2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series) (5 page)

Saturday, January 1
^st

“Rise and shine!” Elizabeth Hemmings sang out, yanking
the shades in the room and startling Catherine to attention.

Oh my God, I overslept! I’m late for school! Did I
do my homework? What the—

But she wasn’t a teenager anymore; she was a grown
woman. A grown woman with a hangover and a perpetually busy, alert, and
high-functioning mother. She groaned, closing her eyes on the room that was only
sort of her childhood room. The same furniture occupied it, but her teenage-girl
personality had been stripped from the space long ago.

“I can’t believe you slept like that,” her mother
chided.

She was still wearing the clothes from the party and
lying crossways on the bed, atop the comforter—shamefully.

“It’s nine o’clock. The day is wasting. There is
plenty of time for sleeping when you’re dead,” Elizabeth noted, tidying and
straightening an already tidy and straightened space. The only things out of
place were Catherine’s clothes she’d worn here last night. “Are these dirty?” She
picked up the pants and top, sniffing at them as only a mother would sniff
someone else’s clothes.

“I don’t know,” Catherine moaned, feeling the weight
of her scotch decision in her head like she had sprouted an anvil tumor overnight.

“What is this?” Her mother scratched at a darkened
splotch on the sweatshirt, touching the questionable stain with a scientist’s
inquisitive nature.

“I don’t know,” Catherine said without even venturing
a look.

“I think it’s ketchup,” Elizabeth said plainly. “Did
you have ketchup, Catherine?”

“I don’t remember.”

“This is not a hard question,” her mother challenged.
“I need to know what the stain is in order to treat it properly.” Elizabeth
Hemmings took great pride in her laundry, treating all clothing items—dirty or
clean—with the utmost respect. Everything was folded on the way into the hamper
and then again after washing on the way into the laundry basket. All stains
were pretreated. Bleach was used in calculated doses. Fabric softener was used
or withheld with precision. Ironing was more than a chore; it was a passion.
Her family had the cleanest, crispest, most perfect laundry on the block. Her
skills were the envy of her church group.

“Ugh—I had some fries in the car on the way down,” she
admitted begrudgingly. “I guess I might have dropped ketchup on my shirt.”

“It’s bad enough to eat while driving, but dipping and
driving?” Elizabeth held the dirty laundry to her chest like she was faint at
heart.

“I put the ketchup
on
the fries, Mother.”

“I should hope so. Although you should really stop to
eat…. Not that you should be eating french fries right before dinner anyway.
You could have spoiled your whole meal.”  

Catherine rolled her eyes and felt the shooting pain
in her head in response. Obviously scotch impaired the exasperation reflexes.

“Well, get up and make yourself presentable. I’m doing
a load of laundry. I’ll add yours to the pile.” She folded the shirt and pants and
then sniffed at the dishtowel on her shoulder, her face twisting in displeasure.
She folded it too and added it to the perfect pile of dirties.

Once she was alone again, Catherine squirmed around on
the bed, trying to find a hiding place from all the damn light spilling into
the room—the sun at full force upon the fresh snow outside was blinding. She
squinched her eyes closed as tightly as possible, trying to find absolute
darkness.

“Catherine Marie!” her mother snapped, startling her.
Elizabeth was lording over the bed again, arms full of clean clothes now. “You
know that no one sleeps past nine in this house unless they’re sick. Are you
sick?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” she said, giving in before the
thermometer came out and clear broth appeared at her bedside.

“Good, because I made breakfast. French toast. Your
favorite,” her mother cajoled. “And here.” She laid the stack of clothes heavily
on the end of the bed. “You’re going to need something else to wear while your
things are in the wash. I brought you some pants and sweaters to try, and later
I thought we could go shopping together and pick something out for you to wear
to Niki’s christening.

Is this hell?
“I have plenty of church-appropriate
clothes,” she said defensively, sitting up slowly and with great difficulty.

“I mean a
dress
, Catherine.”

“I have dresses, Mother.”

“I haven’t seen you in a dress since Connor’s wedding,
and you looked so beautiful that day.”

