This does not make for pleasant daily ablutions.
Until Mr. Tibble learns something useful, like behaving himself, he’s going to put a crimp in both our television watching and our bathing. On top of all this, he makes it clear that he regards us as inferior beings. If you need an ego boost, don’t get a cat.
Tonight we had dinner guests, all of them unannounced. That meant that I threw together the meal—a cauliflower-bacon-and-broccoli salad, cold cuts, bread and soy ice cream. It wasn’t exactly gourmet fare, but if it had been just Chase and me, we would have made caramel popcorn and eaten ourselves into a stupor in front of the fireplace.
As it was, Mom, Dad, Kim and Wesley all arrived at our front door at once.
When my mother comes to visit, she often brings food. I’m not sure if she thinks she won’t get any at my place, or that it will all be raw, organic and unsalted. Tonight she came bearing one of her signature desserts, a frightening confection she calls “dirt cake.”
It’s a mousselike dessert of cream cheese, whipped topping and vanilla pudding that Mom serves in a flowerpot. She tops the mixture with crumbled chocolate cookies—the dirt—plastic flowers and a host of gummy worms oozing out of the soil. It tickles her to serve it with a child’s plastic shovel and watch people’s expressions.
“Mom, do you have any idea how many calories are in that disgusting-looking thing?”
“It’s not disgusting, it’s cute. It was a big hit at my book club.”
I popped a gummy worm into my mouth. “It’s not very healthy. Think of all the sugar, the preservatives…”
Mom glanced in my hallway mirror and put the back of her hand beneath her chin where the first sign of sagging skin was still in her future.
“Preservatives? Don’t take them away from me, darling. I need all the help I can get.”
Chapter Five
Monday, March 22
“Whaddayamean, you want it by Thursday?” Harry roared through his closed office door. I began to count the seconds until he’d roar again. One, two…
“Whitney, get in here!”
Three.
Harry was at his desk, riffling through the stacks of papers that spilled willy-nilly over the edges of the desk and onto the floor.
“Maybe I can find what you’re looking for,” I suggested tactfully. Harry views paper as having as much relevance to the present day as dinosaur eggs. Armed with his cell phone, BlackBerry, iPod, DVD player, CD player, memory stick, hard drive, external drive, tape recorder, Dictaphone, tablet PC and walkie-talkie, Harry believes paper is obsolete.
That’s what I’m for—keeping the obsolete in order and out of his way.
“That contract we signed with Franklin and Terrance? When did we say we’d meet with them to discuss the changes they want?”
“Thursday.”
He sagged like a deflated balloon. “That means I can’t go to my mother-in-law’s place for dinner.” The import of his statement sank into his consciousness, and he straightened a little. Then he grinned. “That means I have an actual excuse. I don’t have to eat her salt-free tuna casserole or those hockey pucks she calls biscuits.”
“I’m so glad you’ve turned this into a plus so quickly,” I murmured.
“Call my wife and tell her what’s happened.”
“No fair. I’m sick of being the bearer of bad tidings.” Harry couldn’t go to his mother-in-law’s last week, either, and he missed out on a Scandinavian feast of boiled cod, boiled potatoes and white cake—food so pale it would disappear in a snowstorm.
“You’re good at it, I’m not. Besides, my wife believes you.”
“That’s because I always tell the truth.”
“Whatever. Listen, I’ve got to get busy on this. Close the door on your way out.” He promptly turned me out. I was as relevant as the three-day-old newspaper lying on the floor beside his desk. Therefore, I was able to stand there and study him, my mercurial, bighearted, Danny DeVito-like boss, without his even noticing my presence.
Harry’s aged in the past couple years. Another chin here, an additional roll around his waist there, two more scowl marks on his forehead…but the biggest difference is definitely his hair loss. For over two years, he’s managed to look as if he had, if not a full head of hair, at least an energetic and animated one, but now even the curly perms aren’t doing the trick. Today he’d been running his fingers across his pate and he’d disturbed the carefully arranged and lacquered spit curls so that they stood on end like exclamation points and question marks hovering above his head.
Quietly I slipped out of his office. Kim, who I’d barely had a chance to talk to all week, caught my arm as I passed her desk. “Let’s go out for lunch soon.”
“Great. Where do you want to go—”
“Let’s do Vietnamese. I’ve been craving pho,” Mitzi chirruped helpfully from behind us.
We spun around to find Mitzi licking her chops.
“Let me guess. You want to eat with us now because Arch won’t be home for dinner.”
“Podiatry convention,” Mitzi said, as if that explained everything. Mitzi often joins us. She never waits for an invitation. Instead, she bestows upon us the privilege of her esteemed presence.
“So Dr. Foot isn’t coming home tonight?”
“His name is Archibald Whitman Fraiser the third,” Mitzi said primly. “Not ‘Dr. Foot’ or ‘Sole Man.’”
“Right. Archie.” I mentally patted myself on the back for my heroic self-control. Not once have I pointed out the ludicrousness of a foot doctor whose name is Arch.
“What is ‘fuh,’ and why would anyone want to eat it?” Kim asked.
“Beef noodle soup.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
I picked up my sweater and headed for the door, glad that I had soup to anticipate. Last time Mitzi picked the restaurant and recommended the food, we ended up at an Indonesian place. Fortunately, neither of us ordered Mitzi’s suggestion, semur otak, which, we discovered later, was beef brains sautéed in spiced sauce. More proof that you can’t trust someone who doesn’t like chocolate.
“Kim, you really need to consider a new wardrobe,” Mitzi observed as we walked through the dimly lit restaurant decorated with faux bamboo paper, red brocade and elaborate hand-carved panels. “Preppy is fine, but…”
“Tailored,” I blurted out automatically. “Kim likes her clothes tailored.” I didn’t want Kim and Mitzi to get into it before we’d even been seated. If Mitzi says Kim’s clothes are too preppy, then Kim will say Mitzi’s are too Barbie, then Mitzi will tell Kim that if she’d ever read a magazine that had some meaning, like
