7. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
“ Y ou should call him,” Gayle insisted as she pulled open a drawer in search of a spoon.
When she only found ten years of change, take-out menus, and screws that would one day come in handy, she shut it again.
“It’s not like you have to take him seriously, but you could have a bit of fun. You need a bit of fun.”
She reached for another drawer. It wasn’t the next logical drawer to check, but apparently Gayle didn’t care about things like that.
“Not in there,” Joe blurted as he scrambled up out of his chair. He reached for the right drawer–which would have been the next logical one she checked–and pulled it open to grab a teaspoon. “Here.”
Gayle turned to grab the spoon with an airy thanks.
She went back down the counter to where she’d left the peanut butter, scraping the bottom of the jar as she talked.
Joe listened with half an ear as he reached over to gently push the drawer she’d cracked open all the way shut again.
With the stash of Final Demands shut away from the light of day again, he reached for his abandoned coffee.
Cody, safely stashed in his high chair and halfway through crumbling his half of the bagel, waved his sticky hands in dismay.
“That’s the problem,” Joe said. He ruffled Cody’s hair to distract him from a wail. “I’d want to take him seriously.”
Gayle pulled an exaggerated face as she applied peanut butter to a bagel. “A pilot?” she said. “Ewww, no. Sweetie, you can do better than that. They’re away all the time, they’re riddled with anxiety, and then cheat like they have a loyalty card.”
It didn’t sound like Quentin. Joe would have made that point, but the Quentin he ‘knew’ was the product of a nice evening and a lot of daydreams…some of which had very little to do with Quentin’s character.
He still didn’t think it sounded like the man who’d taken a crab dip bath with even-tempered equanimity. The real-world reasons he could pull up to justify that, though, were his, and not for public consumption.
Instead, he just took a drink of tepid coffee. Cody picked up a handful of bagel crumbs and threw them at the table, crowing in delight as they went everywhere. “I didn’t know you’d dated a pilot.”
“Well, I haven’t,” Gayle said, pausing with the bagel halfway to her mouth. “But I did watch all three seasons of The Flight Attendant.”
“There were only two seasons.”
“No! Really?” Gayle said. She took a bite of the bagel and chewed it as she squinted up thoughtfully at the ceiling. “There was a third season, with that short actress? The one with the eyes.”
Joe racked his brain, but had to give up with a shrug. He couldn’t help her there.
“It doesn’t matter anyhow,” he said. “I’m not calling him.”
Gayle looked at him over the bagel. She looked serious for once, and then she tilted her head. Joe braced himself.
That look was almost always followed up by something breath-takingly tactless. Like…
“He’s gone, Joe,” she said. “Alan isn’t coming back.”
OK. Joe had actually heard worse.
“I know that, Gayle,” he said. “I’m not…, I don’t know…honoring my vows, or something. It’s just—”
“We all miss him,” Gayle said. She caught the look on Joe’s face and walked that back a few steps. “Not like you , of course, or the kids. But he was our friend.”
He hadn’t been.
Not really.
Alan had signed up for suburbia for school districts and to throw a bone to his parents.
He’d always thought he was too cool for HOA meetings and sleepovers.
It had been Joe who’d organized and hosted and learned to make exactly one acceptable baked good to trot out whenever a potluck was announced.
“It’s not about Alan,” Joe said. The guilt for that pinched at him, and he felt like he should cover Cody’s ears.
His husband was dead. That was the sort of thing that everything should be about, surely?
He ignored the doubts as he drained his coffee and set it down in the sink.
“I just don’t have room for one more thing in my life, especially something that’s no-strings-attached.
You need to have an open calendar to make that work. ”
Gayle wrinkled her nose as she finished her bagel. “That’s just time management,” she said. “I could have made my husband’s day twice while the coffee perked.”
This time, Joe did cover Cody’s ears. A little late, but he didn’t need that repeated at daycare. It would be a significant leap in the toddler’s verbal development, but…still. “Yeah, but I do it right,” Joe said.
Gayle pulled a mock-scandalized expression and then laughed at herself.
“I get it,” she said. “It’s not my business, but…I don’t know, it seemed like fate just dropped him into your lap. Shame to pass that up. And I should go. Greg has a dentist’s appointment this afternoon. I said I’d make him soup. So I need to get the tin opened and thrown away before he gets back.”
She gave her hands a ‘that’s that’ brush to get the nut-sticky crumbs off them. Then she grabbed her hoodie from the back of the chair on the way to the door.
“Oh, your bagels are stale,” she let him know as she reached for the handle. “You might want to throw them out.”
