2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) (6 page)

“Feeling better after a nap?” Fynn asked, standing at
the stove.

“I guess,” she said warily. “So what’s the special
occasion?” She motioned at the pots of sauce and pasta on the stove.

“I just wanted to do something nice for you because
you’ve been running ragged for days.” He avoided her eyes and kept his hands
busy, turning to some bread he had left on the cutting board, attacking it with
gusto.

“Seriously?”

He shrugged at the bread.

“So, can Grammy Elizabeth and Pop-Pop come for a
visit?” Cara asked breathlessly, careening into the kitchen.

“What?” Catherine choked on the knob of bread she’d just
stolen from the cutting board.

“They want to come and I want them to come and you
said someday soon they could come, so can they?”

“What?” she asked, louder and more forcefully,
directing the syllable at Fynn this time.

“Yeah, about that… your mother called while you were
sleeping.”

“You talked to her?” she demanded.

“For a few minutes.” Like that would lessen the blow
or excuse him.

Cara wandered off, bored.

“Why didn’t you just let the machine get it? You
shouldn’t have to deal with that,” Catherine shuddered.

“I didn’t want the ringing to wake you.”

“What did she say?” Her voice taut to breaking.

“Hello, Fynn,” he said breezily.

Catherine still marveled that her mother freely used
his nickname. His name was Joel and Catherine had introduced him as such to her
parents when they met him, yet her mother had taken to Fynn like everyone else.
It seemed that Elizabeth Hemmings’ no-nickname rule only applied to her
immediate family, including herself. No one but Cara called her anything but
Elizabeth or Mrs. Hemmings. But Gramma Lizzy was a big softie.

“And what did you say?” She was trying extra hard to
stop herself from jumping down his throat for purposely dragging out her agony.

“Hello, Mrs. Hemmings.”  

She eyed him darkly. “Seriously, what did she say?”

“Please call me Mom.”

“Fynn,” she growled.

“She said that they would love to see us at Christmas,
but she knows that you can’t travel right now, so they want to come see us.”

“Please tell me you didn’t.”

“I didn’t invite them for Christmas.”

“Good.” A sigh of relief.

“They want to come earlier than that.”

“Earlier?” She glanced around the room as if expecting
her parents to jump out and yell
surprise!
“What did you say?”

“That it would be nice.”

“So you lied to her?”

He cocked his head in response, refusing to entertain
her admonishment.

“When exactly?”

“I didn’t tell them to come; I just said that would be
nice. Because it would be. For Cara. For all of us. They want to see where we
live and meet their new grandchild.”

“I
do not
want my mother in the delivery room.”
Eyes wide in a panic, imagining her mother trying to tell her how to do that
too. That she wasn’t pushing hard enough. That she had to relax and trust in
her body.
And stop swearing, Catherine Marie, or I’ll wash that mouth of
yours out with soap.
Because even her friend, the perfect Georgia Love, had
brought her even more perfect little daughter Nell into world with a stream of
screeching
fucks
! Catherine’s own inevitable Tourette’s-worthy explosion
was hardly something she wanted her mother to witness. 

“I’m not going to let her in the delivery room,” Fynn assured
her.

“You? Stop her? You’re a complete pushover. Look how
far she’s already gotten with you. She’s halfway here and just look at this
place.” Catherine’s eyes darted around the room, seeing everything as if
through her mother’s eyes. All the things that would be judged not clean enough
or organized enough or Elizabeth Hemmings enough for her sensibilities.

“I told her you would call her. It’s up to you.”

“Fat lot of good that does me. Now I’ll look like a
jerk if I say no. She knew exactly what she was doing, talking to you first.
She probably planned it that way.”

“Planned to call while you were napping?” he humphed.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous.”

“I want our kids to be close to their grandparents.
They’re lucky to have them,” he said soberly, stopping short of saying,
they’re
the only ones they have
, but she still felt appropriately shamed.

The hazard of cohabitating with a man who was an
orphan—an adult orphan, but an orphan nonetheless. His parents had both passed
away, leaving their family at a whopping two—him and Drew. Family was important
to him, coming from so little. He didn’t know the pain of extended family. Aunt
Judy came to mind, and last New Year’s Eve during which rumors of Catherine’s
lesbianism had spread like wildfire and almost given her mother a heart attack.

