Iced Tea

by Sheila Horgan

  “It will all be done in a few days, Cara.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Do the right thing Cara.”

  “Don’t try to bully or insult me Joe. I’m from a large family. It won’t work. I’ll think about it. That’s the only promise I can make.”

  “Just make sure that when you’re thinking about it, you think about what it will feel like if you decide to talk to people, and everything goes to shit. It’ll be on you Cara. I tried to warn you. You remember that.”

  “But you didn’t actually tell me anything. You said that you’re working on some undercover thing, and that it’s dangerous, and that I need to stay away from the condo, and keep my mouth shut, but you didn’t tell me what you’re working on, or why you’re working on it, and what the outcome is for whatever it is.”

  “I told you what I could. You just have to trust me.”

  “That would be the problem Joe. Nothing you’ve done has inspired trust.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “In the history of man, there has never been one bad cop?”

  “Okay, you’ve decided to be difficult, and maybe I didn’t present this the right way, but I still hope that you’ll keep all this between us. For your own sake.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Cara, take care, and if you need anything, give me a call.”

  “I’ve got your number.”

  Joe got up, took his untouched Pepsi with him, and drove away.”

  I went in to face my mother.

  “So, Love, what did he have to say?”

  “He said that I couldn’t tell anyone what he said.”

  “Well isn’t that convenient?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “’Tis rare that a secret is a good thing, Love. I doubt we are discussing a gift for a child or the plans for a party.”

  “Far from it.”

  “What are you going to do, Love?”

  “I’m going to think about it and make a decision. If I decide that I need input, I’m probably going to call Rory, it’s a police type thing, and Rory might know more. But, I wouldn’t tell anyone that I was talking to Rory, if I decided to talk to Rory, because on the off chance that what Joe told me is true, I don’t want to put Rory in the middle of it.”

  “Love, it seems this young officer has you betwixt and between. A step off in any direction could place you in the water. How small is the island you are standing on?”

  “Small.”

  “I have every confidence in you Love. You will put your mind to this and decide just what is the proper thing to do. If your father and I can be of any assistance at all, please come directly.”

  “I will, Mom. I won’t say anything to Rory, so you don’t have to worry about him.”

  “And what about your sister?”

  “Or Teagan.”

  “I worry for you Love. Keeping secrets is not your strength. It will be hard for you.”

  “I’m ok Mom. Don’t worry. I brought this on myself, I’ll take care of it myself.”

  “That is the kind of thinking that will get you in trouble, Love. You did nothing wrong. You did a favor for a family friend. There was no way you would know that doing a favor for a priest would bring you to such ends.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, what will you do now, Love?”

  “I’m going to go home and let the wisdom of the universe rain down on me.”

  “A little less sarcasm would be appreciated, Love.”

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic. I’ve decided that I do my best in life when I allow the universe to speak to me in ways that it just doesn’t speak to the rest of the world.”

  “Well, then, I’ll hope that you come to a glorious discovery.”

  “Me too Mom.”

  “Off with you then. Would you like to come for dinner?”

  “No, I think I’ll pass. Until I figure all this out, I don’t want to spend too much time around the family. I just don’t want to bring danger to your door.”

  “Don’t be silly Love.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as I figure out what I’m doing Mom.”

  “You’ll be sure to call me before that if I can do anything at all.”

  “I promise.”

  “See that you do.”

  FOUR

  My phone rang as I was walking into the apartment.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi Gorgeous. Are you busy?”

  “Not really. What can I do for you? Where can I do it? And can I do it again thirty minutes later?”

  “Don’t do that, I’m in public, you’ll get me arrested. I was hoping that you would allow me to bring you to dinner tonight. You remember Jovana and her husband. The woman that I’m going to be sharing workspace with. She invited us to dinner. I know it’s really short notice, but can you make it?”

  “Of course. Where and when?”

  “I’ll be home in a little while. We need to leave at about seven-thirty.”

  “Sounds perfect. If you actually get home in a little while, I’ll be able to go with my plan, followed by your plan, followed by my plan again.”

  “You should be a motivational speaker. I guarantee I’ll be home in a little while.”

  “Is this a dress up thing?”

  “No, we’re invited over to their house. It’s casual.”

  “Works for me. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  I started through my closet. In the back, on the left, are the clothes that I know I have, but really don’t wear very often. Most of it is stuff that Teagan bullied me into buying when I really didn’t want to, but couldn’t come up with a reasonable argument not to buy it. Teagan thinks that just because I’m a grownup, I should have at least some grownup clothes. I am of the opinion that I’ve never had the kind of job, or any other reason, to have more than two good dresses, one for funerals and one for rosaries and weddings, and one pair of dress pants with matching blouse and jacket for whatever other thing I might run into. Family weddings always require something special, but I don’t pick those out, and I don’t keep them. If I’m not part of the wedding, I donate to that organization that supplies women in need with something to wear for a job interview. Tells you where my taste runs, I can wear it to a wedding or a normal person can wear it to a job interview. Not very festive. I really need to do something about that.

