by Ren Benton
“Remember — enchilada, not oatmeal!” Camille called over her shoulder as she and Von walked away with arms around each other.
Easy for her to say. Enchiladas had been throwing themselves at her since puberty. She had her pick of fillings, toppings, and heat level.
Ivy had to work to get even her occasional bowl of oatmeal.
She and Jen headed for the exit at an unhurried pace suited to their delayed transportation. Jen reiterated her stance. “Oatmeal is healthy for you.”
“I know, Jen.” But enchiladas were so much more satisfying.
Stepping out into the afternoon sun was disorienting. The time zone differed from the island by only an hour, but her brain wanted back some of the seven hours confined to planes and the airport during the layover in Atlanta.
Roger trotted up with a smile for Ivy and relieved Jen of her suitcase.
Lips thin, his wife pointed out, “You’re late.”
“Your plane was late.”
“And if it had been on time, we’d have been waiting for you almost an hour.”
“And if I’d been on time, I’d have waited an hour for you, so the timing worked out for the best, didn’t it?”
They did not kiss. They did not walk out of the airport with their arms wrapped around each other. There was no funny business in the car. Conversation focused on everything the kids had done for the past two and a half days in their mother’s absence and how difficult it was to keep up with them and housework without any help.
“Try it for five years,” Jen snapped as the car slowed in front of Ivy’s house.
She shoved the door open before the car came to a full stop. “Thanks for the ride, Roger. Love you, Jen. See you soon.”
After a brief vacancy, her home smelled like a stranger’s house. She turned on the AC to stir the stale air. She washed the airplane germs off her face and started a load of laundry and still didn’t find it any easier to breathe. Her dilemma sat on her chest like an anvil.
Jared would be at work. Calling him now would be inconsiderate, but no more so than making him wait for the answer she had promised.
She wasted no time on preamble when he picked up the phone. “I can’t marry you.”
Air surged into her lungs, free and clean. Maybe she would never get a better offer — or any other offer — but she would rather be alone than attach herself to someone who guaranteed a lifetime without passion and called that a virtue.
Ivy called a life of deprivation a sentence.
“We can’t discuss this over the telephone.” Pages flipped in the background, as if he were looking for an opening in his planner to schedule a meeting with her.
“Saying it to your face won’t change my answer.”
The polite thing to do would be to thank him for considering her for the position of his wife, but oddly enough, starting her day with a good fuck didn’t dispose her to being polite.
“Goodbye, Jared.”
Tock
1
Griff concentrated on the curio cabinet in front of him and tried to ignore the beady little eyes of the silent, judgmental mob drilling into his back. Hundreds of figurines amassed on the dining room table faced a single focal point — their former home. Standing in their line of sight made his skin crawl, but the only other position that afforded a good view of the project was occupied by the man who invited him here.
Byron jingled the keys in the pocket of his golf shorts. “Violet — that’s my wife.”
“We’ve met.”
“You have?”
Griff made it his business to know everybody. Seemingly insignificant introductions yielded information and connections that proved useful later too often to dismiss anyone inclined to strike up a conversation with him.
For example, random chitchat at the batting cage resulted in his car’s perpetually smoking engine being referred to Byron’s garage, and now he could drive without fear of bursting into flames. He wasn’t about to snub the man’s wife. “She was working the counter of your shop one day when I came in.”
Byron’s mouth took on a rueful twist. “Did she try to slip you one of our girls’ numbers?”
“No.” She asked if he had a job and a wife. Based on his responses — yes and no, respectively — she tried to arrange a marriage sans phone contact.
“I can tell you’re being polite. You’re a brave man to venture into her lair.”
Griff was no stranger to matchmaking mothers. He had one himself. They meant well, even if they were misguided about his suitability for long-term relationships. “It wasn’t that bad. Besides, I owe you.”
A debt of indescribable magnitude.
He breathed deeply. A week later, random words still triggered replay of conversations with the Duchess. His eye remained uncharacteristically attracted to splashes of bright red. The little crescent marks where she’d dug her fingernails into his thigh hadn’t quite faded to nothing, a potent reminder she’d been more than a fantasy.
Even after these acute symptoms passed, her memory would live on, a permanent addition to his pattern of becoming infatuated with women he couldn’t have.
His eagerness to be used when she came to collect on his debt left him feeling his balance hadn’t been paid in full. It figured he’d meet a woman he liked enough to consider setting up a payment plan, and she wrote him off as a bad debt within twenty-four hours.
“Unless your checks bounce, you don’t owe me anything. Anyhow, Vi collects these” — Byron surveyed the army on the table in search of a diplomatic alternative for the first word that came to mind — “figurines.”
Griff’s mother called them tchotchkes, which his father translated as Yiddish for useless crap.
“One of the shelves cracked while we were in here eating dinner. Sounded like lake ice giving out under your feet.”
Griff knew the sound. In his youth, he had overestimated the ability of both ice and the tempered glass surface of his mother’s favorite coffee table to withstand his weight. The ice recovered more quickly than he did, but the table didn’t survive.
