Chapter Two
One Week Earlier
Get those disgusting things off the table! My God, are you trying to kill all of us? This family is filled with geeks, I swear!”
Tilley‟s slippers scraped the tile floor on her way to a not anticipated, but much-appreciated half-full pot of coffee while, Mica, her oldest daughter, wasted no time filling her in on the latest catastrophe of the home front.
“Mom, I hope you‟re prepared to deal with an outbreak of scurvy or some other disgusting plague of biblical proportion.”
Still glowing in gratitude, someone other than herself, made a pot of coffee. She smiled and emptied two packs of pink sweetener into her cup.
“Scurvy, huh? Is this your way of saying we need oranges?”
Mica let fly the weary, exasperated sigh of a seventeen-year-old dealing with an inept parent and leaned against the counter. Her arms crossed, head cocked, her long, dark brown hair falling into her face. “Fine, Mom, joke, see if I care.”
Tilley‟s youngest daughter, Trisha sat at the kitchen table, on the verge of tears. Her lower lip puckered and her chin quivered.
“What‟s wrong, sweetie? Why are you so upset?” Tilley walked over, knelt next to her and kissed her plump cheeks, breathing
in her divine, six-year-old scent.
“Mica told me to take my pets off the table.”
“Your pets, honey?” Tilley looked around, confused. “What pets?”
“Mom, she has gross, dead earthworms in that box.” Mica exaggerated each word and the crescendo of the individual syllables pierced Tilley‟s eardrums.
“They‟re not dead,” Trisha said. She held in her hands a small, white gift box and as she opened the lid Tilley saw a mass of dead worms lying on the cotton. “They‟re hibernated.”
“Trisha, Mommy doesn‟t want you to put worms on the kitchen table, okay, honey? Take them out back.”
Indignantly, she turned toward Tilley. “They are going to turn into cocoons and then they will turn into butterflies. We learned it at school. I want to keep them until they are butterflies.”
“Oh, sweetie, I‟m sorry, but speaking in metamorphic terms, that‟s not going to happen.” Tilley brushed Trisha‟s blonde, wispy bangs from her pale, yet strikingly, bright blue eyes.
“Told you, stupid,” Mica said, in triumphant glee.
“Please listen to yourself, Mica. You‟re frickin‟ seventeen and arguing with a six-year-old.” Tilley stood, feeling her knees crack and she pulled out a chair as tiny dots swam in front of her face.
“Oh, and Mom, another thing. I‟m going to kill Jade. I‟m really going to do it this time. She‟s an idiot. Why‟d you have to have her?”
As if on cue, Tilley‟s twelve-year-old, middle daughter, Jade walked into the fray.
“Why are you going to kill me this time?” She nudged a chair away from the table with her hip, grabbed the Fruit Rings off the counter and sat next to Trisha.
“What‟s in the box, squirt?” Jade asked. Her older sister‟s rant of the moment ignored, she poured milk into her bowl of
cereal.
“They‟re dead earthworms, dear,” Tilley said. “Do you want yours fried or scrambled?”
“I‟m going to totally barf,” Mica yelled. “You know, we could all get, like, e-coli from those repulsive creatures sitting on our table. We could all die and you‟re making jokes.”
Jade added more milk and Mica smirked at her. “You better make that skim milk, chubbo.”
This upset Tilley. “Do not call her that. Do you hear me? She isn‟t chubby.” Jade, at age twelve, still carried baby fat on her short body and Tilley hated when tall, thin Mica called attention to it.
During this entire exchange, Tilley‟s husband, Zeke sat with the morning paper and a glass of orange juice in front of him. Oblivious to their early morning biology lesson, he turned the page.
“Trish, please put the worms on the back porch,” Tilley said. “They will be much happier there.”
Mica hovered over Jade with a pair of pants in her hands and she spoke to Tilley as if Jade weren‟t in the room, so great her disdain.
“Mom, I want you to tell Jade if she ever wears my jeans again I will not be responsible for what I do to her. She wears them, stretches them out with her fat ass, then she folds them and puts them in my drawer hoping I won‟t notice.”
