Danger, Sweetheart Part 4

She grinned. "Trying to figure the mix?" He glanced away, embarra.s.sed to be caught gaping like a teenager, and she laughed outright. "Irish and German on my dad's side, and-"

He tried not to interrupt her, tried to stop himself, but the thought had hit him and come right out of his mouth like he was Rake, or five. "You-" Are lovely. Are intriguing. Are carrying too many folders. "-have high cheekbones." At some point in the festivities, she had carefully put the folders on the sidewalk. A prudent move.

"It's good that you told me that," she replied, sounding perfectly serious, then shattering the illusion with a snicker. "Hadn't ever noticed."

"I think my brain is also numb."

"You really shouldn't leave the door open like that. You're basically demanding to be made fun of. It's entrapment!"

"Please," he replied. Please stay here and keep talking to me. Please don't take two trips when you can barely manage one, because otherwise we'd never have met. Please tell me how a stranger's smile makes me want to smile, too. Please. "Mock away if you like. My brother is one of the world's greatest mockers and he's been torturing me for years. You have no power over me." Lie.

What is wrong with me? We've only just met. It's not even s.e.xual-or not entirely. I just like hearing her voice and watching her eyes. Did I hit my head on the way down, too?

She squatted again to help him, and this time as he grasped her small, cool hand he was able to rise to his feet. "Naw. Too easy. Don't say, 'That's what she said.'"

He snorted and managed-just-not to rub his coccyx. "What year do you think this is?"

"Touche." She bent to scoop the folders back into her arms, blocking him with her coccyx when he moved to help. "Nope. Confidential, sorry."

"Oh." Do not leer at her lovely behind. Do not.

"I've ... you know." She jerked her head toward the rambling white house. "Gotta get back to it."

"'It'? Do you work here?"

"No, it's a temporary setup. The Great Outdoors Band is in town, so..."

He should not, he thought as she trotted off after a parting smile, but he did. He liked how she said things that made no sense, then a.s.sumed he understood everything. It should have been annoying. It absolutely was not.

He watched her until she went around the side of the house (a temporary setup, but she eschews the front door?) and then went to find his mother. If he'd known what was coming, he never would have left the driveway. If he'd known he'd just had the best part of his month, he never would have left the Supertruck.

Six.

"Couldn't help yourself and I blame myself. Took your offer to help and didn't think about what it meant, what you'd do, and instead of actual help you went Martian and doomed this town!"

Blake, fluent in four languages (including English), had no idea what his mother had just shouted. He tried to pa.r.s.e the sentences; surely the answer was in there somewhere. Couldn't help yourself ... blame myself. Active voice, suggesting current events in which I played a significant part. Think about what it meant: she had antic.i.p.ated another outcome. Actual help ... Martian? Several theories: 1) my mother is an alien, 2) my mother thinks I am an alien, 3) my mother is drunk at eleven A.M., 4) my mother has gone clinically insane, 5) this woman isn't my mother; she is a hologram programmed by alien scientists to mimic my mother exactly, 6) if not alien scientists, then perhaps programmed by- A sharp crack! an inch from his left ear; his mother had crossed the room while he ruminated. The sound sent him rocketing back into his body and (unfortunately) back in his mother's room.

"Come back here right now," she ordered. "No sneaking into your brain when I'm talking to you."

Talking? Then, the even more perplexed thought: sneaking?

"I apologize. You were ranting?"

"We were discussing your giant c.o.c.k-up."

Blake blinked. My mother said "c.o.c.k." Yes, it was part of a hyphenated word, but she could have said "screwup." b.a.l.l.s-up. Even f.u.c.kup. Any of those would have been fine. Perhaps not "b.a.l.l.s." What is happening? "I don't understand."

"Exactly!"

"You seemed-we only-you were besieged. On the phone, all those talks we had, you sounded..." Broken. Bereft. Lonely. "... overwhelmed."

"It was good of you to call," she replied, calming. "You always called right back, no matter when you got my messages. You're a good boy, when you're not killing me with blood pressure spikes brought on by stress."

"I-" No. He had no follow-up to that. Best to stay quiet.

His mother let out a short bark of a laugh. "And yes, overwhelmed, that's putting it-are you saying I inferred I needed you to rush to my rescue?"

No.

Don't, Blake.

Do not do this.

"Actually-"

Blake!

He shut out the increasingly hysterical inner voice. "-I inferred, as I was the listening party; you implied. 'Infer' and 'imply' are opposites."

You care nothing for living. Definitive proof at long last.

Pretending not to notice his mother's reddening forehead, he doggedly followed the line of thought to its logical conclusion. "The speaker implies. The listener infers. I inferred."

"Not. Now. Blake."

"I'll put the badge away," he agreed at once. Even when Rake wasn't there (Hey, grammar police! Shove that badge right up your a.s.s!) he was there. And it bought him a smile, thank goodness, however brief. Time to get back on track. "During our conversations I inferred you felt overwhelmed. You implied you were plagued with problems."

