Cat in a Topaz Tango

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Would you want one who was?” Temple asked.

  Rafi was regarding his daughter with satisfaction, even a bit of pride. “Nope.”

  She was wearing orange Capris and a yellow-and-green sixties-print smock top with fluorescent poison-green flip-flops and carried a lavender canvas backpack for a purse. The girl’s Dutch bob of highlighted blond over brunet looked hip but wholesome for a soon-to-be high school freshman nowadays. Temple felt a pang that Mariah could accessorize Teen Fashion Queen without even trying, when Zoe Chloe had to really work her look.

  “Mom’s gonna freak,” she muttered to Rafi, “but Mariah looks like she knows what she’s doing.”

  “Terrifying,” he muttered back. “Let’s find out what that is before Momcat gets here.”

  Mariah turned to greet them with no guilt, like they were here to join a fun party.

  “How’d you guys hear about this?” she asked. “Did the Dance Partee people hire you as security because of the Teen Queen house gig?” she asked Rafi. “And you’re a little old to compete,” she told Temple-Zoe. “But you look cool, as always.”

  “Your mom’s worried about you,” Zoe said with a twinge of Temple disapproval.

  Big sigh. “I sent her a text message. She’s been too bummed to even notice I’m gone. I hadda do this! Ekaterina heard she could try out and she needs something to keep her in this country, or she’ll just die! I mean, maybe literally. Could be the publicity will help. And she’s just made the finals! Is this a great country or what?”

  Mariah was hopping up and down with excitement.

  Rafi put a big hand on her hyperactive shoulder. “Your mom’s been worried sick about you, and you’re right, she’s already sick. How could you do this to her? It was really stupid and selfish.”

  Mariah’s glee wilted in the face of adult male disapproval. Her eyelashes batted back regret. She’d thought Rafi had been cool. “Oh, Mom’ll be fine. She always is. But EK is a Chechnya refugee and her family’s only chance. I had to help her.”

  “How?” Temple asked.

  “I know how these audition things work. I’m . . . I’m her manager.”

  “Does EK’s family know where she is?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “‘Not exactly’?” Rafi repeated.

  Temple eyed him. He’d wanted Molina to hold back because she was “too police” and now he was acting like a truant officer.

  “No. I guess.” Mariah was fidgeting like a preteen. Temple had to give Catholic schools credit for delaying adolescent rebellion and fine-tuning guilt. “We wanted to wait on telling anybody until we knew EK was going to be on the show.’”

  “The show?” Temple took over, figuring it was time for Zoe Chloe to display some camaraderie for The Young and the Restless. “What a cool deal! What show is this? Sumthin’ I can groove at?”

  “My mother got you out of the closet again,” Mariah accused. “You’re both shills for my mother. Please! I need to help Ekaterina. She wouldn’t have made it without me. I did her clothes, her makeup. She can dance but she doesn’t know a thing about being with it.”

  The blind leading the blind, Temple thought.

  “Where is your . . . client?” Rafi asked gravely.

  “Well, my allowance would only pay for bus fares,” Mariah said. ‘So we’re sorta camping out. There was a huge line waiting outside the ballroom anyway, and everyone came early and was sleeping until they opened this morning and let us sign up.”

  She glanced over his shoulder. “Uh-oh. Mombot heading straight for us. I shoulda known she’d be here too.”

  Temple glanced back. Molina was grimly advancing on them.

  Louie chose that moment to jump down and rub encouragingly back and forth on Mariah’s bare calves.

  Rafi took Mariah by the shoulders and turned her to welcome, and face, her mother. Still, she had a wall of defensive male in black denim behind her.

  “Mariah!” Molina bent to take custody of her daughter’s shoulders. “What possessed you to pull this kind of stunt? We were about ready to put out an Amber Alert for you.”

  “You can’t! I’m not a kid! I’m thirteen.”

  “You sure are a kid. Amber Alerts can go out on kids up to eighteen.”

  “No! They’re old.”

  “What was so important you had to scare all of us so much? Me, Morrie, Mrs. Alverez across the street?”

  “I needed to help somebody.”