“It was a peach bridesmaid dress that was held
together with safety pins. I looked ridiculous,” she countered, holding her
head with her hand to help with the weight. She hated being reminded of that
moment. She’d been perfectly content going to the wedding as a guest—preferred
it to faking a close relationship with her future sister-in-law that didn’t
exist—so when Lacey’s cousin’s water broke at the rehearsal dinner, Catherine
had literally taken a dive under the table to hide from view when they tried to
pinpoint a replacement, almost yelling,
What about that fat chick over
there?
to send everyone’s attention toward what happened to be a waitress
with a similar shape to the already-altered dress. Unfortunately, at some point
she’d had to “find her napkin” and come up for air and a bite to eat before she
died of asphyxiation or starvation, and she was immediately pressed into
service.

“You never could see yourself, Catherine Marie,” her
mother said, turning to go.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You sell yourself and everybody else short.”

“I’m a realist, Mother…. You know, life is real, not
ideal.”

“Don’t use my words against me.”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“I’m just saying that you are your own worst enemy. It
is like you
want
to be sad, pitiful Catherine who never gets what she
deserves.”

“And what exactly do I deserve, Mom?”

“Love. A family. Happiness,” Elizabeth said plainly.

“That stuff doesn’t grow on trees.”

“Of course not. It’s rare. Even more so because you
sabotage yourself at every turn. Just when you have a good thing going you shut
it down.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Fynn.”

She was flustered, confused, wondering if scotch lips
sink ships. Had she told her mother? Did Connor say something? “Fynn’s fine,”
she said softly—
could be the truth.

“I’m not an idiot, Catherine,” her mother scolded,
sitting on the end of the bed. “I saw the look on your face last night when you
got here. You were hurt.”

“I was
hurt
because you had a party and didn’t
invite me!” she exclaimed, wincing at the pain reverberating in her head in
response.

Elizabeth waved off the accusation. “I know that we
don’t talk about boys. I’ve always left you to your own love life.”

Except for those five years during which you told
me every move Daniel Bell made after I dumped him.
“I am hardly dealing
with boy trouble anymore, Mom.”

“I just want you to know that we really like Fynn.”

It was so strange hearing her mother freely use his
nickname. Elizabeth called everyone by their given name. But for Uncle Dick.
And now Fynn. Catherine wondered if she’d ever even told her mother that his
real name was actually Joel, or if that had been lost somewhere along the way
because Fynn would never be Joel to her. The name just didn’t fit.

“Catherine?” her mother prodded firmly.

“Sure you like Fynn. It’s me you have a problem with,”
she groused, wallowing in self-pity.

“Oh please, give me a break.”

“You thought I was nuts when I showed up with him last
spring, for the whole way we met—flying out there, chasing a lost toy—for
everything.”

“Sure I thought you were nuts—you’re my daughter, I
know
you’re nuts.”

“Thanks,” she said lowly.

“Did I ever tell you how I met your father?”

“He was the quarterback of the high school football
team and your eyes locked with his in the middle of a play, all the way from
where you sat in the bleachers,” Catherine recited, sounding bored by the old
story she’d heard countless times.

“Actually, he was the quarterback of the
other
team.
Our biggest rivals. He lived three towns away.”

“So?”

“We didn’t go to the same school. We didn’t have the
same friends. We were sworn enemies. And yet we made it work.”

“Nice try, Mom, but I hardly think a few towns and a
football rivalry equate to what I’m going through.”

“I was fifteen. I didn’t drive yet. He didn’t have a
car. I used to take the bus to see him when I could because it was safer than
him coming to see me. In a lot of ways it was probably harder than what you’re
going through. But this isn’t about me…” she said pointedly. “I just hope that
whatever is going on with you two, you don’t let a few miles get in the way.”

“A few miles?” Catherine scoffed. And then the dam
broke. “
Hundreds
of miles, Mom. I don’t know up from down half the
time.”

“Maybe that’s a sign that you need to make a change.
You have been dating like this for months.”

“I think so, too.”

“Good,” her mother said, like the conversation was
suitably concluded. She’d said her evasive piece and Catherine had responded in
kind and everyone was roughly on the same page as far as Elizabeth Hemmings was
concerned. She got up to go, walked across the room, and as she was reaching
for the doorknob Catherine shattered their common ground.

