A Stiff Critique (17 page)

“That’s all right,” I assured her. Some day I would learn to knock off my knee-jerk sympathy. “Though I think we oughta—”

The doorbell rang, cutting me off as effectively as someone snipping the telephone cord. For an instant I thought my heart had stopped too, but then I heard it pounding again. Who the hell was out there?

“Ought to what, Kate?” Carrie asked.

“There’s someone at the door,” I told her in a whisper.

“Well, I’ll let you go in that case,” she said.

I said goodbye and hung up, wondering too late if I should have kept her on the line. I grabbed the phone console instead, poising my finger over the button programmed for 911, and carried it to the door, trailing the telephone cord behind me. I switched on the porch light.

“Who is it?” I shouted, wishing for the hundredth time that I had gotten around to installing a peephole in my solid wood door.

“Delivery!” The answer boomed clearly through the door.

Delivery? It was completely dark now, way past normal business hours. My skin tightened into goose bumps.

“What are you delivering?” I demanded.

“Flowers,” the reply came back, softer now but still audible. And familiar somehow.

“I didn’t order any flowers,” I yelled.

“Oh, come on, Kate!”

Now I was sure I recognized the speaker. I put the phone down and yanked the door open, ready to scream.

My ex-husband, Craig, was standing there on my doorstep, looking more handsome than ever dressed in a tuxedo and a grin, a huge bouquet of flowers in his hand. Somehow the sight of all those flowers smothered my intended scream.

‘Ta-da!” he sang out and bowed, one hand across his midriff, the other holding the flowers out in my direction.

“Damn it, Craig—” I began.

I watched the smile leave his face, and my heart twinged with guilt. His brown puppy-dog eyes widened. I had loved this man at one time in my life. And the hurt he had inflicted upon me hadn’t been intentional. Not that it had hurt any less.

“You shouldn’t have,” I finished. And I meant it.

“Like ‘em?” he asked, cocking his well-trimmed head, a tentative smile on his lips.

It was quite a bouquet. There were gladioli, poppies, chrysanthemums, daisies, snapdragons and five kinds of other flowers I couldn’t identify, in a rainbow of colors. They must have cost a bundle and Craig was a notoriously cheap man. Now my stomach echoed my heart’s twinge of guilt.

“They’re very nice,” I told him, keeping my tone as unenthusiastic as possible. That wasn’t too hard. All I wanted at that moment was to figure out how I could get him to go away and never come back. Without hurting his feelings too much.

“You know what the orange said to the doctor?” he asked.

I shook my head. Maybe I should have screamed at him after all. Or bludgeoned him. Or—

“I haven’t been peeling well,” he answered himself. “Get it?”

“I get it,” I said, adding ice to my tone.

Apparently I hadn’t added enough ice. He stuck one foot through the doorway.

I stepped in front of him quickly, blocking his path.

“It’s late,” I told him. “And you’d better take those flowers home before they wilt.”

“But they’re for you,” he insisted, his voice too high. His eyes were wide again.

“Craig, it won’t work—”

“Just kidding,” he assured me, smiling gamely. “I’m going to a fancy-dress dinner. These are the centerpiece.”

I stared into his eyes for a moment, wondering if it were true. But all I saw was hurt.

“Then you’d better get going,” I said briskly. “See you later.”

“I’ve got some more computer gags—”

“Fine,” I cut him off. “Goodbye.”

He pulled his foot back through the doorway, still smiling. At least his mouth was smiling. His eyes were those of a dog unjustly accused of carpet molestation, wide with hurt and unceasing devotion.

I shut the door gently, then double locked it.

I should have given up and gone to bed then. But I knew I’d never sleep, so I went to my desk instead and worked on my computer-nerd earring designs in an attempt to drive hoods, murder, children on the telephone and ex-husbands from my mind.