The phone rang and Fynn put down the bread knife to
grab it.

“Don’t bother. We’re about to eat,” Catherine waved it
off. “Elizabeth Hemmings’ rules.”

“But it’s probably your mother.”

Catherine shrugged. “She made them. It didn’t matter
who it was: my best friend, the cutest boy in school who I’d had a crush on for
months and he finally realized I was alive and got my phone number and I
couldn’t even answer his call. He ended up going out with Jenny Martin, by the
way. So my mother can wait just like I did.”

He looked back at her dubiously.

“I’ll call her back later.”

“Tonight.” Firm.

She paused. Sighed. “Tonight.”

“I’m serious. I don’t want to get on my
mother-in-law’s bad side.”

“Don’t worry, you, she loves. It’s me she has a
problem with…. Now let me have a nice last supper before being tortured,” she
said dramatically.

Cara came skipping into the room, narrowly missing the
island in her excitement. “—and I was a carrot that had to say, ‘Hi-ho, farmer
Joe, pick me please, I’m ready to go. On your table for a treat… I am good for
you to eat.’ I was ‘sposed to be a turnip, except Magnus got hungry and ate my
costume
all up,
so I was a carrot instead. And even though the other carrot
was a silent carrot, Mrs. Karnes said to say my turnip lines anyway.”

Catherine’s blood ran cold as she realized Cara was on
the phone a half second too late. “—Yup, she’s right here. I love you too.”
Cara held the phone out to her. “It’s Grammy Lizzy. She wants to talk to you.”

“You answered the phone?”

“Uh-huh. And I was real polite too. Mrs. Karnes says
being polite is very important.”

“Oh.”

Catherine took the phone and put it to her ear,
completely done in by a first grader. “Hi, Mom,” she said robotically.

“Catherine, you are close to impossible to reach.
Thankfully I had a wonderful little talk with Fynn earlier. I am sure he told
you the news.”

“Um… yeah—I mean yes.” Her mother hated the laziness
of things like
yeah
and
gonna
and
sayin’
and all kinds of
relaxed speech. Speak with structure and pride.

“We do not want to be any trouble. We just want to see
you. All of you. And since we will probably wait forever for an invitation….”

And there it was, the hanging judgment. Just enough
left dangling there to say her daughter was a terrible hostess, daughter,
person. “We were planning to come see you after the New Year,” Catherine said
lamely. They hadn’t planned any such trip. She was just grasping for any
purchase.

“But it has already been too long. We have never even
seen Nekoyah yet. Or your house. And once the baby is born, it will be awhile
before you are ready to travel,” Elizabeth Hemmings pointed out, seeing the
story for what it was—a mirage that would disappear as it approached. “Besides,
you will have way too much going on to have to pick up to come see us. We have it
easy. Just a suitcase and we are on our way.”

“I thought you were spending Christmas with Connor and
Lacey, though.”

“We will be long gone before Christmas, not to worry.
We just want to help out in the last weeks before the baby comes.”

“Weeks?” Catherine choked out.

“Yes, Fynn did tell you, I hope. Two weeks.”

Two weeks!
That was a long time. That was an
eternity. That was impossible.

“I am sure you have more than enough things to do in
preparing for the baby and Christmas too, and we can occupy Cara and help
lessen the load a bit.”

More judgment, her mother assuming she was leaving
everything to the last minute when she had all kinds of things ready. The
nursery paint was almost picked out, the battle between two paint chips still
waging on the wall. She knew exactly where the crib was, at Finnegan’s
Furniture just waiting for her to slap her Visa card down on it—

“Did you tell her about the signs, Elizabeth?” It was
the sound of her father’s voice in the distant background.

“No, William, I did not.”

“What signs?” Catherine asked.

“It is nothing,” she insisted. “Just a bit of
ridiculousness that—”

“What?” Now Catherine
needed
to know.

