Chapter 4
Jack
I took the pizzas up to Mike and Ruby’s door. Before I could knock, Shelly flung it open, jumping up and down, her fat little pug puppy dancing around her feet.
“Jack! Jack! Jack!” She was so overexcited her cheeks were bright pink. “Did you hear about the pigs?”
“Junior’s pigs got loose again?” In case you’ve ever wondered if tigers are helpful when herding pigs, trust me. We’re not.
That had been a fun afternoon, though.
“No!” She grabbed the pizza boxes out of my hands and led the way to the kitchen. “There are going to be pig races next Saturday at the pre-game carnival!”
“I didn’t know pigs could drive race cars,” I said, fighting a smile. “How do they hold on to the steering wheels?”
“No, silly! The pigs run the races! All around a track! And sometimes they even jump in a pool and swim! Can you imagine?”
The tiger in me thought: Yum. Pork chops. But I knew better than to say that to Tess’s newly vegetarian sister.
“That sounds awesome! Will you be my date to the pig races?”
She giggled and carelessly shoved the boxes onto the kitchen counter. I jumped over to catch them before they toppled because that would have been a catastrophe. I hadn’t had anything to eat since my second breakfast.
“I can’t be your date. I’m going with Zane! Anyway, you loooooove Tess. Guess what their names are?”
“Zane and Tess?”
“The pigs!”
“Um, Wilbur?” Tess had forced me to read Charlotte’s Web. I’d pretended that I thought saving Wilbur was a waste of great bacon, but Tess had kissed my nose and called me a softy. Since her cat, Lou, had been cuddled on my lap, I’d had no defense.
“No! That’s a great name, though. Great book! They’re all puns!”
Ruby and Mike walked in from the back porch, and we exchanged hellos. Mike only gave me a cursory narrow-eyed stare instead of a full-on death glare. So, things were improving. When he’d first found out that Tess and I were sleeping together, the threats about tiger-skin rugs had come at me fast and frequently.
Mike was a retired engineer and part-time farmer who could fix anything that had movable parts. He was tall, lean, white-haired, and imposing, especially when he fixed his blue eyes on me with a frown. Ruby was his opposite in appearance—short, with soft curves and a gorgeous smile. She had pink cheeks and what she liked to say was “If God didn’t want me to be blonde, He wouldn’t have invented Clairol” hair. Beneath that deceptive exterior, though, was a core of steel. They had stepped up to raise Tess after her mom died and her father, devastated by grief and drink, had disappeared into a life of crime. I liked them both a lot. And I respected them, too.
Pickles, the little black pug, sat down in front of me and held up one paw. She was so cute that I had to crouch down and scratch her ears. When Shelley first got the dog for a Christmas present, Pickles and I had needed a minute to come to terms. All four pounds of her had instantly gone into protective mode when her tiny, flat little nose scented a predator.
Most dogs were aggressive toward or terrified of shifters, which made sense. They could smell that something dangerous had moved into their territory. But I’d sat down on the floor with Pickles and let her get used to me. Within a few minutes, she’d climbed into my lap and fallen asleep, and we’d been buddies ever since. She was a great little dog.
“Hey, the lessons are going well, Shelley.”
“She’s doing a great job with that puppy,” Mike said. “House trained in a snap, too.”
“We thought for a while there that Shelley should have named her Puddles,” Ruby said, but she was smiling.
“Is she asking for a high five?” I asked Shelley.
“Yes! She also knows sit, stay, come, and yoga.”
“Yoga?”
Shelley gave the pup a high five and then pointed at her. “Yoga, Pickles!”
The pug stuck her bottom in the air, little donut tail wagging furiously, and leaned down on her front legs.
“Get it? Get it? It’s the downward dog pose!” Shelley fell all over the place, laughing, and I had to smile.
I heard Tess’s car pull up outside—superior tiger hearing—and smiled but returned my attention to the girl bouncing up and down. “How do you know all this about the pigs, Shelley?”
“Aunt Ruby told us! Plus, we had an assembly at school today, and they mentioned we’ll get next Friday afternoon off school to help decorate and put up signs for the carnival.”
“Seems like a silly reason to get off school,” Tess’s uncle said, pretending to be gruff.
Shelley was on to him, though. She skipped over and gave him a hug. “You can come help, Uncle Mike! And guess what the names are, Jack!”
“Peter Porker?”
Her mouth widened into an O. “Wow, you’re good at this!”
“They could call him Spider Ham,” Tess offered, walking into the kitchen from the hallway. She looked tired, and her eyes had a pinched quality I didn’t like.
I pulled her into a hug and kissed the top of her head. “Are you okay?”
She nodded and then shook her head. “Yes. Maybe. Rough day. I’ll tell you about it later.”
Ruby gave us a wistful look. “Mike, remember when Tess brought all her problems to us?”
“Nope,” he said with a straight face. “Tess never had any problems.”
Tess cracked up, and I gave Mike a grateful look over the top of her head. He nodded, and I was sure he’d noticed that something was off with Tess, too.
“And guess what else!” Shelley said. “Alexander Hamilton!”
“Um, that’s an actual name,” Tess said.
“I know, but it’s funny for a pig, right?”
We all had to admit it was a little funny.
“And Sherloink Holmes!”
“Seems like it should be Sherlock Hams,” Mike said.
“What about Elvis Porksley?” Ruby put in.
“We’ve had too many Elvis puns around here, I think,” I said, remembering the hurricane.
