My Favorite Mistake Page 18

  “He’s at a teaching conference in the city at the moment.” She laid the gold-ringed hand on Roland’s head and tilted her face at me. There was a definite smirk in those brown eyes. “Are you the latest?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, I assume you’ve come either to carry on with or about my husband. In either case, he’s not at home. You’re welcome to leave a message.” She cracked the door open and clutched Roland’s collar.

  The foyer was full of dark wood and muted blue accents. I stepped in, trying to reassess the situation. “Mrs. Hammond, I am definitely not Ian’s latest. But do you know what he’s done to my sister?”

  Her smile was icy. “I might be able to guess, yes.”

  I stared at her. “Well…doesn’t it bother you?”

  “May I offer you a cup of tea?” She gestured back toward the kitchen.

  “No, thank you. Listen. I know I just met you, and I don’t want to interfere with your personal life, but this concerns you, too.” I took a deep breath. “Ian has really misrepresented himself to my sister. And one of her good friends.” All right, the ‘friend’ bit was a shameless lie, but it added dramatic effect.

  She nodded. “A muffin, perhaps?”

  “No, thank you.” I pressed on. “Aren’t you outraged?”

  She smiled again and pretended to try to hide it. “Should I be?”

  “Yes! Really, how dare he?”

  She scratched Roland behind the ears. “Your sister is one in a long line. Dr. Hammond has been diverting himself with his students since his first faculty appointment in London. Really, ducks, why do you think he finally had to come to the States to teach?”

  This would explain why he was teaching in the boonies. And the hasty departure from the University of Chicago.

  “Well, why didn’t you leave him?” This sounded cheesy and canned, even to my own ears. I was so confused and taken aback, I’d resorted to lines memorized from bad TV.

  “Ian and I reached an understanding many years ago. I’ve become accustomed to a certain lifestyle, you might say. We have children.”

  The second jaw-dropper of the day. “You have children?”

  “Three sons. The youngest just left for university. So I thought I’d pop over to see Minnesota. Lovely scenery, isn’t it? Quite unspoiled.”

  “Stop changing the subject!” I sputtered. “How can you be okay with all this?”

  She gave me a pointed look. “He is my husband. My loyalties naturally lie with him, and your sister should not date married men.”

  “But she didn’t know he was married!”

  She shrugged. “Then she must be quite thick. Any one of his friends or colleagues could have told her.” She paused and gazed past me out the front door. “Very warm today.”

  “I want—I demand to talk to Ian. I’m waiting here until he gets back!”

  “Young lady. This is not a film clip from Showdown at Shadow Gulch.” She pushed the screen door open with a squeak. Roland pricked up his ears and growled low in his throat. “Good day.”

  So much for subtlety. I had no idea when I had lost the upper hand, but I knew I was getting the boot. I backed out the door and made a face at the dog. “Fine. But I’ll be back tomorrow. And I’ll sit on your front porch until I’ve talked to Ian.”

  That was when Roland bit me.

  It wasn’t like that scene from Cujo, full of frothy fangs and split-second lunging for the jugular. The dog was almost casual about it. He just stuck his neck out and chomped before I could jerk away.

  One second I was raving at Portia, and the next, I was looking in open-mouthed horror from my left arm to Roland, who had resumed a sitting position, licking his chops in the canine version of a sneer.

  Small red tidepools were welling up on my forearm. I had no idea about first-aid procedures for dog bites. I gaped at Portia, who raised her eyebrows in theatrical bewilderment.

  “I can’t imagine what’s gotten into him,” she said. “He’s never done anything like this before.”

  “Your dog just devoured half my arm, and that’s all you have to say?”

  “Let me get you a towel.” She shooed Roland down the hall and returned with a thick blue dishcloth from the kitchen.

  I snatched it from her and wrapped it around my arm as tightly as I could. I didn’t know whether pressure was good for the wound, but I didn’t want to look at it anymore.

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine. He hasn’t got rabies. Ian keeps all the veterinary shots up to date.” She stood on the other side of the door and folded her arms.