Inside the cabinet, the uppermost sheet of tempered glass sagged along a fracture running front to back. If the Millers hadn’t removed the weight resting on the shelf before it cracked all the way through or folded enough to slip off the support pins, it would have crashed into the similarly overloaded shelf below, which wouldn’t have survived the impact. Likewise for the two shelves below that. The mirrored back and glass front also had grim odds of withstanding such a collapse.
The beady-eyed horde had clearly outgrown its headquarters and required a satellite office.
Byron knew how to exploit connections, too. Griff’s engine problems had been caused by sawdust. That diagnosis led to a long conversation about his woodworking hobby. Byron suggested covering the car with a tarp if he was going to use his garage as a woodshop — a suggestion his former mechanic had forgone in favor of screwing him every month on cleaning and filter replacement.
When Byron called for a cabinetry consult, Griff had been happy to provide one.
“I can build you another cabinet. The problem with making a twin of this one is the glass.” A curved sheet enclosed the front of the cabinet. “It will cost a fortune to get that custom made.”
“Well, damn.”
They had already discussed that money was an object.
“If you’re not set on a clone, I can give you a couple other options.” Griff pulled a folded sheet of paper and a stub of pencil from the back pocket of his jeans. He could draw on his phone, but there was poetry in using a pencil and paper to plan a woodworking project.
He sketched a front view of the cabinet standing before them.
“Option one, flank it with towers that look like extensions of the existing cabinet.” He added the towers to the sketch. Similar features. Slightly shorter to sit beneath the cove molding wrapped around the top of the original cabinet, slightly shallower to nest behind its curved front legs. Flat on one side s
o the units sat flush together.
“Option two, low and wide, which will give you extra counter space, like a buffet.” He penciled the new option over the towers. Same basic idea, different dimensions.
“Matching finish, matching details, flat glass front. I can make the components look almost like one unit. If you want to rearrange furniture, the two side pieces can be pushed together like so.” He creased the paper down the center, then folded back a flap so the original cabinet was hidden in the crease and the proposed pieces abutted each other.
Couldn’t do that on his phone outside a CAD app.
Byron scanned the pencil scratches. “Both look good to me.”
Don’t make me choose, man. Griff liked the functionality of the server height, but the towers better suited the proportions of the room. He didn’t want responsibility for deciding what Byron and Violet would have to live with in their house.
“Either way, Ivy will be able to get a few more years of gifts in there.”
The names together struck him. “Violet and Ivy?”
“Family tradition. Somebody way back was a gardener.”
There was no naming theme in Griff’s family, though his brother would make a better Basilisk than Daniel. He had the death glare perfected.
He hadn’t met his nephew yet, taking advantage of the new parents’ adjustment period as an excuse to dodge the introduction. If the kid showed evidence of taking after his father, he might have to be renamed Goblin.
“You can make it look like this one?”
“Sure.” The cabinet came out of a factory, where hand tools, rare wood, and custom stain hadn’t complicated the manufacturing process. Antiques were the real challenge to replicate. There was no substitute for years of dirt, oil, moisture, and use. “I’ll have to check samples against it to match the finish, but the build is right up my alley.”
“I can sneak you in to check your samples. I want it to be a surprise.”
Anything that made it easier to avoid awkward matchmaking efforts that were bound to lose him a friend and an honest mechanic suited Griff just fine. “I’m happy to come by when Violet’s out of the house.”
Sneaking around her schedule would be less of a problem than sneaking around his. Nepotism didn’t get him any breaks at the family consulting firm, where deviations from a forty-hour work week tended to encroach upon his personal time instead of expanding it. He’d have to give up sleep to finish this project before the knickknack army recruited new members.
Maybe he could excuse himself from more family functions than usual. The Dunleavy clan might not support the second son’s inexplicable fondness for laboring over a workbench, but they couldn’t protest fulfilling a commitment he’d made like a responsible adult.
The screen door separating the kitchen from the driveway banged, snapping Byron to attention. “She’s back early.”
Griff tucked the sketch and pencil into his pocket to hide the evidence.
A feminine voice called out, “Anybody home?”
Byron’s tension evaporated. “That’s my baby girl. In here, Ives!”
In the kitchen, a plastic lid came off with a pop. “I brought brownies.”
Byron flicked away an imaginary tear. “Three little words every father loves to hear.”
Griff was pretty fond of those words, too. He retrieved his planning materials and his key ring, from which hung a tiny tape measure. “I should take some measurements before your wife gets home.”
“Are we hiding something from Mom?” Soft steps padded across the kitchen floor.
While Byron went to greet his daughter, Griff crouched to measure the distance between the oak floor and the bottom of the curio cabinet.
“Is it a secret? I want to be in on the secret. I’ll give you a brownie if you tell me the secret.”
Her eagerness to partake in the intrigue teased a smile from Griff. She sounded too young for a maternally arranged marriage to a guy creeping up on thirty-five. The only parts of her visible through the forest of table and chair legs were the bare feet below the rolled cuffs of her jeans, only minutely more tan than the white stripe where sandal straps had shielded her skin from momentary sun exposure and in stark contrast to Byron’s dark shins.