“So we broke up,” she said, her voice even, like she
was stating a simple, unemotional fact.

She watched her mother’s shoulders slump in defeat for
exactly one heartbeat, and then Elizabeth composed herself and turned to face
the bed. “Well, then I guess another year has passed, hasn’t it?” There she
went, passive aggressively counting the time down to her daughter’s old-maid
status. Suddenly she was all business again. “Why don’t you get dressed, come
downstairs, have some of my famous French toast, and then we’ll take that trip
to the store that I was talking about.”

“There’s Little Miss Sunshine!” William Hemmings
announced from the table, eyes twinkling, bald head polished and shining in the
daylight that was streaming through the windows behind him. He’d taken to
calling her that ironically when she was in high school and obviously her dour
mood had brought it back into play.

“Whatever,” Catherine said begrudgingly, her usual
response to the greeting.

“Just like having a teenager around the house all over
again. Ah, those were the days,” he swooned facetiously.

Her father had gotten the worst of her teen years, but
in her defense, he was blind, deaf, and dumb to her growing pains. She was
awkward and gawky and slow to bloom, except for her face that bloomed mounds of
puss like a mutant garden. She was a complete mess in her teen years. But for
some reason he never noticed, so when his generally agreeable daughter turned
into a shrieking nightmare or slipped into absolute contrariness unexpectedly over
what seemed to be mundane things, he didn’t get it… at all…. Like the time he
tried to take her for an ice cream and she balked, refusing to go in the parlor.
They fought the whole way back—sundae-less—over her rudeness and orneriness.
She knew she could take the heat from his anger, though, and she could live
without the hot fudge—even
never
have another sundae again while she was
under his roof, like he asserted. What she couldn’t live with was stepping foot
inside that shop… a local hangout… on a Saturday night… dateless (no surprise)…
with her father… wearing
no
makeup… with zits lighting up her face like
a Christmas tree (considering the holidays were three months past at that point,
it wasn’t a festive statement—it was just plain gross). To this day she still
held firm that no matter how much of a bitch she’d been to be around,
being
her was at least a thousand times worse.

“Well, I hope you didn’t have your heart set on French
toast because I couldn’t just sit here and stare at your plate any longer, so I
ate your breakfast too,” he chuckled.

“Oh, William!” her mother exclaimed, coming out of the
laundry room and grabbing a new dishtowel from the drawer to whip at him
lightly.

“You should know better by now than to leave French
toast unattended in this house,” he said sadly. “I am but a man.”

“That you are. A
growing
man,” Elizabeth
cautioned, eyeing his burgeoning belly. Something new of late, Catherine noted.

“Oh
this
….
I call this a sign of how
good you are to me,” he said.

“Don’t patronize me, William.” She busied herself
cracking a couple more eggs and starting up a new batch.

“Don’t go to any trouble, Mom, I’m not really that
hungry anyway.”

“No trouble. You need to eat something, dear. What
with that awful hangover you’ve got, you should really get some food and drink
in you.”

Catherine gulped. She hadn’t realized that her mother recognized
what was going on. But then her mother always seemed to know everything. Maybe
she was psychic.
Maybe I should have her read my palm or tell my fortune.
Maybe she’s known all the answers all along… in which case I really should
have spent more time listening to her all these years.
In fact, maybe that
was why she’d gotten Minks for her thirteenth birthday.
Perhaps he was a
clue to my future… or the nest egg on which to build my old-maid cat colony of
which I will one day become queen.
Unfortunately Minks died several years
back, a faithful friend—she could use one right about now.

“So,” her father said, jiggling his newspaper as he folded
it sloppily and set it down. “When are you leaving?”

“Can’t stand the sight of me?” Catherine joked, poking
out her boo-boo lip that had earned her many things from her daddy over the
years.

“You said your flight was canceled last night. When
will you be able to fly out?”

