Wicked Appetite (24 page)

“We need to do something with Carl,” I said to Diesel. “He’s got Easy Cheese and Froot Loops stuck in his fur, and he smells like a sick water buffalo.”

Diesel filled the kitchen sink with warm water, dunked Carl in it, and soaped him up with dish detergent. He rinsed him off, I wrapped him in a towel and rubbed him dry. When I turned him loose, he was lemon fresh and weirdly fluffy.

“Maybe we should have used a conditioner on him,” I said to Diesel.

Carl smelled his arm and picked at his fur. “Eeee.”

I was no longer dripping, but I was still wet to the bone. I kicked my shoes into a corner and peeled my socks off. “I’m taking a shower. I’m going to stand under the hot water until I’m as red as a lobster.”

Diesel selected a cupcake from the box. “I’m right behind you.”

“You don’t mean that literally, do you? I mean, you aren’t planning on sharing a shower with me, are you?”

Diesel glanced over at me. “Is that a possibility?”

“No.”

“Your loss,” Diesel said.

“What about the forbidden Unmentionable joining thing?”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t get naked and ogle each other.”

“Wouldn’t that be frustrating?”

“Honey, every moment I spend with you is frustrating.”

I wasn’t sure if that was hot frustrating or annoying frustrating, and I didn’t want to ask.

“Both,” Diesel said. “And you need to get out of those wet clothes. You’re starting to look pruney.”

I ran upstairs, grabbed dry clothes, and jumped into the shower. I was halfway through shampooing my hair and the water turned cold.

“Damn!”

Ten minutes later, my hair was dry, I was dressed in sweats and shearling boots, and I’d replaced the soaked gauze with a couple giant Band-Aids. I stomped down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Cat, Carl, and Diesel were working their way through the box of cupcakes.

“You used all the hot water,” I said to Diesel.

“Wrong,” Diesel said. “I didn’t have any hot water.”

“Well then what happened to all the hot water?”

Diesel turned the tap on and waited for it to get warm. “How old is your water heater?” he asked.

“It came with the house. It looks pretty old.”

We went down to the cellar and looked at the water heater. It was completely rusted out and leaking water.

“I’m no plumber,” Diesel said, “but I know a dead water heater when I see one.”

He turned the water off, and I mopped the floor with some old towels.

“I can’t afford a new water heater,” I said. “It’s not in my budget.”

Diesel looked at the sagging overhead beams and the crumbling foundation. “You have bigger problems than a water heater.”

“I know. I need the money from the cookbook. It’s my only hope of fixing the house.”

“How close are you to finishing your book?”

“I’m almost done, but that’s not my problem. My problem is selling the darn thing.”

Diesel followed me back to the kitchen. “I can get you a water heater, but I can’t solve your more serious issues. Unlike Wulf, I don’t have unlimited funds at my disposal. I don’t draw a salary on this job.”

“You work for free?”

Diesel got a soda from the fridge. “I have everything I need.” His eyes held mine for a beat. “Almost everything.”

Carl jumped from the counter to the floor and farted.
So much for the sexy moment, I thought. Saved by monkey gas.

“Dude,” Diesel said to Carl. “You need to lay off the cheese.”

The phone rang. Diesel answered and passed it to me. “It’s your mother.”

Terrific. The one time in the history of the world Diesel answers my phone, and it has to be my mother.

“Who was that man?” my mother asked. “I thought I had the wrong number.”

“He’s just a friend.”

“Oh?”

“Not that kind of friend,” I told her.

“I have a wonderful surprise,” she said. “Your father was selected to attend a seminar on public transportation customer relations in Boston tomorrow, and he’s on his way. Lou Dribbet was supposed to go, but he passed a kidney stone last night and wasn’t up to flying. It was all very sudden.”

“Dad’s flying?”

“Actually, he’s landed. I tried calling your cell phone all day, but you weren’t picking up.”

“My cell phone died, and I haven’t gotten a new one yet.”

“Well, he’s on his way. He should be at your house any minute now. He’s so excited. He’s going to spend the night with you and go to the seminar hotel tomorrow.”

“What? No! Not a good idea.”

“Why not? You have a guest bedroom.”

“I haven’t got a bed in it.”

“He can sleep on the couch then. Goodness knows it won’t be the first time he’s had to sleep on the couch. Sometimes I can’t take the snoring. That man could wake the dead.”

The doorbell chimed, and I felt my heart constrict to the size of a raisin.

“I think Dad’s here,” I said to my mom. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up and focused on Diesel. “You have to go.”

“No.”

“YES!”
I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and got into his face. “My father is at the door. He’s spending the night here, and he’s not going to like that you sleep in my bed.”

“Tell him we’re engaged.”

“We’re
not
engaged. And even if we were, it wouldn’t be good enough.”

“So tell him we’re married.”

“That’s insane!” I said. “And besides, I don’t have a ring.”

“Tell him you lost it. Tell him it slipped off into the mixing bowl when you were making sticky buns and someone took it home and ate it.”

The bell rang a second time, and I hurried to get the door before my father was completely drenched. “I’m begging you,” I yelled to Diesel as I ran. “Sneak out the back way.”

My father is a big man. Six foot tall and chunky. The family joke is that if he wasn’t driving a bus, he could be pulling one. He’s as strong as an ox, but he’s the family softy, crying over
sad movie endings, a sucker for puppies and kittens, buying mushy Valentine’s Day cards for my mom. He’s completely not the disciplinarian in my family, but he wouldn’t put up with a man in my bed if there wasn’t a ring on my finger.

I found him hunched on my front stoop, holding a small yellow umbrella in one hand and a suitcase in the other. His rental car was parked at the curb.

“For a minute there, I was afraid you weren’t home,” he said, leaving the umbrella outside, stepping in with his suitcase.

