You and I, Me and You (2 page)

“Can you believe it?” I asked, hoping to get her off the trail. “Moving Day? Isn't it wonderful?”

“No. No.” Cathie shivered, rubbing her arms through her deep-green Gore-Tex parka. She was also wearing black snow pants, even though she only had to walk back and forth from the moving van through the front door—about twenty feet total—and it was thirty-some degrees out: balmy, as she'd pointed out. Cathie hated being cold almost as much as she hated being audited. “Don't remind me. I don't need any more horrific pics in my head.”

“Now, now,” I said mildly. Cathie also liked the status quo. For years her brother had been her brother and her friend had been her friend. She'd compartmentalized her life so well, Patrick and I had only just met a few months ago. Now her brother and her friend were a couple.
Abort! Abort! Shifting status quo!
“You know you're my favorite.”

“Sure. You say that now.” She peered into the back of the moving van, which was rapidly emptying. “You know, it's pretty great. I gotta give it to Patrick. Well … some of the tiles don't line up exactly on the south side of the kitchen. And one of the light fixtures is a few degrees lower than the other ones in one of the bedrooms. But it's a fixer-upper.”

I smiled and said nothing. The house was brand-new and perfect. There wasn't so much as a crooked seam (or whatever houses had that traditionally needed fixing) to be seen. But Cathie was particular.

“Last chance to change your mind. Say the word and we can hijack this U-Haul.”

“Did you set aside enough time in your schedule to be arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for motor vehicle theft? And then maybe sued in a civil trial for punitive damages?”

“No.” She kicked at a frozen tuft of grass. December without snow was just wrong, especially in Minnesota. A few days last week of forty-plus weather had gotten rid of the little snow we'd had. On the other hand, now that I was a homeowner and no longer an apartment dweller, I'd have to do things that homeowners did. Shovel. Mow. Start meaningless feuds with next-door neighbors. Garden. Can. Pickle? “Damn it, no, I didn't.”

“Another time,” I comforted her.

My baker-boyfriend, Patrick, came bounding out the front door, in his enthusiasm coming across an awful lot like an Irish setter with an unbelievable upper body and denim shorts.

(Yes, Cathie loathed the cold and overdressed for it. Her brother refused to acknowledge it and wore shorts all year round. You're right to be confused. When my life settled down, I'd have to devote some research time to the Flannery clan, which in its own way was almost as weird as my own.)

Our dog, Pearl, ran out beside him and I smiled to hear her bark. A black Lab cross, she'd been rescued from an abusive douche just a few weeks ago and was normally too conditioned to bark. The douche, incomprehensibly, wanted a dog but disliked barking. He was still in the hospital, which was as cheering as it was guilt-inducing.

“Our” dog meant mine and Shiro's and Adrienne's. Adrienne had snatched her, Shiro had tolerated it, and I had decided the dog could stay in our lives. This led directly to my agreeing to move in with Patrick—my one-bedroom Burnsville apartment was not dog-friendly. Regardless of the inconvenience, I had a lot of respect for the small black puppy—the vet figured she was about a year and a half old, and due to malnutrition would only grow to about two-thirds the size of a Lab. I thought that was sad; Shiro thought it proved the dog's intelligence. “Clever girl, keeping herself small for convenience's sake,” she'd told Patrick.

I leaned down and gave her a pat on her small sleek head. She had no idea it was Moving Day, just that she was with us and hadn't seen the douche in weeks. Good enough.

“All done, huh?” Patrick swooped down and scooped me up in a hug. I was gawky and tall, about six feet, but he made me feel petite and cute. My feet dangled several inches from the sidewalk, and Pearl darted beneath them to snuggle around Patrick's ankles. (She was small and entirely black except for her white paws and a small round, white blob of fur on the top of her head: Pearl.) “They've got all the furniture in places where I think you'll like it. Okay?”

“Are the beds in the bedrooms?”

“Yup.”

“Boxes marked
KITCHEN
in the kitchen?”

“Yup.”

“That won't do at all,” I said, smiling. He bent down and we rubbed noses, our faces so close his was out of focus. Not for the first time I was aware that if you looked at Patrick and Cathie together, it'd be a tough guess that they were brother and sister.