“I—”

But her mother cut in quickly, her face pale, “She’s
not going to be flying out, William.” She had finished dipping the bread and
loading the griddle, and now stood at the sink drying her hands on her fresh
dishtowel. “Catherine and Fynn broke up,” she said evenly, coming over to the
table to refold the newspaper properly.

“What?” her father asked, total shock passing over his
face.

Her parents had never shown any real interest in her
relationships, at least not since her high school squeeze, Daniel, who they
feared she might go too far with (entirely warranted seeing as how they had
gone as far as possible on the family room couch right underneath the master
bedroom while her parents slept). Over the past sixteen years of dating and notably
less often sleeping with men, they’d shown no familial concern for her
extramarital relationships at all. And they hardly knew Fynn. Sure they met him
that time in New York when they’d first started dating; when she brought him to
dinner as a human shield to protect her from the big family announcement. And
of course he had charmed them completely with stories of their daughter’s zany
adventures in Nekoyah, Minnesota. He
was
captivating. But since then he
had come to see her only a handful of times, and only two of those times had
they seen her family. Three meetings and her father looked like he’d lost a son
rather than a practical stranger… or at best an acquaintance.  

“Did something happen?” he asked Catherine. “Did you
say—”

Elizabeth cut her husband off and answered for her
daughter. “Sometimes things just run their course.”

It was her relationship or lack thereof that they were
talking about and yet she felt oddly detached from the conversation.  

“We’re planning to go out,” her mother announced
suddenly, manning the griddle again. Catherine felt the smells of the kitchen
begin to ply at her appetite greedily.

“On New Year’s Day? Isn’t everything closed?” William
asked.

“You live in the past, old man,” Elizabeth said. “It’s
the beginning of a whole new round of sales. Some of the best of the year are
right now.”

He smirked, knowing that his wife lived for a deal. “Well,
I for one will be right here where I’m meant to be, watching the Mummers Parade
and then Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl, with a little nap thrown in for good
measure.”

Catherine almost drooled with delight at the thought
of that kind of day.

“So long as you’re entertained,” Elizabeth said,
serving the French toast up on a plate, sprinkling confectioners’ sugar on top,
and setting it in front of Catherine. “My daughter and I choose to begin the
year more productively.”

Catherine stifled the groan that attempted to skate
past her lips.

*****

“I think it is perfect. You can wear it to the christening,
to work, out at night. Dress it up. Dress it down,” Elizabeth said, giving it
her essential wardrobe seal of approval as she started up the car. Her mother
was always about versatility. For Catherine’s whole existence in her mother’s care
she had been denied anything that might be deemed as one-time use—i.e. the
stuff she wanted most. All that super trendy stuff that other girls were
wearing—that was in all the cutesy shops—that likely wouldn’t last through one
wash cycle let alone survive the fickleness of the fashion industry—was
considered out of bounds. And when it came to accessorizing, Elizabeth Hemmings
liked strong fundamentals—roughly translated this meant brown leather shoes and
brown leather purses and brown leather belts that wore like iron. No satin or
sequins or colorful pleather for Catherine Marie.

That was probably the reason she was such a clothes-hound
now, gorging herself and bucking the tight-ass budget of her youth ever since,
buying what she wanted, not just what was needed and economical and versatile. Catherine
was magnetically drawn to high-fashion, high-quality, classic styles that she
couldn’t afford. Price was no object and her credit card statements had been
known to prove it. Only Fynn had been able to put a chink in that line of
thinking, not directly, but by putting something else in the way of her fashion
happiness. Himself.

“You didn’t have to buy it for me, Mom,” she said,
relieved that she could finally breathe easy again. Kohl’s had come through
just like her mother had insisted it would, but it also brought on a bad case
of heartsickness. It was like trying to shop with a cinderblock on her chest.
This Kohl’s was identical to the one in Nekoyah that had come through for her
last spring, saving her from looking like a vagabond when she got trapped there
with one change of clothes and an awesome case of bad luck—
bad luck that made
me the luckiest girl in the world…. God, I miss him.

“I wanted to. We don’t get to spend time like this
anymore.”

“Well, thank you,” she said carefully, trying not to
read into her mother’s words any deeper to see if she was being blamed for that
fact or if her mother was just stating a fact.
See, I am already making
strides in the New Year.