“Jade, do you hear your sister?” Tilley asked.
“Yep,” Jade said. Her dark blonde hair hung in her eyes, and she pushed it behind her ears to see the morning comics more clearly. “I sure did.” She crunched her Fruit Rings apathetically.
“Don‟t wear her jeans, okay.”
“Kay,” Jade mumbled.
Incredulous, Mica stared. “God, Mom, thanks. It‟s so obvious you love Jade more than me. She gets whatever she wants and she never gets in trouble. I‟m so sick of it.”
“You‟re finally catching on?” Tilley said. She gave Mica a Cheshire cat smile, leaned back in her chair and cupped her coffee, sipping it slowly.
“I‟m so gone.” Mica grabbed her backpack and headed out.
“Don‟t forget your absent note for yesterday,” Tilley yelled. “I put it on the dryer.”
“I got it,” Mica screamed.
“You‟re welcome,” Tilley called. When the back screen door slammed shut, she cringed.
Zeke finished his coffee and told Jade and Trish to get a move on or they‟d be late. He kissed Tilley on the lips and reached for her breast, glancing at the kids to make sure they weren‟t looking.
“Knock it off.” A serene smile played on her lips as she pushed his hand away.
Backpacks grabbed off the counter, lunches in hand, Tilley kissed them all goodbye before heading upstairs to brush the taste of the red wine from the night before from her mouth. A hot shower later, she took her vitamins, three Advil and popped a mint. Ready to face another day, she headed out the door for work.
Tilley concentrated on getting some invoices completed for a shipment from the antique store she worked at part-time, her mind swam deeply in numbers. Her phone rang and she reached to answer it. “Hey, Michelle.” The phone in the crook of her neck, she continued with her work.
“Hi, Tilley. I‟m calling to see if you‟re busy tonight?”
“It depends.” She yawned for affect, in hopes if Michelle had something boring planned she could feign exhaustion.
“Ya know, you never go out with us girls anymore. We‟re going to dinner and then over to the Landmark for a couple of drinks. You‟re coming.” Stressing the words the way she did, made them a statement of fact, rather than a question.
Tilley‟s neighbor, Michelle, renowned for relentlessly badgering people to wear them down, was adamant. Tilley understood her point. She hadn‟t been to a girl‟s night out in a long time. The joy of being drunk with a bunch of middle-aged women took its toll on her and she preferred drinking alone.
“You know what, Michelle,” she said, “if you promise me it won‟t be a real late evening I might consider it.”
A night spent relaxing in front of the television with a glass or two of wine or maybe vodka on the rocks appealed to her more.
“Don‟t sound so excited,” Michelle said.
“I‟m tired and I have a headache, I‟m sorry.”
“I‟ll pick you up at six. Try to rest before that.”
“See you then.” Tilley hung up and moaned.
Is there enough wine in the fridge for a couple of glasses before Michelle picks me up?
A sticky note to pick a bottle up on the way home, stuck to her phone, would remind her.
Lulled from her thoughts by the sound of the bell ringing on the front door, she rose to greet her customer. Quickly removing her reading glasses, she glanced toward the entrance as a tall, striking man of around thirty walked in.
“Hi, can I help you?” Tilley asked. He came closer and she smiled warmly at him.
“Yes,” he began. His head swiveled around left, then right as he took in the furniture filling the store. “I‟m supposed to meet a Mr. or Mrs. Lewis to see a dining room table and chairs.”
“The Lewis‟ are usually in later in the afternoon, but I can help if you tell me what it is you‟re looking for.”
His above average man-in-the-street persona struck her first. Dressed in jeans and a red flannel shirt with work boots, he appeared to be a construction worker and his hands, culled from the hard work of, say a carpenter, were big and rough. He possessed the type of face that drew stares not only from desperate, single women, but from wives married for fifty-years and eighty-year-old gray-haired virgin librarians.