They were redheads, but hers was a bright copper and his was a deep auburn, so dark it was black cherry rather than red. He towered over pretty much everyone, especially his little sister, and was muscular where she was small and slim (baking gave him an unreal physique … flour and sugar and butter in big enough quantities are quite heavy, and cupcake pans aren't featherlight, either).

Then there was the ten-year age gap between them, but I wasn't getting into that now. It had … unpleasant associations for them. Not for me, though. I was
fine.

I looked into Patrick's out-of-focus face and thought it was a perfect moment, even with the approaching car engine in the background. “I should have told you I want to sleep in the kitchen and fry eggs in the bedroom.”

“Yeah, that sounds exactly like what you think goes on in bedrooms, dumbass.”

Patrick's arms involuntarily tightened so much I groaned and gasped for breath. We all glanced over at the car that had swung into the

(our!)

driveway behind the moving van. My partner, George Pinkman, waved a cheerful greeting, by which I mean he flipped all of us off. With both hands, so he was in an especially good mood.

“What's
that
doing here?” Patrick asked, mouth going thin with surprised distaste; he would have been happier to see a worm crawl out of his watermelon salad.

(Weird, right? Watermelon was a fruit. And not a fake fruit like a tomato, which tasted like a veggie but called itself a fruit: watermelon was a
fruit.
But Patrick treated it like a vegetable, slipping it into salads with salt and pepper and oil and vinegar.… Not all the crazies, I can tell you, are in therapy.)

Pearl sensed the tension, darted off the sidewalk, stress-pooped in the frozen grass, then turned tail and darted into the house. She was a stress-pooper and a stealth-pooper, but she was learning fast and, given all that she'd adapted to in a short time, keeping our patience wasn't too much of a trick.

Besides, George occasionally brought about the same impulse in me.

I knew why he was here, but I decided to let George be the bad guy; he was so good at it. There was only one reason he'd show up on his day off, on my day off, on Moving Day, and it wasn't to drop off a housewarming plant. Unless he'd peed in it first.

But he still wouldn't swing by on his day off. He'd swing by on the way to work, tossing the peed-on plant from his ugly car and laughing like a crazy man as it smashed on our sidewalk and sprayed dirt everywhere. Yes, that was George Pinkman's idea of a housewarming gift.

“God,” he said, clambering out of his awful, awful, awful Smart Pure coupe (in festive Jordan-almond green). “It looks like Martha Stewart threw up here. Just barfed, and some cutthroat real estate agent came along and put up a
FOR SALE
sign in the middle of it until you idiots bought it.” His burning green gaze settled on me, which was awful. “Got a dead guy, Cadence. Time to swap out your granny panties for big-girl ones.”

 

chapter five

My baker greeted
my partner with, “Too bad you can't stay for a tour.”

“Too bad you can't keep flour or butter out of your eyebrows, Aunt Jane. And besides, like I'd want to?” He yelped more than spoke; when startled or amused, George tended to squawk or yelp. “Barf barf barf barf barf barf barf fucking barf barfity fucking fuck barf barf. I just…” He eyed our perfect house and shook his head. “You're rich, right? I googled you in a moment of suicidal-level boredom. You're the Sara Lee of … I dunno … stuff Sara Lee makes. Why didn't you buy one of Tom Cruise's places? He's had to downsize since Katie wised up and started her version of
Scientology: Take Two
.”

Patrick/Aunt Jane shrugged, but I knew the answer. Yes, he was a millionaire. He'd built a hobby into a career into a corporation that shipped delectable pastries around the world. He'd made baked desserts trendy and sought-after long before the cupcake rage.

(Cupcake rage, heh. Sounded like how you felt after too many cupcakes. Or when denied cupcakes.)

He could have indeed bought an abandoned Cruise mansion or a previously owned Diddy boat. He could have bought a ten-bed/six-bath mansion on Summit Hill for one-point-two, rather than the trim four-bed, two-point-five-bath in Cottage Grove. But Patrick had made his money; he hadn't been born with a silver spatula in his mouth. “Why would I want to clunk around in a huge mansion?” he'd asked the Realtor with honest bewilderment. “I want a home, not a museum.” I could have fallen in love with him for that sentiment alone.