“They are not even signs,” Elizabeth Hemmings said,
brushing the whole conversation off on a technicality. “Just a few posters
around the neighborhood—”

There was a click on the line and a scuffling sound
and a few unintelligible grumbles, then her father’s voice right over her
mother’s. “Can you hear me? I’m on the crap cordless phone in the bedroom.”

“I hear you, Dad.”

“They’re wanted posters. Tons of them. Wrapping the lampposts
up like presents. And the sign at the front of the neighborhood too. It’s
plastered with them. Covered the whole thing up.”

“Wanted posters?” Catherine eked out. All sound was
coming to her as if through a tunnel. Her parents’ voices. Her own. Suddenly
her mind was filled with thoughts of a murderous madman on a rampage in her
sleepy little hometown, where her parents still lived.

“Do not bother her with that, William. She has more
important things—”

“Are you guys safe there?”

“Oh, we’re just fine,” her father pshawed. “
You
might want to stay out of Chesterton for a while, though.”

“Me?” she blurted in shock.

“Do not worry her,” her mother chastised her father.
“It is nothing, Catherine. Nothing serious at all.”

“What is going on?” she demanded of both of them.
Someone needed to fess the hell up.

“They’re for you,” her father said bluntly.

“They are not police-issue,” her mother clarified.

Her father again. “There’s a bounty out on your head.”

“A bounty?” Incredulous. “Who would do something—this
has got to be some kind of joke.”

“Catherine Hemmings, a.k.a. ‘The Cake Devil’.” As if
her father was reading it right off the poster to her.

“Cake Devil?” Catherine felt a bit faint and sat down
in her chair at the table. This was something Tara would do, all in fun, to get
a rise out of her…. But Tara had been the mastermind behind the whole cake
robbery; her prints were all over it. “Rachel Craig,” she breathed. Still mad
about a cake that didn’t even survive long enough to make it to Catherine’s
wedding anyway. A cake that was
hers first
. And in the end nobody got to
have it. No need to make a federal case out of a defunct baked good.

“So you know,” her mother said, in a tone that told
her Elizabeth Hemmings knew exactly how worthy her daughter was of the alias.

“We never liked each other but that’s still a little
harsh,” she choked out.

Her mother humphed in response. “You do realize that we
have to live here,” she added. “I run into people. Your actions reflect on me
as a mother. I raised you better than that.”

Her father then: “They’re calling your mother—”

“Never mind what they call me,” Elizabeth Hemmings
asserted boldly, showing she was above name calling and all the snarky things
that her daughter was still up to her eyeballs in. “Just tell me why you would
steal a bride’s wedding cake? How would you feel if someone had stolen yours?
Not that anyone would, seeing as how it was… questionable.”

“It was delicious,” her father offered.

“It fell apart and rolled away,” her mother said with
a twitch.

“Only some of the Ding Dongs. The rest was still
perfectly sanitary and edible,” Catherine objected.

“And I love a good Ding Dong. Your mother won’t buy
them for me.”

“I just don’t understand you,” Elizabeth Hemmings
said, ignoring her husband. “I know that you girls had something to do with
that. You and that Tara who is always getting you into trouble.”

Catherine felt like a little girl being reprimanded
all over again, and she suddenly felt a visceral desire to protect Tara and
herself by throwing the other names under the bus. Her mother obviously thought
that Lacey and Georgia had nothing to do with it. 

“I just hope that such things are behind you now. You
are a mother and young ears and small eyes are always about.”

It was my wedding cake first,
Catherine thought
righteously, thinking of the craziness of planning her wedding and then losing
everything. The whole thing. All she wanted was the cake
.
Her cake, that
Fynn had picked out.

“I’ve said my piece, now, regardless of all that
craziness, we want to see you and that means coming to you. Plus, our
granddaughter would love to see us.”

Catherine couldn’t believe how diabolical her mother
was that she would try to wield her power with the wishes of an
as-yet-to-be-born grandchild.

“I’m sure Cara is terribly excited about Christmas and
we could help keep her busy while you go into the home stretch.”

“Oh, Cara.” Jealousy surged that her mother was so
easily able to identify her place in the little girl’s life while she, herself,
stumbled all over it.