  And that was the end of that. I realized I was not going to get any apologies or explanations, and I didn’t want them from her, anyway, so I tied the ends of the towel around my arm and returned to my car.

  En route to the clinic, my mind kept fixating on the answering machine light blinking away in Skye’s kitchen.

  Sick and obsessive? Perhaps. But better to speculate for twenty minutes about phone messages than about what kinds of nasty little microbes might be lurking under that dishtowel.

  When I arrived at the Raylor Memorial Clinic, I found Skye and Sally waging a full-fledged catfight through the thin yellow curtain separating their treatment areas. Before I even got past the frazzled nurse in the waiting room I could hear the accusations and counter-accusations flying.

  “Well, at least I didn’t knowingly two-time somebody and then try to kill them with my car.”

  “Give me a break. I was only going like ten miles an hour. If I had wanted to kill you, trust me, I would’ve.”

  A fed-up-looking doctor in a floral print dress and a white coat bustled out of the room.

  I peeked through the yellow curtain to find Skye, sulky and supine on a metal exam table with her shoulder exposed and alarmingly swollen.

  “Are you okay?” I rushed to her side. “What did the doctor say?”

  She stopped pouting at the ceiling and looked at me like I was about to part the Red Sea. “You’re back! Did you see him? What’d he say?”

  I glanced around the sterile white room and fixated on a jar of cotton balls resting on the shelf above her head. “Well. I didn’t get to talk to him directly. Listen, what did the doctor say about your shoulder? Do you want me to call Mom?”

  “Don’t change the subject.” Her eyes were huge. “What’s going on? Are you hiding something from me?”

  “I went to his house,” I admitted. “He wasn’t there. But his wife was.”

  “So he does have a wife?” She sighed, then tried to make the best of this. “Did she say he’d left her for a beautiful blonde?”

  “Or a stunning young redhead?” Sally piped up from the other side of the curtain.

  “Not exactly. We’ll talk about it later, okay? It’s kind of a long story. Now, seriously, how’s your shoulder?”

  “They think my collarbone’s broken, and two of my fingers.” She held up her right hand. The fingers she kept so carefully moisturized and manicured were twisted and livid.

  “That looks awful. Are you in horrendous pain?”

  She grimaced and nodded slowly.

  “Well, so am I,” Sally proclaimed. “The airbag broke my wrist.”

  Skye went from kitten to cougar in two seconds flat. “I’m so sorry you hurt yourself running me over with your car.”

  I could see why the physician had looked so harassed.

  “What happened to Leah and Lars?” I asked.

  “Leah had to go pick up Rex. She said you should call her tonight. And I told Lars to stay in the waiting room. He was making this big deal about doing something useful.” She raised her voice. “So I asked him to go call Sally’s insurance company and see if we can throw her in jail.” My sister stopped threatening litigation long enough to gawk at me. “Faithie. What happened?”

  Startled, I followed her stare to the blue dishtowel tied to my forearm, which I’d momentarily forgotten about in all the excitement. There were dark wet splotches seeping through the fabric
. I tucked my arm behind my back and squeezed her hand. “Oh. Nothing much. I sort of had an accident. Don’t worry about it.”

  “What happened?” she pressed. I could tell she was dying for more details about what had transpired at the Hammonds’.

  “Nothing,” I said firmly. “Let’s move on.”

  And we did. “How cute was Lars when he dragged me off to the hospital? Let me tell you something about that boy—you could break bricks on his pecs.”

  “Hold it right there.” I clapped a hand to my forehead. “Are you or are you not currently in the E.R. because of a love triangle worthy of Aaron Spelling? Don’t you think it’s a little early to be discussing Lars’ pecs?”

  “It’s called a transitional man,” she said loftily. “He’s going to help me at the bar from now on. Plus, he can shut up for three minutes at a time, which is more than I can say for Ian.”

  “Somebody say ‘amen’,” intoned the disembodied voice of Sally Hutchins.