  “Help somebody? Why would you be so foolish to listen to anybody but me and the nuns at school? You’re not in a position to help anybody.”

  “Yes, I am! And she won! Just a couple hours ago. I’m sorry. Really I am. But EK needed a chance.”

  Molina straightened up, her knees visibly shaky. “What’s this about?” she demanded. “Who, or what, is this EK?”

  She asked Rafi, Temple noticed, as if he was to blame just for having gotten to Mariah first. As if she’d given up on asking Mariah anything.

  Mariah’s mouth froze in mid-answer, and shut as stubbornly as her mother’s.

  “I don’t know,” Rafi admitted.

  “Mariah was just going to show us.”

  Molina turned to Mariah. “Show me,” she ordered.

  Subdued, Mariah turned away and led them around the corner to the elevators.

  The four joined the people waiting for the cars. Most of them stared at Louie, still playing thread-the-needle with Mariah’s calves. She looked down at him and stifled a nervous giggle.

  Mama was not happy.

  Temple supposed they looked like a normal family to the clustered strangers: mama, papa, kid, and oh-you-kid, one of those awful Goth girl teen delinquents. That would be her. Like any normal family, none of them said anything, except for Louie, who growled occasionally when some stranger bent to pet him. Temple scooped him up and pushed him into the tote bag.

  When they finally got an elevator, Mariah only pressed the next floor up. Ballroom level.

  “How’d she get here?” Molina asked Rafi.

  “Bus.”

  “And the fare?”

  “Allowance.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Not a good idea. Grounding would be better.”

  “Step two. No allowance will be step one.”

  Mariah rolled her eyes at Temple.

  They were almost the same height, Mariah a little taller. The two adults repeated the similarity at a foot higher: Molina almost six feet in low-heeled moccasins; Rafi a little more than six feet. Temple/Zoe felt like a firstborn daughter. Ick!

  She hiked the tote bag again bearing the remarkably docile Midnight Louie. He must have realized he was failing to follow the Feline Rule of Domination.

  Louie used the opportunity to tangle a forepaw in her hot and itchy black wig.

  She was glad this masquerade would soon be over.

  Leaving Laughlin

  Twenty minutes later they were all standing in front of a long table with an adamantly bored middle-aged grump behind it.

  “But I’m assigned to dance with the cute one of the Los Hermanos brothers,” the lanky thirteen-year-old girl known as EK protested, tears in her eyes and voice. “I won.”

  “I need the signature of a parent or guardian,” the guy said. “You’re a minor.”

  “Grandmother Dzhabrailova is in Las Vegas.”

  “We’re signing up the winning girls here and now for tomorrow night’s show. Sorry, kid. The cast has gotta be locked in before we shut down the operation and we gotta leave this ballroom in an hour.”

  Hotel staff were already slamming folding chairs shut and stacking them on dollies. A couple guys had their eyes on the last folding table left standing. This one.

  “You can’t produce a guardian now, I’ll sign up the runner-up.” He nodded at a blond girl wearing an expensive highlighted hair-cut and a bored look that failed to cover hope so intense it seemed to sizzle off her.

  Ekaterina’s dark brown hair was pulled back in a simple ponyta
il in a dollar store band. She was a thin, gangly girl, doe-eyed and desperate.

  “Mom,” Mariah pleaded.

  “Mom” stood resolute. “I’m not a relative. I can’t sign for her. Besides, I don’t know what this is about, who she is, who’s responsible for her—”

  The blond girl pushed forward into EK. “Can we hurry up? My dad’s standing by the door. He can sign right now.”

  “But I won!” EK wailed.

  The blonde couldn’t quite disguise a smirk as a sympathetic smile.

  “I’ll sign.”

  Temple and Molina, and even Midnight Louie, stared at Rafi Nadir after he spoke.

  The man behind the desk frowned. “You’re not a relative—”

  “Temporary guardian.”

  “You can’t do this,” Molina whispered impatiently.

  “The girl’s grandmother will okay it.” Rafi was already pulling the form on bright yellow paper forward and bending over it, ballpoint pen in hand. Mariah grabbed EK’s hand and swung it up and down in childish, energetic joy.