  For me, in theory, all the wardrobe I need is jeans and workout clothes and every beautiful piece of lingerie I come across in life. Looks like Teagan might have been right, at least a little bit.

  In the very back of my closet, I have a pair of black pants from Banana Republic that I really like, but I have to wear really high heels with them, so I don’t wear them that often. I also have a cream colored cashmere jacket, no buttons or anything, with this really unusual collar that makes my neck look long and graceful, which means I will be wearing my diamond hoop earrings, a gift from my parents years ago. I dug out a tone on tone cream-colored blouse, that’s really sheer, and a cream colored cami that shimmers gold. Skinny black belt with gold buckle, strappy black sandals with gold on the heels, that could go hooker or elegant, just depending on what you wear them with.

  I made sure everything was in order to wear tonight, then I went in and took a nice long bath with smelly good stuff, shaved and pumiced and buffed everything important. Painted my toenails and put big pin curls in my hair. That way, if we went for plan A, I would still have presentable hair for plan B.

  AJ got home, dumped his stuff in his room, and came back out to the living room. “Is that hairstyle in progress or done?”

  “In progress.”

  “Can I mess it up?”

  “Doesn’t matter either way, if it holds, then I’ll have curls, if it doesn’t hold, then I’ll just blow it out, why, what have you got in mind?”

  With an evil little grin on his face, he scooped me up, and deposited me in the shower, where he joined me, so to speak. We ended up on the flo
or in the hall, and in his room, and then back in the shower, and then it was a race to get dressed and ready for dinner.

  He was at the computer doing something with pictures when I walked out into the living room. I love it when he looks at me that way.

  “You are stunning.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No, I mean it, you are stunning. Don’t brush it off. Listen to me. You are a stunningly beautiful woman.”

  There’s nothing you can say to that. All you can do is smile, so that’s what I did.

  “Well, are we ready?”

  “We are. Your car or mine?”

  I smiled, “How about we go all traditional, and you drive.”

  “I can do that, and Cara, thanks for coming to this with me.”

  “My pleasure.”

  The drive was uneventful, which was good, cause I’m not overly comfortable with someone else driving. We ended up on the complete other side of town, in a very nice gated community. Some of the houses are a little close together for my taste, but some of them have quite a bit of land, and some are horse properties, but those are the ones at the very edge, and I’ve always thought of them to be the ones for the truly blessed. We drove past the truly blessed up to the back of the development, where I’d never been and I came up with a whole new definition of blessed. Oh my gosh. I started to get a little bit uncomfortable.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “You just tensed up. You’ve met these people, you like them, there’s no reason to be nervous.”

  “AJ, you have been to my parent’s house. Their house could fit in the foyer of these houses. I’m just not a shee-shee poo-poo person. I don’t know how to do that.”

  “No one is expecting you to be anything other than who you are Cara. When are you going to understand that being you is a good thing?”

  AJ turned right, and there was a gate. A gate inside a gated community. I knew there was no need to panic, but it didn’t stop me.

  The gate opened without us having to do anything, so I’m assuming we were on camera. We drove up a winding driveway, not movie length, where the victims drive up a driveway so long you know they won’t be heard screaming, but still, pretty long. The house is beautiful. Mostly glass. I love that. When I grow up, after I win the lottery, my house is going to be all glass, in the middle of a field, where I look out over everything and no one is around to look in at me. I saw a house like that on the Internet, for sale in California; I think the price was thirty-five million dollars. Little rich for my blood, but I’d like about a fourth of what they built, and a much smaller price tag.

  AJ jumped out of the car, opened my door for me, and we started toward the house. From a side door I hadn’t noticed, Jovana and her husband appeared, he was comfortable in old jeans and she wore a beautiful maxi dress that suited her well. They looked comfortable and casual and happy to have us there, and put me completely at ease. Guess that’s why they’re both in the service industry, they have a gift for making their clients feel good, and based on this house, I’d say they do it well. Really well.

  We walked into the kitchen. It was huge, and bright and open. The cabinets were sleek matte white. They didn’t have any handles, and looked more like a solid surface than traditional cupboards. The countertops were glass. Thick glass. With huge splashes of color showing through from the bottom. They were different than anything I’d ever seen.

  “Your kitchen is beautiful. I’ve never seen counters like these. They’re a work of art.”

  “I’m so happy that you describe them that way. That’s how we feel about them too. A very dear friend of ours creates them. He went to school with my son. When he was just starting out, we wanted to support him. We knew he had talent; we just had no idea how much. Originally we thought that maybe we would have him do the guest bath and maybe something in the pool area. We saw his sketches and thought they were a bit ambitious, but he was like a second son to us so we went ahead. One of the better decisions we’ve made. You’ll see his things all over the house. Most of the work you see in this house shows up in his brochures and on his website. He gave us a great price. Turns out that he helped us, much more than we helped him, but in our lives, that seems to be a theme.”