I decided a keyboard hanging from one ear and a terminal hanging from the other might be interesting. I sketched the first draft in exquisite detail, my treat to myself. Then I got real on the second draft. I knew that any design had to be simple enough to be reproduced in inexpensive plastic. At least it had to be if I wanted to actually profit from my work, not to mention paying the salary of my two employees. And the design had to be uncomplicated enough to encourage the paint job to line up with the molded plastic. I had learned that hard lesson early on.

I let out a little sigh as I worked on my second draft. True, gag gifts weren’t fine art. But occasionally, I still wished that designing didn’t have to be an exercise in compromise as well as drafting.

A couple of hours later I was dead tired, but I still wasn’t sleepy. I climbed under cool sheets and squirmed with reckless fatigue as I thought about Wayne. I missed him, damn it. I turned over on one side and then the other. After a few more turns, I had managed to short-sheet myself. I tucked the bottom of the sheet back in, then tried a new game, pretending that Wayne was right there by my side. I imagined his curly head lying on the pillow, then his muscular body—

That was a little too much imagination. My body was responding to his body and he wasn’t even there. I jumped out of bed in frustration and padded into the living room for Slade’s manuscript.

Cool Fallout
kept me up another hour, and I barely made it out of the sixties. I read page after page as the main characters played their parts, selling illegal drugs and enabling draft resisters to escape to Canada. And as I did, Patty Novak and Nan Millard blended in my mind, Patty seeming more interested in Jack Randolph’s family wealth than his leadership of the Brightstar commune and devotion to the cause. And Warren Lee, quiet and spooky as Russell Wu himself, seemed increasingly sinister with each appearance.

In fact, Brightstar felt less and less like Eden as I turned the pages, and more and more like a dysfunctional family ready to explode. And explode it finally did when Kathy Banks, the woman who would eventually become a Catholic nun, panicked and shot the sheriff who had discovered a few dozen bales of marijuana in the false back of the barn. Brightstar collapsed inward then. Jack Randolph’s charisma couldn’t save it. He didn’t even bother to try. He abandoned ship, slipping out in the excitement, never to return. With his disappearance, the center was gone. And with no center, everyone else scattered.

In one final, sad scene, Peter Dahlgren drives away from Brightstar, weeping for all the deals he won’t be there to negotiate. And with that final scene, the sixties are irrevocably dead.

Damn, I thought as I lay the manuscript down by the side of my bed. I’ll never be able to sleep now.

But I was wrong. I closed my eyes.

*

The next thing I knew it was Saturday morning.

Since it was officially the weekend, I dawdled an extra ten minutes over my soy yogurt and fat-free granola before starting in on my stack of Jest Gifts paperwork.

The phone rang while I was working on my payroll tax deposit schedule, C.C. perched on the back of my chair. I leapt up, grateful for the intrusion. C.C. dug her claws into the chair as I pushed it back, riding the chair like a rodeo cowboy.

“Yeehaw!” I encouraged her. I reached for the phone, hoping Wayne would be on the other end. But it was Carrie. “I hesitate to even ask,” she said without any audible hesitation. “But are you coming to the critique group’s regular meeting at my home this afternoon?”

I looked over at the stack of Jest Gifts paperwork. C.C. meowed sternly.

“It will be a potluck again,” Carrie coaxed, tempting me further. “You are, of course, exempt from food preparation.”

In the end, I agreed. I even thought about bringing a poem. For less than an instant. I made a potluck dish, though, a vegetable and rice salad with my own invention, a dressing made from lemon soy yogurt, miso, vinegar, garlic and ginger. It tastes a lot better than it sounds.

As I minced ginger, I thought about calling Felix for information. Felix was my friend Barbara’s boyfriend and, more importantly, a newspaper reporter with police connections. If there was anything interesting to know about Slade Skinner’s death, he would probably know it. Unfortunately, Felix was less a source of information than an information siphon. And an aggressive information siphon at that. I shook my head and returned my attention to the knife in my hand.

Once the salad was chilled through, I had no excuse to linger at home.

“I promise I won’t get in any trouble,” I said to C.C. on the way out the door.