“The herd can no longer be contained. Mmf.” When Byron continued, his voice was muffled. “You have to try these, son.”
Griff thought he’d never ask. The smell of chocolate wafted across the room, as if the brownies were fresh out of the oven and still emitting fragrant steam, making his mouth water. He retracted the tape measure and stood.
“Griff here is expanding the corral as a surprise for your mother.”
Violet didn’t have a monopoly on surprises.
Big brown eyes he’d seen suspicious, mocking, laughing, cynical, and smoldering now stared at him with alarm rounding their thick ring of lashes. Lips he knew to be soft parted, but no sound escaped. Her hair today was light brown instead of blood red and she wore jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt instead of a hideous floral dress or nothing at all, but a dye job and a costume change weren’t radical enough precautions to disguise the Duchess.
After the initial shock of recognition, Griff had the urge to pull out a chair, sit down at the table, and say, It’s about time you got here. You won’t believe the week I had. I played hooky Monday and still worked almost sixty hours. My brother found a whole new trunk of prior indiscretions to throw in my face. Oh, and I got another wedding invitation. Want to go to Dubuque the first weekend in August? The theme is Suburban Cowboy. I don’t know if there’s a dress code, but I’m strongly in favor of seeing your luscious ass in some Daisy Dukes.
Instead, he reached across the table, took a brownie from the plastic container clutched in her white-knuckled hands, and waited for her next performance to begin.
Ivy would have been less vocal in her support of blabbing secrets had she known the accessory in perpetrating one of hers was within earshot.
Griff had exhibited good table manners when they’d dined together previously, so he wouldn’t talk with his mouth full if she vaulted over the table and crammed half a dozen brownies into his speaking hole.
That would be easier to explain to her father than having a one-night stand with a man who had just now learned her name.
Her dad, not realizing she needed all the brownies as a silencer, helped himself to another one. “Aren’t you going to ask him if he’s allergic to chocolate, eggs, wheat, and nuts?”
“He’s not.” She couldn’t explain that confident statement without telling a story about their prior interaction with compensatory chocolate-hazelnut cake, so she continued as if her previous utterance hadn’t obviously ended with a period. “A child. He can take responsibility for his own dietary restrictions.”
Not that adulthood ordinarily stopped her from making sure her food wouldn’t send someone to the emergency room, but just this once, it would be super if her tedious consistency could be overlooked.
“I’d risk it.” Griff’s dimple put in an appearance. “I like to live dangerously.”
She could admit when she’d been wrong. A sense of humor was not an attractive quality in a man. In fact, under these circumstances, she could imagine no trait less desirable.
“He’s not kidding.” Byron waggled his foot to call attention to a scar. “When I showed him my ankle surgery, he one-upped me with a leg that’s been stitched up more than a quilt.”
Her eyes flicked downward, though she couldn’t see through the table to examine Griff’s injuries. She hadn’t asked about the scars on his shoulder and finger and hadn’t inspected the rest of him for damage. Sharing stories was for lovers who had time for conversation, and she hadn’t wanted to waste one of her limited minutes getting to know him as a person who existed for anything other than her pleasure.
Belated concern softened her voice. “What happened to you?”
He swallowed his brownie. “Nothing worth that much sympathy. In my misspent youth, I had
delusions of daredevilry out of proportion to my coordination, that’s all.”
He had a whole past she knew nothing about. At some point, he’d been Blake’s age, climbing trees and building rickety ramps to jump with his bike, being rushed to the emergency room by frantic parents.
For a day on the island, she became the kind of person who didn’t care about someone’s life if it didn’t benefit her. That wasn’t the kind of change she wanted to make permanent.
So it was for the best she’d settled right back into her rut upon arriving home.
Her vacation had peeled away the scab hiding her festering dissatisfaction, but she couldn’t simply stop meeting expectations and do whatever she wanted with complete disregard for the demands of others.
She wasn’t the only consultant at the shop trying to move up to management. Her boss had a short memory. If the day Ivy decided not to go to work early happened to coincide with one of Sabrina’s sporadic appearances, she’d be hearing Sabrina was here when you weren’t when she got pulled into the office to explain why she hadn’t gotten the promotion, and five years of being there when Sabrina hadn’t shown up wouldn’t matter.
Holly left the kids with her Thursday night. They had survived a weekend with their mother, but they hadn’t eaten a vegetable in a week, and Blake had a note from his history teacher dated Monday that a project was overdue and expected to be turned in no later than Friday — twelve hours after Ivy first saw the note. They had to run to the store to buy posterboard and stay up late putting the presentation together, and she had to call Mr. Felix the next morning and advise him a lot of time and stress could have been avoided if he had allowed her nephew to submit the report that had been ready on Monday and that a student’s hard work shouldn’t be deemed worthless if it wasn’t pasted to a piece of cardboard.
The freedom to shirk her responsibilities might be exhilarating, but there would be far-reaching consequences of indulging her selfishness.
Next time doing something out of character seemed like a good idea, she’d remember this consequence reaching into her parents’ dining room and continue plodding along as she always had, save for that one lapse — sensibly, responsibly, inoffensively.