  The physician returned, X rays in hand. She pinned these up to a lighted box mounted on the wall and pointed at the abstract jumble of black and white lines.

  “Your right clavicle is broken,” she told Skye. “We’re going to line it up and set it now. You’ll need to keep your arm in a sling for three or four weeks.”

  “How’s my wrist?” Sally yelled through the curtain.

  “Still broken. We’ll discuss it in a minute,” the doctor yelled back. She turned to me, raising her eyebrows at my tea towel tourniquet. “If you’ll excuse us.”

  “Of course. Skye, I’ll be right outside if you need me.” I headed for the waiting room pay phones.

  There was no message from Flynn. Of course.

  I wasn’t surprised; I knew I wouldn’t get off that easy. I had made this mess, and I needed to clean it up myself. No deus ex machina miracle was going to magically reconcile an inveterate grudge-holder and a commitment-phobe. Unfortunately.

  The first message was from Ian, telling Skye he’d have to cancel a date tomorrow because “something’s come up.” The second was Sally, sounding like a cross between Joan Crawford and Donald Duck, commanding Skye to call her back immediately. The time stamp placed this call at a scant thirty minutes before the Main Street Massacre.

  The third message was from my editor, who, I was relieved to hear, was not demanding to see a final draft of the Tuscany piece. In fact, he didn’t mention Italy at all.

  “Faith! We just finished some meetings, and we’ve decided to go ahead with a whole special issue on the Southern California cuisine scene.” I pressed the receiver against my ear. “Mostly Los Angeles. Maybe a little bit of Santa Barbara and Orange County. Your scene. So you can stop complaining about how much you hate it out there in the wilderness because we need you back in civilization. Give me a call as soon as you can.”

  I kept listening to the soft whirr of recorded silence after he stopped talking.

  Lars would be only too happy to pick up where I’d left off with the Roof Rat. He’d do anything for Skye. And no matter how socially inept he was with the customers, he couldn’t be any worse than I was.

  I could say my good-byes, hop in the car, and in a few days I’d be back in California. In a desert full of flowers where it was too dry for mosquitoes and the smog only enhanced the vibrant colors of the sun setting over the ocean. I could trade Lindbrook’s volatile weather and small-town scrutiny for the balmy warmth and anonymity of Los Angeles. I could swap Thompson’s Dry Goods for the Beverly Center. I could be free. And no one could claim I was running away. My glamorous career beckoned, and I had to follow.

  But for some reason, I did not respond to this news in what I knew to be the appropriate fashion (i.e., doing backflips down the hall while singing “Going Back to Cali” at the top of my lungs). Flynn was still M.I.A. and I missed him. And I’d miss him more if I went back west, more than I did the first time because now I’d fully appreciate what I had lost. Every time I listened to some jackanape at Koi go on about how his Milan photo shoot just hadn’t panned out yet, I’d think about what I’d left behind.

  And Flynn would never go with me. Even if, through some odds-defying feat of diplomacy, I managed to win him back, he was one of those stalwart Minnesota natives who harbors a love of their arctic motherland that borders on the fanatic. I thought back to the conversations we’d had about hockey and fishing and family values, how intense he’d looked when he talked about his job. He belonged here.

  But it was more than that. I’d miss Leah and Stan and Rachel and Rex. I’d miss the wide-open silence of country evenings, the joys of dressing down and driving a really crappy car with pride. And I’d miss Skye. We were just getting to know each other as adult friends instead of siblings allied against adversity. She was the best part of my fractured family, the weakness that forced me to be strong.

  I had a history with Flynn and Skye. They knew all the twists and turns I’d taken early in my journey, and why. No matter how close I might get to someone else, I would never find that same shorthand understanding that comes from sharing a past.

  Something inside me had shifted during the past few weeks. I didn’t know if the change was good or bad, but it was permanent.

  “Dammit, dammit, son of a bitch.” I rested my head against the rough beige wallpaper that smelled of antiseptic and stared through the glass doors at the end of the hall. Beyond the asphalt parking lot was a vast expanse of cobalt sky streaked with clouds. The horizon under which I’d grown up now seemed almost as wide and fresh as the Pacific or the Mediterranean.