  “I’ll need employment info as well as personal,” the guy was saying, still frowning. “If the grandmother takes exception, it’s your responsibility.” He looked at the sheet Rafi spun to show him the filled out sections. “Oh. Assistant security chief at the Oasis Hotel. I guess that makes you a ‘responsible adult.’”

  Molina snorted.

  “And you’re with the exact right hotel, so that’s even better. Be at the Oasis in Vegas at 8:00 A.M. tomorrow,” he instructed EK, handing her a sheaf of papers.

  The infuriated blond girl was about to knock hard into EK’s back as she turned away to leave, but Temple jerked the girl’s arm and pulled her out of contact.

  “Bitch,” the girl mouthed, mistaking Temple as Zoe for a peer.

  Temple lifted Louie’s big black paw and waved goodbye while he added a parting hiss, perhaps resenting his paw being appropriated, but more likely responding to one catty word with another, in actual feline.

  They walked away as the sign-up table was turned sideways, folded, and toted away.

  EK and Mariah brought up the rear, huddling and giggling like ten-year-olds. Temple had nothing to do but lug Louie and trail the wordless Molina and Rafi to the hotel entrance. Before they left the lobby, Rafi stopped and turned to the girls.

  “You two have been sitting in line overnight?”

  They nodded. “Everybody did,” Mariah said.

  “What’d you eat?”

  She shrugged. “There are snack dispensers on all the hotel floors. We didn’t have a lot of change after bus money, but got a couple candy bars.”

  Molina sighed heavily.

  “EK needed energy for dancing,” Mariah said, justifying necessity.

  “We want to get something to eat before we leave, or en route?” Rafi asked Molina.

  “‘We’ want to get the . . . heck back to Vegas and get these children settled at their respective homes.”

  “EK’s grandma doesn’t have a car,” Mariah said, “and EK has to be at the Oasis by eight tomorrow morning. She’ll have roommates there but can stay overnight with me.”

  “Mariah.” Molina’s voice was low, logical, and furious. “You ran away from home without leaving word on where you were going and why. You are grounded. You are not entertaining partners in crime overnight.”

  “But EK has to be—”

  “I’m sorry, but EK has to be no such thing. She has to answer to her poor worried grandmother.”

  “My grandmother knows what I am doing,” EK answered, panic rising in her voice. “And I have won—”

  “This is a stupid dance contest. That permission this . . . stupid man you don’t even know signed is worthless. You can’t compete. You two are children, and acted like very irresponsible children, and you’ll be treated like children. And that includes not getting what you wanted, or expected. Or even won.”

  The silence was, well, Temple thought, impressive.

  Then EK’s thin shoulders started shaking with swallowed sobs.

  Molina rolled her eyes and looked around the lobby at the spreading silence as people nearby stopped to watch them. Mariah comforted her friend but still managed to glare at her mother.

  “You’re such a . . . policeman,” Mariah accused.

  “Quite a compliment,” Rafi said to Molina with a quiet smile.

  To the two girls and the gathering crowd he added, “Let’s adjourn to a roadside restaurant down the highway. You girls must be starving. And your mother, Mariah, has been seriously ill while you were busing on down the road without permission or notice. We could all use some peace and quiet and food.”

  He turned the two girls to the door and guided them out, leaving Temple to deal with Molina. Who was shaking ever so slightly.

  “The dude is right, dammit,” Zoe Chloe said cheerily. “I hate it when they do that. Men, I mean. We can dis ’em all good on the way back to Vegas, and he’ll have to hear every word.”

  “Can we dis magicians?” Molina’s voice was still shaky.

  “No,” Zoe said seriously. “Never did, never will.” Temple met Molina’s ice-blue eyes. “Us undercover girls are loyal.”

  Molina bit her bloodless-looking lip. She had been sick.

  “Good for you,” she said brusquely, surprising the heck out of both of Temple’s current personas. “Let’s eat.”

  “Jeez,” Zoe Chloe confided to Louie’s left ear, which twitched either from her soft caress or her breath. “Nobody’s acting in character on this cheesy road trip but us.”

  Rafi was just slamming the Tahoe’s front door shut on Molina in the passenger seat when Temple/Zoe and Louie arrived.

