carriage and a chair.

  Like all his pictures, it appeared to be suspended in ether, giving it a fantastical appearance. This time, the background was pale blue, reminding him of the summer sky.

  It was trying to tell him something. He connected the coloring of the cat to Abby but had no idea what it meant.

  It wasn’t a painting of her naked. That would have needed no interpretation.

  Now he had that image in his brain, and he went to his bathroom to clean his brushes and put away his supplies and put the painting on top of a bookcase shelf to dry.

  Only then did the problems of his business become paramount in his mind again. He called Sherry and told her he was taking off early, something he rarely did because it set a bad example for his workers. He had no pressing appointments, and he needed fresh air. Sometimes his best ideas came when he was away from the source of his problems. In his case, the business.

  Instead, he’d be going straight into another problem: his attraction to Abby.

  He stood, and his heart beat harder, and his blood flowed faster, and he felt more alive than he had for years. His whole life, he’d done the right thing, the responsible thing. Even marrying Juliana had seemed responsible on paper. Her family was wealthier than his; she knew the best people; she was beautiful, well-traveled, and healthy.

  What he hadn’t known was that she was like a beautiful rose on the verge of rotting. But now he knew a woman who laughed a lot, who sparkled like the sunlight on the lake and glowed like the moon, was not a woman who would stay with a man like him.

  Twenty minutes later, he reached Abby’s house, and her sister told him that Abby and Cara weren’t there.

  7

  The music was loud, but Minnie still heard the buzzing of bees, the brush of wind outside, and the car engine coming down the driveway.

  On a series of boxes halfway up to the high barn ceiling, she crouched, recognizing the low growl of the engine. The sound was smooth, though not as smooth—or as wonderful—as her purr.

  The car stopped, and the music changed to another song with a faster beat. Craning her head toward the driveway, she filtered out the music and listened hard, catching the click of the car door opening. She sniffed deeply, and through the smells of trees, leaves, sky, sun, people, and wood, she scented him.

  She became still. Abby had brought her here so she could try out the new furniture. Sam’s cats were too wild and unreliable to test the furniture. And too messy. Quigley wasn’t much better. If he smelled a squirrel or a rabbit, or even a bird, he might chase after it—and then get scared to be alone in the grass. So Mom had picked her to do it.

  A wise choice, though if Minnie smelled a mouse, it would be her duty to go after it.

  So far that hadn’t happened.

  The only animal she smelled that didn’t belong here was a just a man.

  She remained in the crouched position, all her senses aware, storing everything the humans said or did in her mind to share later with Quigley and Lion.

  If she could trust the humans to do the right thing, she would happily nap in the sun instead of spying on them. But it was a fact that she was a smart cat. A very smart cat. Smarter than humans. Humans seemed to think because they were bigger they were wiser.

  But if they were so smart, why was the world in such a mess?

  Yet some of them were good people. Like Mom and Grace and Sam. And Holden was Cara’s father and Daisy’s nephew, so Minnie held out hope for him.

  And then there was the way he smelled when he was around Mom.

  And the way she smelled back.

  Things were changing in their house. And they could change for the worse or they could change for the better. Anything that happened between Mom and Holden today might be important.

  ***

  The double barn doors were open with music pouring out, some girl singing that hips don’t lie, and Holden had to agree with the singer. There was a black pickup truck and a red SUV in the driveway. He glanced in the SUV and saw the child’s car seat in the back. A small knot of tension inside him unknotted.

  Of course Abby had a child’s seat. When Abby’s sister had told him she’d taken Cara to “the barn,” he’d worried. He should have known better. He’d already concluded she wouldn’t do anything that would hurt Cara.

  He was the first to admit that he didn’t trust easily; no one with his background would trust easily.

  The barn doors were opened, and he entered the brightly lit place that he supposed had once held hay or other products. Maybe animals or tractors and other farm machines. Right now it was filled with odd-sized and -shaped furniture. To his right, he saw Abby talking to a woman who towered over her. Then his eyes were drawn to Cara, sitting on one of the cat perches, her little face bright with laughter.

  He stopped. Emotion filled him, clogging his throat, a reaction to her happy face. It didn’t matter if she was his or not; every child deserved to be happy.

  The thought crept into his mind that soon—in just nine days—she would be taken away from this. She would be sent back to the loveless place where she was treated as a duty. A place that wasn’t a home but a void that would suck the happiness right out of her soul.

  “Holden?” Abby called, her voice raised to be heard above the music.

  He turned to her, but overcome by the unjustness, he couldn’t speak for a moment. He knew a little of what Cara was going through. When he was her age, at least he’d had his brother with him. Though it wasn’t the same as having loving parents, it was something.

  The tall woman held up a remote, her thumb moved, and the music shut off.

  “What are you doing here?” Abby asked.

  “I took off work early and stopped by your house. Your sister said you were here.”

  “You wanted to see Cara?” She gave him a radiant smile then turned to Cara. “Did you hear that, Cara? Your daddy came here to see you.”

  He shifted his gaze to Cara. Her smile was gone, her face solemn, her eyes searching his face, as if checking to see if what Abby said was true.

  There was no way he could tell them he didn’t know why he’d come here. That he—who always did something with a purpose—had just...driven here.

  But maybe his coming here had been with a purpose. A purpose driven by his unconscious mind.

  Because of the painting.

  Because, at the most basic level, he wanted to see Abby.

  “Do you want to tell me about this place?” he asked Cara.

  She blinked and turned to Abby.

  “Tell your daddy.” Abby smiled her encouragement.

  Her words started a constriction in his chest, as if his heart had squeezed into the shape of a clay ball. He remembered all the times his par
ents would breeze into his grandparents’ house, staying just long enough to get more money before they left. Hardly paying any attention to him or Ryan.

  It was true that people married their parents—that’s what he’d done with Juliana.

  Not the second time around. When he and Portia decided to have children, he had no doubts that she would read all the books, buy the right foods and products, do the correct things. She would do everything by the book, as would he. They wouldn’t be spontaneous joy givers like Abby, but they would be responsible parents.

  Cara started to push off the perch, and he took quick steps forward to be there in case she slid onto the hard ground. She landed with a stumble then caught herself.

  “Good girl,” he said.

  Though her lips didn’t curve into a smile, she held her hand out to him. He took it, and the constriction in his chest melted, and it felt like his closed clay ball of a heart opened a crack.

  “This is cat furniture.” She made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the many pieces, her wide eyes showing her amazement of this place of wonders.

  Glancing around, he gave the feline furniture his attention. There were at least a couple dozen designs. Against the wall was something that looked like a puzzle of boxes, each one a different color. It looked fun, and he suspected Abby had designed it.

  “Look up there,” Cara said, pointing at the high barn ceiling.

  He gazed up. Attached to ropes from the rafters, a series of boxes were suspended about four feet above his head. Some sort of a walkway for cats. A familiar face with Siamese blue eyes peered down at him. Minnie. As if she was spying on him.

  Shaking his head, he turned his gaze to the furniture in front of him. The cat probably belonged to Abby’s partner, because who would use a cat as a spy?

  “Amazing.” He peered more closely at a lopsided, ladder-like design with perches that was similar to the one in his aunt’s condo. This one was in cherry, one of the most durable woods used for furniture. One of his favorites, and it wasn’t a cheap wood, either.