  And then a shaded silhouette appeared, as they say, out of the blue. I knew it was Flynn before I could discern his face—his stride and his posture were like kinetic fingerprints.

  Pieces of me that I’d kept separated since I first left Lindbrook started to collide. Whatever had happened in his apartment, whatever he must think of me right now, he had come. Probably more for Skye’s sake than mine, but he had come when I needed him. That was enough for the moment.

  So I did what I always did under duress. I ran.

  I ran down the hallway and into his arms with no regard for personal space or good manners. I was trusting him to accept—for the moment—all my contradictions, to ignore his better judgment, and to catch me when I threw myself at him.

  And he did.

  He paused for a second, his body absorbing the impact of mine, and then he wrapped his arms around me while I buried my face in his soft gray T-shirt. He smelled like the promised land mingled with traces of laundry soap. And in that moment, I fell right back in love with him. So simple, yet so complicated.

  He stood there for a second, just letting me hold onto him in the hushed taupe waiting room. And then he stepped back and picked up my left wrist.

  “What the hell happened to your arm?”

  20

  Where to begin? Just imagine a movie called My Sister, Her Lover, His Wife, and Their Dog, Roland. Imagine the movie gets an ‘R’ rating for explicit language and vicious animal attacks.”

  His eyebrows shot up and his grip on my forearm tightened. “That’s a dog bite? When exactly did this happen?”

  I blinked at the blue dishrag, sort of surprised to realize that it still hurt. “About an hour ago. I guess.”

  He slid his hand under my right elbow and steered me back to the urgent care clinic. “Let’s get this checked out before you go Old Yeller on me.”

  “I did nothing to provoke this,” I said, anxious to clear my name as an animal lover.

  “No one’s saying you did.” He nodded at the waiting room receptionist, who rolled her eyes, turned up the soft-rock radio station, and handed him a clipboard to fill out. “I just don’t want to have to drag you out to the backyard and shoot you.”

  “I was taking care of Skye,” I explained.

  “Yes, and I’m taking care of you.” He filled out my name and local address on the clipboard, then handed it off to me.

  The form asked for my permanent address.
That was a head-scratcher. “How did you know we were here?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? A Sally Hutchins, Skye Geary, and Ian Hammond love triangle? With car crashes and hysterics? It was all over town in ten seconds flat. My voicemail’s overflowing with messages from ‘concerned citizens’ who ‘just thought I’d want to know’ what my business partners are up to.”

  I slumped into the Naugahyde chair. “So everyone knows about the Ian thing?”

  “If you guys wanted to keep it a secret, you shouldn’t have been screaming about it in front of Cherry’s Café at lunch hour.”

  The phrase “lunch hour” reminded me. “Hey, shouldn’t you be at work? It’s Monday.”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “I’d say this qualifies as a personal day.”

  The next hour was a blur of detailed questions and unappetizing medical procedures. The same physician who had just sentenced Skye and Sally to overnight observation in the upstairs clinic (in a shared room, God help us all), attended to me. She introduced herself as Dr. Shelbourne and got right down to brass tacks.

  “Have you had a tetanus shot in the last five years?” she demanded, flushing out my gaping lacerations with water and yellow fluid from an unlabeled plastic bottle.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, wincing anew at the sight of my mangled flesh. Roland had been quick but thorough.

  “Try to remember.” Dr. Shelbourne was clearly at the end of her tether with the Roof Rat Delegation.

  I racked my brains, then said, “I don’t think so.” Flynn gave me the same look that his grandmother used to give us when we forgot to wear our mittens in January.

  “Well then, after I wash this out, you’re going to need a few stitches, and we’ll give you a tetanus booster. I’m also going to prescribe a cycle of antibiotics to prevent skin flora. Are you absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent certain the dog is current on his rabies vaccinations?”

  “That’s what the owner said.” I swallowed hard as the doctor broke out a silver tray full of scary-looking sharp steel instruments.