The dress in the trunk really was absolutely perfect. Midnight
purple. Simple, yet figure-hugging enough to draw the eye. Three-quarter
sleeves that would span seasons. A wide neck that left that special spot
exposed for kisses—not that she would have a kisser around to take advantage of
that—

Stop it!

Of course the dress hadn’t looked nearly as good on
the hanger—dowdy was the word she’d used—and Catherine had recoiled at the
prospect of even trying it on. The whole exchange was kind of heartwarmingly
nostalgic, though, taking her back to her adolescence when her mother would
pick out the most unsuspecting things and she would stick her finger down her
throat dramatically in response. Then Elizabeth Hemmings would put her foot
down and Catherine Marie would relent. And as usual her mother proved to have been
right all along. It was their shopping shtick. Somehow her mother had better
fashion sense than she did, and when left to her own devices Catherine tended
to stick to the stuff modeled on mannequins rather than deflated on hangers
because she seemed to lack the vision to see things for what they were.

“Now what?” her mother asked, sounding all too chipper
considering Catherine knew she’d stayed up well past when the last guests left
in order to tidy up from the party… because Elizabeth Hemmings couldn’t lie
still in a dirty house—probably even cleaned the bathrooms before catching a
single wink.

Now… everything  just hurts,
she thought to
herself.

“Catherine?”

“I think it’s naptime,” she noted.

“Maybe that will teach you to stay away from the
drink,” her mother chided.

“The drink? What year
is
this?” Catherine
laughed, deflecting her mother’s judgment. 

“You put on quite a show last night.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She wondered if she’d
sung or danced or done something truly deplorable under the influence of
scotch. It was her first time! How was she supposed to know that it caused
hallucinations or visions of grandeur or—

“Your Aunt Judy couldn’t tell people about you fast
enough.”

“
She
is the one who needs to stay away from the
drink.” There she went, deflecting again.

Catherine watched her mother’s expression tighten, eyes
glued to the road, knowing she had touched a chord inside. Elizabeth wasn’t a
teetotaler, but she was about as close as one could get. A toast here or there
was all she ever drank. Of course she knew, like everyone else in the family,
that her sister was a total lush. In fact, that was probably why Uncle Al
smoked two packs a day and why he held onto her coattails wherever she went, just
so he could pick up the pieces.

“What exactly did you say to her anyway?” Elizabeth
asked, sneaking a look at her daughter after they were safely at a full stop at
a red light.

“I didn’t say anything. She called me a lesbian,”
Catherine said incredulously.

“Are you?”

“What?”

“A lesbian.”

“No.” Catherine’s jaw dropped open as she looked over
at her mother, talking to her about her sexuality like she was asking if she
liked oranges. Never in a million years would she have imagined such a
conversation like this with Elizabeth Hemmings.

“You didn’t correct her?”

“Why bother,” Catherine said, shrugging off the
thought and looking off into the distance.

“You have a point,” she agreed.

Her head snapped back toward her mother in shock. Then
she narrowed her eyes, waiting for the
but
—

“You know, we are actually only five minutes from
Lacey and Connor’s house. We can stop in and say hello. See Niki. She is
growing up so fast already,” her mother gushed.

And there it was. Not so much a
but
; it was
more like a carrot on a stick moment, dangling understanding and goodwill in
order to lead her daughter to do her bidding—forced family time.

“I don’t want to impose,” Catherine said tightly,
noting that her mother mentioned her daughter-in-law freely now, happily even.
All tension between them had dissolved when Lacey got pregnant. Jealousy
sparked as Catherine realized maiden-name-coveting Lacey Stemple (
I thought
that was against our religion, Mom
) had usurped her position in the family—
she
was the favorite daughter now. She had achieved the highest honors possible
when she birthed the first grandchild… and then she had the gall to throw her
mother-in-law a bone by naming her baby Niki Stemple
Hemmings
. This was
a competition that Catherine couldn’t hope to win, and now she had no prospects
to even keep her in the race.

“You really have to give Lacey a chance, Catherine.
She tries to be friendly with you and you are just so—”