Explaining what he wanted, Tilley showed him an antique oak table and chairs.
“These are nice.” He ran his hand over the tabletop and then through his short, dark blond hair, his eyes squinting in thought. “But I was looking for something with a little more wear and tear. I tend to be rough on things.”
He smiled at Tilley and she disgusted herself with an inappropriate mental innuendo.
“I‟d be afraid to put a can of Coke on this table.”
“I don‟t think we have anything else at the moment that fits what you‟re searching for.” She didn‟t want to sound ostentatious by telling him they dealt strictly in high-end antiques and he might have better luck at a thrift store or the Salvation Army. “I can call you if something comes in though, if you leave your phone number with us.”
“Great, thanks. I‟ll do that.” He gave Tilley his number and walked toward the door, when a Gramophone by the exit turned his head. He smiled, his hands on his hips. “Does this thing work?”
“Uh, yeah, would you like to hear it?” On her way over, she caught a subtle smell of soap emitting off him and it comforted her for some odd reason. From a wooden box, she removed an old record and put it on. After a few cranks of the handle on its side, the music started and he grinned. The song, a recording by Bessie Smith from the nineteen-twenties, skipped a few times.
His face beamed as the music began. “I can‟t believe we‟re listening to this.”
She faced him. “It‟s something else, isn‟t it? I have all her songs on CD‟s at home, but nothing compares to hearing her voice coming from an old Victrola. It‟s what it was intended for, after all. No one will ever sing the blues so beautifully again.”
They listened to the scratchy, hollow and yet still strong, sensuous voice coming off the aged record, lost in a world all their own, a world that knew no time. Billy sang about it being nobody‟s business what she did in her life and they nodded their heads in agreement.
The song ended and he glanced over at her, ready to say something when Tilley talked at the same time. They both laughed and his mirth granted her a view of his stunning smile and white, straight teeth. It only figured that his breath smelled of toothpaste.
“I‟m new in town,” he said. “It‟s great to meet someone helpful. Nowadays, most people don‟t want to give you the time of day. Thanks for letting me listen. I enjoyed that.”
“No problem,” Tilley said. “So, what brings you to our neck of the woods?”
He shrugged his huge shoulders. “I needed a change and I remembered passing through here a while ago and loved the small town feel of this area. I free-lance write, so I have the ability to be a bit of a rolling stone. By the way, do you know of any good restaurants around?”
Without thinking, she blurted, “Funny you should ask. My friends and I are meeting for dinner this evening. You‟re welcome to join us.”
“I don‟t want to impose.”
“You won‟t be imposing, but if you don‟t want to meet for dinner, meet us at the Landmark. We‟re going for drinks
afterward. Locals hang there. It‟s a friendly place with good music on Friday nights. Although I‟ll warn you, it can get pretty rockin‟ after-a-while.”
Stupid comments flew out of her mouth when she got nervous and she winced at that one. God, what a nerdy thing to say. I guess I want him to think I was born in the twenties. Why didn‟t I just say it‟s the cat‟s pajamas?
“I still don‟t know…” he said slowly.
“Stop by if you want. I‟ll introduce you to some people and maybe you can start to feel more at home.”
“Thanks.” His smile reached out to her before his hand. “I think I‟ll take you up on that offer.”
They shook and she reveled in the feel of his firm grip. “Good,” she said.
He turned slowly and walked out the door.
God, could he tell I found him sexy?
It‟d been so long since she found another man attractive. However, when would she grow up and learn that she should be checking out nice looking men as prospects for future sons-in-law, not hoping they found her eye candy?
Stop it, Tilley. A smell of soap lingered in the air. Zest, Dial, Life Boy? Unrecognizable, the scent stumped her. Maybe it‟s Tide.
After a busy day at work, Tilley found herself anticipating a night out with the girls. Secretly, she hoped her customer showed at dinner, but couldn‟t quite grasp why. Absolutely in love with her husband, Zeke, she‟d never do anything to compromise their marriage. But a girl can look, can‟t she?
Next installment will be on Friday.