She turned her back on me and stalked away.

I shrugged. If C.C. didn’t believe me, she wasn’t the only one. Then I walked slowly down the stairs to my Toyota, taking enough time to feel the heat of the July sun on my shoulders.

It was two o’clock sharp when I trotted up Carrie’s apple-scented path and rang the bell.

An explosion of sound answered the ring.

- Thirteen -

Basta howled, Sinbad yowled and Yipper yipped as I stood at the front door. But I didn’t have a chance to stick my fingers in my ears before I heard Carrie’s “CEASE AND DESIST!” And then the explosion of sound ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

Carrie opened the door and peered out at me, blinking in the square of afternoon sunlight that shafted through the doorway. Yipper danced behind her, his claws making skittering noises on the floor while Basta pulled his old basset body up on her left blue-jeaned flank and Sinbad stalked up on her right. Then Carrie smiled, her white teeth a radiant contrast to her dark, freckled skin. No wonder Travis was in love with her. She might have been ten or fifteen years his senior, but the animation in her smile could have lit up the Golden Gate Bridge on a foggy winter’s night.

“Thank you for coming, friend,” she said solemnly.

“No problem,” I told her. I put my rice salad down and opened up my arms for the traditional Marin greeting hug. I’m sure anthropologists will study it some day.

Carrie took a couple of steps forward and we embraced tightly. And this time she lingered, not pulling away immediately like she usually did. At first I assume she was lingering for my benefit, but then a revolutionary idea popped into my mind. Carrie was frightened. She who had saved me from Rosie some twenty years ago was seeking comfort for herself now, like a child seeking reassurance from an adult. I could even feel a tremor in her small, round body.

My own body stiffened with the realization. I didn’t want Carrie to be frightened. I wanted her to be the rock she had always been.

She must have felt me stiffen. She dropped her arms and stepped back out of the embrace amid scurrying animals.

“Carrie, what are you so afraid of?” I asked.

Her eyes widened.

“I am—” she began.

“Hey, is everything cool out here?” came a deep voice from behind her.

She jumped and so did I. Even Yipper let out a startled bark. Then Carrie smiled again, a smile even brighter than before, and I wondered for an instant if I had imagined her fear.

“Everything is perfectly fine, Travis,” she answered, turning her eyes away from me. “It’s my friend Kate.”

“Hey, Kate,” Travis said and then turned back to Carrie, his face set in its usual handsome scowl. “Listen, Mave says there’s going to be a rally for the homeless on Monday night. The cops have been rousting them in downtown San Ricardo again.” He threw his arms out, looking crucified for an instant. “Like they have any other place to go, you know. And…”

Carrie shot me a look over her shoulder, rolling her eyes. Then she took Travis’s arm and led him toward the living room as he went on speaking. I followed them and wondered what in hell was scaring Carrie so badly.

“Well, howdy there, Kate,” Mave greeted me, her raspy voice loud enough to drown out Travis’s for a moment. She was perched on one of Carrie’s cornflower blue sofas in between Joyce Larson and Russell Wu.

“Hi, Mave,” I replied with a wave in her direction.

“…and it’s a righteous cause, you know,” Travis continued. He turned toward the occupants of the sofa for support. “Joyce says a lot of the folks they rousted can’t get their meals at the Operation if they can’t stay in the city overnight.”

Joyce nodded emphatically, her face serious.

“So how are they supposed to eat?” Travis demanded. He flopped into the easy chair, his arms outstretched in question.

No one answered him. I wish I could have. I only wish our Government would. At least Joyce was doing good work, I thought with a warm rush of admiration. I studied her serious face, her solemn blue eyes. How many lives had she saved with her work?

Then I noticed the tilt of Russell’s head on Mave’s other side. He was staring up at me, studying my face as I was studying Joyce’s.

I pulled my eyes away and looked around the living room. All the furniture, including the two sofas, the easy chair and a few kitchen chairs had been rearranged into a large circle with varying sizes of tables placed in front of most of the seats.