“Purple and gray,” George was marveling, staring at the front of the house. “And a gray door. You've fulfilled your lifelong dream to live in a thundercloud, Cadence.”

“It's not gray,” I couldn't resist pointing out, ignoring Patrick's
Don't bother
eye roll. “It's Shale and Fig. From the … uh…”

(Martha Stewart Collection.)

“So, there's dead people? Let's go see dead people.” I took a step toward him/away from the baker.

Patrick's hand closed gently over my bicep. “Do you have to?” he asked plaintively. “It's Moving Day. You've been looking forward to it for days. And I thought, after, we could maybe—uh—make the house our own?”

George dramatically clutched his stomach, bent forward at the waist, and made throwing-up noises.

“Sorry. The dead can't wait.”

“Technically they can.” George bobbed back upright, fully recovered from his fake barfing. “They're not getting dead
er,
right? Man's inhumanity to man has been pretty much a constant theme for hundreds of thousands of years. But somebody's gotta go catch those pesky bad guys, Janey-poo, and the FBI lost the coin toss. Along with various police departments and sheriff's offices.”

“Your car.” I'd actually forgotten about Cathie, who during all this had been standing by the van looking chilly (the weather) and puffy (the Gore-Tex). “It's awful. As awful as you are. I can't believe you did it. I can't believe you found the perfect car to showcase your awfulness.”

“Actually makes your brain hurt to look at it, huh?” George loved his awful car for many reasons, not least the attention it brought him.

“I might have to paint it,” she continued, staring. “That's how terrible it is.”

“Later, baby. We gotta go. Mush, Cadence, mush! Over yon hilltop a corpse awaits!”

I turned and kissed Patrick on the mouth. “I'll be back when I can.”

“I'll start unpacking the kitchen boxes in our bedroom,” he replied dryly, but he managed to return my kiss, glare at George, and jerk his head at Cathie all in one motion, which I thought was pretty neat. “C'mon, Cath, let's get you out of the cold.”

“Even if I shut my eyes I can still see his horrible car,” she whispered, turning and following her brother up the walk. “I don't understand how swans and that car can exist in the same universe.”

“Wanna go for a ride in the car, girl?” George was shaking his keys at me. “Wanna go for a ride? Huh? Do ya? Huh?”

The jingling was making my head throb. “Please don't,” I said, two words that had never worked on him. (Which begged the question: why oh why did I keep trying?)

“Huh? Do ya? Huh? We'll go to the park! You like the park, doncha?”

Darn it, gosh darn it! Can't he ever just not be like this? Can't he ever just—

 

chapter six

Almost as quick
as the thought (it was impossible for a physical motion to be as quick as a thought, though now and again I came close), my hand flashed out and I seized George's left earlobe between my left thumb and index finger. Incorrect; I shall clarify: I seized his earlobe between my left thumbnail and left index finger nail. And then I did what Cadence would not: tried to make my nails touch through his earlobe.

“Do ya, girl? Do yannnnaaaaaggghhh!” George blinked so fast tears came to his eyes. “Oh. Hi, Shiro. Please will you let go and then scrape my earlobe out from under your nails and mail it to me?”

“Do not shake your keys at Cadence and liken her to a dog.”

“Never! It wasn't me! Framed, I was framed! I'm the
victim,
damn it.”

“You will be, if you do such a thing again.”

I let go and he cringed back, pawing at his ear. “Argh, Jesus! It burns
and
feels cold at the same time, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna start crying; this isn't making me horny at
all
. Your problem is, you've got no sense of humor.”

George was right; that was my problem. One of my problems.

“Yours is that you never know when to quit a jest.” One of
his
problems.

A sociopath fears only for himself. You may think that if his relative is threatened, he fears for that relative; he does not. He fears how harm to the relative will complicate/worsen/end his life. You cannot frighten or hurt a clinical sociopath with anything but his own pain. But although the option box is sparse when dealing with such types, it is very near a sure thing. Pain
=
compliance. It was crude and knee-jerk and quite Pavlovian. As was George.