“I was in the kitchen, talking to mom.”

He looked around my living room. “This is nice. You’ve made a real home here. I only was in this house once, and it was over twenty years ago. I remember it as being fussy, with stuff crammed everywhere. Seems like it’s a little more lopsided now, but that’s how it is with these old houses, I guess.”

Cat strolled into the room and gave my father the once-over.

“I didn’t know you had a cat,” my father said. “What’s his name?”

“Cat 7143. Cat, for short.”

My father squinted at Cat. “He’s only got half a tail. And there’s something weird with his eye.”

“It’s glass.”

My father went blank-faced for a moment. “Is that Ophelia’s cat?”

“I don’t know. He came from the shelter.”

“If it’s Ophelia’s, he must be the oldest cat on the planet. Ophelia was telling us she had a one-eyed cat when we visited her, but no one ever saw it. We always figured she was making it up. And in the years before she died, she’d tell your grandmother crazy things about the cat. How the cat could read her mind. And that he was actually a ninja.”

Oh great, I thought. Just what I need . . . another mind reader in the house. I looked over at Cat, and I swear he looked back at me and winked. Okay, so I guess he could have just blinked his one good eye, but it seemed like a wink.

“You know what we should do?” I said to my dad. “We should go out for dinner. I know this bar that makes unbelievable wings.”

“No way. I sent you to cooking school. I want to see what you can do.”

“I haven’t got a lot in the house,” I told him.

“Do you have beer?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m a happy man. You can make me a sandwich, and we don’t have to go out in the rain. And there’s a game on tonight. I see you have a television.”

“Right.”

And I might have a big, strange guy in my kitchen. I hadn’t heard the back door open or close.

“There’s something I should tell you,” I said. “I don’t exactly live here alone.”

“I know,” he said, moving past me toward the kitchen. “You have a one-eyed cat.”

“Yeah, but there’s more.”

“More?” He stepped into the kitchen and stopped dead in his tracks. “Does your mother know about this?”

I sunk my teeth into my lower lip and followed behind him. “I can explain.”

“Your mother would have a heart attack if she knew you had a monkey in your kitchen.”

“That’s all? A monkey?” I peeked in and did a fast scan of the room. One monkey. No Diesel.

“That’s Carl,” I said to my father. “I’m taking care of him while the rescue organization finds him a real home.”

“What kind of monkey is he?” my father wanted to know. “His fur is all fluffy. He looks silly.”

Carl gave my father the finger, and my father’s eyebrows went all the way up to his hairline.

“He’s sensitive about his fur,” I said.

My father looked like he was working at squelching a grimace. “You’re sort of living in a loony bin.”

Yeah, I thought. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

An hour after my dad arrived, I had dinner on the dining room table. Steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans. And vanilla pudding for dessert.

“This is great,” my father said, taking his seat, shaking out his napkin. “I’m starved.”

Carl had followed us in and was standing on tiptoe, peeking over the edge of the table, surveying the food.

“He looks hungry,” my father said.

“He’s always hungry. He just ate enough junk food to feed half of China.”

“Maybe he needs green beans after all that junk food.”

Carl bobbed his head up and down. Yes, he needed green beans. He scurried into the kitchen and returned with a plate and silverware. He plunked the plate and silverware down on the table, climbed onto a chair, and sat erect on his
haunches. He could barely see over the table. He jumped down, ran into the living room, and came back with a throw pillow. He carefully placed the throw pillow on his chair and climbed on board. Now he was just right for the table.

“Eep,” Carl said, hands folded in front of him.

“I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t just seen it,” my father said.

I spooned potatoes and beans onto Carl’s plate, and I gave him two small pieces of steak. Carl picked a green bean up with his fingers, smelled it, and ate it. When he was done with his beans, he popped a piece of steak into his mouth and chewed. His lips curled back, his mouth opened, and the half-chewed piece of steak fell out.

“Guess he doesn’t like steak,” my father said.

Carl looked at his mashed potatoes, and he looked over at me. “Eeee?”

“Mashed potatoes,” I told him. “Do you like mashed potatoes?”

Carl shrugged.

I ate a forkful of potatoes. “Mmmm,” I said. “Good.” I handed him his fork. “You try it.”

Carl vigorously shook his head no.

“It’s easy,” I said to Carl. “You just stick the fork in and scoop up potatoes.”

Carl looked from the potatoes, to me, to my father. He looked at the fork and tested a prong with his finger. “Eeh.”

“If you can work a DVD player, you surely can manage a fork,” I said to him.

Carl sucked his lips in and squirmed in his seat.

“Be a man,” my father said to him. “Eat your potatoes!”

Carl squared his shoulders, forked up a glob of potatoes, and concentrated. He got the potatoes almost to his mouth, the fork twisted ever so slightly, and the potatoes fell off onto the floor. “Eeep!” Carl narrowed his eyes and dug into the potatoes again with the same result.
“Buh!”
He flipped my father the bird, threw the fork across the room, grabbed a handful of potato, and shoved it into his mouth.

My father dug into his food. “This is like eating with your brother.”

After dinner, my dad and Carl settled onto the couch and tuned in to the ball game while I cleaned the kitchen with Cat keeping me company.

“This is a real pain without hot water,” I said to Cat. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll call a plumber and get an estimate on a new water heater.”

Cat fixed his good eye on me and didn’t say anything.

“I love my house, but I didn’t have this problem when I was renting,” I said to him. “I paid my rent, and that was it. I guess you wouldn’t know about that if you’ve always lived here with Ophelia. I suppose you’ve had your own problems,
what with your eye and tail and all, but at least you’ve never had to find money for a plumber.” I put a pot of hot water on the stove to heat. “And by the way, I never thanked you for saving me from Hatchet. I really do appreciate it. That was very brave of you.”