“Shit, sorry,” Joe said. Like he didn’t know the bagels were stale, had been stale since he got them reduced and hanging onto their best before date by their fingernails. “The kids keep leaving them out when they grab one.”
Gayle gave a chuckle of commiseration and then yelped as the door flew open and the kids burst in. Jessie had leaves in her hair and scraped-up hands, while Benjy had lost his T-shirt somewhere and had long, bloody scratches on his skinny arms.
Nat, Gayle’s son and Benjy’s best friend of the week, had apparently had the good sense to stay out of whatever it was. He just had mud on the knees of his jeans.
“There’s a bobcat in the garden,” Jessie exclaimed, her eyes huge with excitement.
“What?” Joe asked.
“Oh my god,” Gayle blurted as she grabbed Nat and pulled him against her. “Did it attack you?”
The kids all gave her a variety of disgusted looks.
“No,” Jessie said. “We’re trying to catch it.”
“I got it in my T-shirt,” Benjy said. “But it got out.”
That, an unusually unflappable part of Joe’s brain noted, explained the scratches. In the high chair, Cody, reacting to all the excitement, squawked and waved his smooshed-bagel hands in the air.
“It went up the tree,” Jessie explained. She dodged around Gayle and headed for the fridge. “I tried to get it down, but it’s really good at climbing.”
“She fell out of the tree,” Nat volunteered. He looked at Jessie with the sort of shiny, dewy admiration that he’d reserved for Benjy until recently. Apparently, he was impressed. “She didn’t even cry!”
Gayle turned Nat around by the shoulders to give him a once-over. “You didn’t try to touch it, did you?” she asked. “What did I tell you when we had the moose? Leave animals that aren’t yours alone?”
Jessie pulled the fridge open and stared inside. “Do bobcats like ham?” she asked.
And that explained why they’d come in, Joe supposed. That just left one question. He reached out and closed the fridge.
“Nobody is feeding the bobcat,” he said.
All three kids looked at him like he’d announced Disney had shut down.
****
As it turned out, the cat liked chicken. Also bits of bagel.
It was currently stationed at the bottom of Cody’s playpen staring in at him with intense, yellow eyes. The size of the thing meant that when Cody did stick his fist out in its direction, it could lick the squashed banana from between his knuckles.
“Why does it like him so much?” Jessie complained. She sat at the other side of the kitchen table, sullenness hanging around her like a cloud, with her hands upturned on her knees. “I’m the one who wanted to rescue it.”
Benjy, already patched up and redressed, gave her an indignant look. “I did too!”
“I think Jessie said it first,” Nat chipped in. He had apparently picked a side.
“Yeah?” Benjy countered. He waved his Band-Aid-slapped arm in the air. “Well, he’s tasted my blood.”
Joe cleared his throat.
“He likes Cody because they’re covered in food,” he said as he pulled the backing off the Band-Aid. “And it doesn’t matter, because as soon as we find his owner, he’s going back there.”
Jessie and Benjy both gave him looks of horrified betrayal.
“That’s not fair!”
“What if he’s a stray?!”
“We can take care of him!”
Joe wanted to say yes. He wanted to be in a position that he could say ‘no’ because you shouldn’t steal people’s cats, not because he couldn’t imagine what a cat the size of a beagle cost to feed. Since he couldn’t do either of those, he just held up both hands.
“Enough!” he snapped. “He’s going home or the pound. So that’s enough.”
Everyone shut up. Jessie’s lip wobbled. Cody had no idea what was going on, but started to cry anyhow because ‘vibes,’ Joe guessed.
He took a deep breath and felt like shit. None of this—not the cat, the money, or the shitty in-laws—were their problem. Or their fault.
Whose fault is it then?
Joe ignored that sly little question his brain tried to sneak past his guard. There was no answer that wouldn’t make him feel like crap. Even if he lied, then he still knew what the real answer was and he was a liar.
He scrubbed both hands through his hair and let his breath out on a slow, cheek-puffing exhale.
“Sorry,” he said. “You just scared me, that’s all. I didn’t mean to yell.”
There was a pause, and then Jessie lunged forward and hugged him.
She smelled of antiseptic and bubblegum shampoo…
and maybe a little bit of some sort of crap she’d rolled in when she fell out of the tree.
Blond curls, bits of leaf still knotted in there, pressed against his throat as she tried to strangle him with affection.
There was a surprising amount of strength in those little arms.
“Sorry, Joe,” Jessie muttered.
Benjy gave him a clumsy pat. “It’s OK, Unc,” he said. “Mom would have lost her shit.”
“Yeah,” Nat agreed. “Dad would have…”