“Good one! But I didn’t see that on the list. One of their star pigs is Kevin Bacon!”
“Huh.” These pig people were not particularly imaginative. Mike looked unimpressed, too.
“Let’s eat pizza, everybody,” Ruby said. “Mike, get the salad out of the fridge, please. Jack, drinks? And Shelley, plates and silverware. Tess, you sit down, honey. You look wiped out.”
Tess made a halfhearted protest but let her aunt convince her to sit and have a glass of sweet tea. I was just happy to be part of the family now, as evidenced by my assigned job of getting everyone drinks. For months after I’d returned to Dead End, Ruby and Mike had kept me firmly in the visitor/guest category. Now that they knew Tess and I loved each other, things had changed.
Mike, walking past me with the salad, elbowed me in the side. “Try not to eat all the pizza before those of us who are older and wiser get our fair share.”
Okay. Not everything had changed.
I grinned at him. “No worries. I brought four large pizzas.”
“Meat lovers?”
“Two. One veggie for Shelley, and the other is pepperoni and black olives for Tess.” Why someone would bother to put vegetables on pizza was another mystery of the universe that I’d never understood, even before I first shifted shape into a tiger.
“What about Hogatha Christie?” Tess offered.
“Who?” Shelley asked.
Tess sadly shook her head. “Oh, boy. I need to get to work on your literary education, sweet girl.”
“Pedro Porksgal,” I said. We’d recently watched his creepy new show about plant zombies, which was great, but Tess had spent most of the time with her hands over her eyes.
“Ooh! Good one! The Baby Yoda guy!” Shelley said, her mouth full of pizza.
Ruby gave her a look. Shelley hung her head, chewed, swallowed, and then said, “Sorry, Aunt Ruby. No talking with my mouth full, I know.”
“Well, I have the best one of all,” Mike said, reaching for his third slice of meat pie.
Ruby deftly slid the veggie pizza in front of him. He sighed but took a slice of that instead.
“What is it, Uncle Mike?” Tess said. I was glad to see some color was back in her cheeks.
“Shaquille O’Squeal.”
Everybody applauded except Shelley, who said, “Who?”
I waved my napkin in surrender. “I bow to the king. That’s the best by far. And, Shelley, we need to get to work on your basketball legends education.”
“There’s a lot of education going on around here,” she said darkly, grabbing another piece of pizza.
“Salad, too, dear,” Ruby murmured. Shelley rolled her eyes but ate some salad.
Saying “Eat some salad-salad with your pizza-salad” might not win me any points with Ruby, so I didn’t say it. Old tigers could learn new tricks.
“You know how pigs prep for a race, right?” I asked Shelley.
“No. How?”
“They have to do a lot of stretching, so they don’t pull a hammy.”
Everybody groaned, except Shelley, who just looked confused. Mike explained hamstrings to her while I basked in my punny awesomeness.
We talked about the pig racing and the carnival—I wondered if all small towns had as many carnivals as Dead End—and about Connor Murphy’s new pub, which was scheduled to have its grand opening the evening of the ball game.
“He’s a precog,” Ruby said.
“Not sure how precognition helps run a successful pub,” Mike said. “You know in advance how much beer to order?”
“It’s only a brief window of precognition, so I guess we’ll see,” Tess said. “He’s a nice guy. He moved home to Dead End to take care of his mom when she was sick. She’s better now, but he stayed. I heard he was working from home in an internet job before he opened the pub.”
“It will be nice to have someplace to go in Dead End for a beer and maybe a game of darts. The Swamp Rat is way too loud for us,” Mike said, referring to the bar down by the swamp that had live music on the weekends. The Rat could get rowdy. Tess and I weren’t big fans of the place, either.
“I hope it works out. As I’ve learned the hard way, owning and running a small business is not for the faint of heart,” Tess said.
“What’s he calling it? Murphy’s? The Dead End Pub?”
“His business application listed it as Connor’s Pub,” Ruby told us.
Tess laughed. “Good call. Business names in Dead End are not imaginative. We either name them Dead End Something or Person’s Name’s Something. Nobody here likes ‘fancy’ names.”
After we ate and helped clean up the kitchen, Tess and I headed for the door to go to the softball field for the ceremony I still knew nothing about. Shelley hugged us and raced upstairs to do her homework, play on her computer, or whatever else hyperenergetic ten-year-old girls did.
Tess glanced after her and then told Mike and Ruby about the incident with the Truckmans in the shop. “It was so weird how hostile he was with Brenda. This wasn’t just trash talk about the game. It felt personal.”
“I’m sure it was,” Ruby said. “They were dating, and she just dumped him.”
“What? Ace and Brenda? That’s hard to imagine,” Tess said, grimacing. “How do you know that?”
“A lot of gossip makes its way to the mayor’s office,” Ruby said primly, as if she hadn’t been the center of all the news before the election, too.
“The plot thickens,” I said.
Mike grinned. “We need Sherlock Hams.”
“I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of looking forward to these pig races now, just to hear the names,” I said.
Shelley’s footsteps pounded to the top of the stairs. “Alexander Ham Bell!”
“Great one!” I gave her two thumbs up.
“Well, good luck at the ceremony,” Ruby said.
“What is this ceremony? It’s something weird, isn’t it?”
“It’s Dead End,” Tess said. “You have to ask?”
“It’s not that weird,” Mike said.
* * *
It was pretty weird.