  “You girls all sit in back,” he said, lifting the tote bag and Louie off Temple’s shoulder as he hefted her by the elbow into the high step up. She was pretty sure Molina had received the same gallantry. Interesting.

  Rafi to the rescue. How long could that keep up?

  “Okay,” he said, once again behind the wheel. “I spotted a Wendy’s, Denny’s, and steakhouse along the highway. What does everybody want?”

  What a loaded question, Temple thought. She kept her mouth shut as the girls fought for Wendy’s and Denny’s and Molina won with the steakhouse. It was time Molina won one, and Temple knew Louie’s vote would have been for steak. Very rare.

  Molina kept quiet during lunch but EK and Mariah made enough noise for all five of them, leaving Temple and Rafi to play supervising adults. The ravenous girls ordered hamburgers and fries and chattered away, dramatically reliving the highpoints of their adventure. Rafi ordered a big rare steak and devoted himself to hacking it up and eating it. Temple had a Cobb salad while Mama Molina picked at a blander chef’s salad.

  The girls heedlessly revealed all the details of the long evening bus trip and sleeping in the hotel hallway and interacting with the audition attendees and crew that would turn even a careless parent’s hair white. They’d actually been pretty observant and showed some street savvy. Rafi finished his steak and asked EK about her life in Chechnya and as a refugee. That was even more observant and street savvy.

  Molina was so self-absorbed she let Rafi pay for the whole party without a peep.

  Or maybe she wasn’t as absent in mind as she seemed.

  “Okay,” she said as Rafi was laying down the tip in the middle of the messy fast-food table. “She doesn’t deserve it, but Mariah can attend the dance thing with Ekaterina. But not without some kind of chaperone.”

  Or course Mariah’s squeal of joy was followed by an “Oh, Mom, we don’t need a babysitter.” Temple packed the plain hamburger she’d ordered for Louie and the to-go bottled water for his covered water dish in the truck. She was beat, but at least she and Louie would be enjoying all the comforts—and quiet—of home soon.

  North to Las Vegas. Molina leaned against the locked passenger door, as far from Rafi as her body could manage. She had her sunglasses on and was either dozing or fuming.

  M
ariah and Ekaterina’s spirits were rising again. They chattered about the funny people on the bus on the way down (who sounded more creepy than amusing), how Mariah had dug up EK’s performing outfit from the school costume cupboard and a vintage shop, about the boy band members who would partner the junior category girls in the dances, and which Los Hermanos Brothers brother was the coolest, the cutest, the hottest. About what kind of dances and costumes EK would get for the show.

  After fifteen minutes of this, Molina stirred and shoved her black-framed sunglasses up on her hair like a headband. “Wait a minute. Where is the next stage of this dance contest being held?” She’d been too angry earlier to register the glorious, Rafi-related news.

  “At the Dancing With the Celebs show at the Oasis,” Mariah reported. “EK won a spot in the junior division.”

  “And I am not even a freshman,” EK said, giggling.

  “Me, neither,” Mariah said, “but the age range is twelve-to-seventeen. We got that right.”

  They high-fived each other while Molina shuddered slightly. She wasn’t thinking of Rafi, but another man of their mutual acquaintance.

  “Does that mean,” she asked, directing a significant look at Temple, “that EK is appearing in the same dance competition that Matt Devine is in?”

  Temple hit Zoe Chloe’s forehead with the heel of her hand. With all the fuss and worry over Mariah, she’d forgotten that.

  “Ooh, Matt Devine,” Mariah screamed to EK. “He’s gonna take me to the dad-daughter dance next fall. You gotta teach me the waltz or something, EK. He’s to-die-for cute, but, you know, old.”

  The adults in the vehicle, including the host persona of Zoe Chloe Ozone, kept an uneasy silence. Out of the mouths of babes.

  Temple had to wonder how Rafi liked hearing about some other guy escorting Mariah to a father-daughter event.

  Molina must be cringing about that.

  And Temple was not too hot on hearing her fiancé lauded as a teen idol, even though he was, you know, old.

  Like her.

  The Bus Fume