  The great room was huge, but they somehow made it feel cozy. The entire back wall of the great room opened up onto the pool area. They had floor to ceiling doors that accordion-ed onto themselves and the two areas became one.

  “I hope you like casual fare.”

  “I love casual. Is there anything I can help with?”

  “Honey, we have everything done. Why don’t you and I go putter in the kitchen? The guys can stay out here and play with the grill, and then we can enjoy our meal out by the pool.”

  “That sounds great.”

  The kitchen seemed even nicer upon second inspection. The cabinet fronts didn’t open like a closet door, Jovana touched the bottom of the cabinet and it made a swishing sound and the door came out and up, more like the door on an airplane than a kitchen cabinet.

  The surprise on my face must have shown, Jovana saw it, and laughed, a wonderful deep, from her toes kind of laugh. Teagan laughs like that. I am starting to. I think it has to do with self-confidence and having a sense of humor about yourself.

  “Pretty fancy, huh? It still tickles me every time I open a cabinet. I was not to the manor born, Honey. Never saw myself living in such a shee-shee poo-poo place. We’ve worked hard, but we’ve also been real lucky. This place was only half finished when we bought it. The builder was a regular at the restaurant. He just started talking to my husband one night about getting rid of it. His momma got sick, and he just wanted to walk away from the house and go take care of her. He was ready to cut his losses and be done. We came out to see it, and we just loved the bones of the house. We sat down and figured out how long it would take us to make it livable, and decided to go ahead and buy it.”

  “Well, you’ve done a beautiful job of finishing it out. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Me neither Honey. You know that show they have on the TV every year, where the DIY people go to the big convention centers and see the best of everything that the builders offer, well, we set us up a little TV in the bedroom, and we put a little recorder on it, and we’d tape all those shows. Then we would look it up on the Internet. We got to knowin’ some of the vendors, and for most of this stuff, it was from somebody that ordered it, then didn’t want it any more, so we got it at a real steep discount. We didn’t have most of the walls built out yet, so we could build around their custom order numbers. Then, of course, we got some connections because of the restaurant, and my business takin’ pictures. I traded some stuff for glossy brochures. I am a firm believer in the barter system, I’ve traded for some of the best stuff in my life, don’t ever discount talents you have and someone else needs, and never discount the talents they have that you might need. I learned that young and it has served me well.”

  “Wow. You could start a whole industry just around this. You could be a builder or a house flipper or something like that.”

  “Honey, those kinds of jobs are for the young, when you got more energy than you do sense. I’m older now, and I’m real comfortable with what I do. We’ve done well, we aren’t gonna starve, but we aren’t as rich as you would think lookin’ at us from the outside.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what, Darlin’?”

  “For making me feel so comfortable.”

  “Well, that is such a sweet thing to say. Now that I’ve gone on and on ‘bout us, you tell me about you and AJ. He is such a lovely young man, and he loves you more than spit.”

  I burst out laughing. “Spit?”

  “Honey, you can’t do nothin’ in life without spit. You can clean a baby’s chin, you can lick your lips and give your man a sexy smile, or you can get marker off a white board. Spit is a powerful thing, and that boy’s love for you is powerful.”

&nbs
p; “I’ve never heard love described quite that way before. I love it. Everyone is always telling me I have a unique way of phrasing things, but that’s more cultural than anything else.”

  “Cultural?”

  “I’m 100% Irish. But at the same time, I’m very American. When you put those two things together and shake them up pretty good, you get some interesting reactions. Some things just don’t survive the translation. And other things do well with the whole translation thing, but I say them wrong, or heard them wrong as a little kid and kept them the way I like them. Kind of like a little kid saying besgetti instead of spaghetti.”

  “Give me one.”

  “Beware of the anger of a patient man.”

  “Oh, I like it.”

  “Or, another one is, ‘Many times it is a man’s own mouth that breaks his nose’.”

  I love to listen to her laugh.

  “My grandmother used to say, ‘A lock is better than suspicion.’ One of her other favorites was an Irish curse, ‘May the curse of Mary and all her nine blind illegitimate children, chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Good Lord himself can’t find you with a telescope.’ And then there is my mother’s favorite, ‘No matter how fast you run, no matter how far you go, when you get there, I’ll be there, and God help you.”

  The guys walked in to see what we were laughing about.

  Turns out they’d been busy with preparing dinner. A nice steak, baked potatoes prepared on the grill, ice cold Pepsi, and warmed rolls. Not a veggie in site. I’m thinking that they were talking about my food peculiarities behind my back, which is fine with me; I hate eating food I don’t like just to be polite.

  We chatted in the kitchen for a while, meandered out onto the patio and admired the surroundings, sat with our toes in the pool and smelled the food as it cooked.