"Stop using the past tense!" she snapped back, but the fingers that had jerked him back to the present now affectionately ruffled his neatly combed hair (fun fact: she affectionately smoothed Rake's eternally mussed hair) before pulling away so she could resume her pace/rant. Her pant. Her race? "And the only thing I'm plagued with is sons."

Hands shoved wrist deep in his pockets, Blake sc.r.a.ped his toe along the green floral carpet, scowling down at it as he mumbled, "'M not a plague."

An inelegant snort was his mother's reb.u.t.tal. He looked up to watch her pace and was disoriented-again-by the decor.

Flowers, had been his initial thought upon entering the room. Flowers everywhere. But not in a charming meadow way. A funeral home way. Flowered carpeting (green, with sizeable pink cabbage roses). Flowered wallpaper (white tea roses over pale pink stripes). Flowered curtains (suns.h.i.+ne yellow background and tiebacks littered with roughly eight million daisies). His mother had been pacing back and forth so quickly, her small form darting from floral-curtained window to floral-curtained window over floral carpet, that she reminded him of an irritated hornet trapped in a vase with flowers not at all happy to be in there with her.

"Do you know what I'm trying to accomplish here?" she asked after another minute. But she shook her head even as he opened his mouth. "No, that's not fair. I never told you boys in so many words. I spent decades never talking about this place; I can't put that on you two."

Thank G.o.d! Blake, you idiotic b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you just might live through this! "Then why-?"

"I thought that when you said you were coming to help ... I thought you meant help."

"I did help!" he protested. "You don't have to worry about the farms anymore. They aren't your responsibility anymore." Why are we still discussing this? Why are you so upset when the problem was easily solved? Why am I overnighting in the world's oddest bed-and-breakfast?

"Yes. They. Are!" She whirled on him so quickly, Blake experienced a sympathy dizzy spell. "That's the whole point. That's what you don't get."

Dear G.o.d. More italics talk. Not good, most emphatically not good. It forced him to say three words he loathed, words he tried never to say aloud if he could help it, a bad habit that had led to much unpleasantness: "I don't understand."

"No. You don't; that's clear to me like it never was before. That's on me, too. But you will, boy. I promise."

"All right." Blake pitted every shred of self-control into not sounding terrified. "Enlighten me, if you please. I'm all yours. Here, I'll..." He looked around, spotted nothing to sit on that wasn't embroidered, topped, or near flowers, and sank into the overstuffed chair near the fireplace.

"Now you listen like your life depends on it, Blake." Unspoken: because it does. "What you've done in your Martian arrogance is ... is..." His mother was trailing off in confusion (he could count the number of times that happened on both hands) and staring into s.p.a.ce.

"Mother?" She was too young for Alzheimer's, he thought in a panic. Wait; was she?

"Oh!" she gasped, slapping herself on the forehead like a gothic heroine. "I promised Roger I'd help him deworm the White Rose of York!"

Blake stared up at her from the chair that was making a valiant effort to suck him in. If there was such a thing as flower quicksand, this chair was the physical manifestation of such an ent.i.ty. "You promised who? To do what?"

"Deworm the White Rose of York. She's a pig," his mother added impatiently, clearly irritated with Blake's continual stupidity.

Blake began to give serious thought to the theory that the train had crashed, that he was even now in a canyon somewhere with train cars piled everywhere, slowly bleeding out. All of this ... whatever it was ... it was just a hallucination conjured by his dying brain to divert him from the fact of his own death.

"Mom, I don't-"

"To be continued!" she snapped, jabbing a bony finger in the general vicinity of his face before sweeping out the door. "We are not done!" she italicized, her voice getting farther away with every stomp. She didn't slam the door-Shannah Tarbell would never indulge in such childish behavior, no matter how tempting-but the weight of her displeasure was much worse.

Blake, never a fan of casual profanity (everyone does it; there are so many more interesting ways to express shock/anger/surprise/sadness; how dull), managed a, "What the f.u.c.k?" before allowing the chair to suck him the rest of the way in. If he was lucky, it would suffocate him.

Seven.

The terms, the hideous impossible terms of his withdrawal from disgrace and reinstatement into his mother's affections, were made horrifyingly clear over dinner that evening.

Blake, suspecting nothing, arrived five minutes early. Used to the teeming ma.s.ses of the greater Las Vegas area, he had overestimated the time to traverse from UR A Sweetheart! (G.o.d, that exclamation point unnerved him) to the (why? why?) Dipsy Diner.

He had parked the Supertruck at one end of the neatly kept downtown area and, as he walked the streets, he began to get an inkling of what had so disturbed his mother.

Everything was dead, or dying.

Not the few people he saw; they were lively enough, if quiet, keeping their distance and watching him pa.s.s with wide-eyed curiosity. Small towns, he told himself, surprised he wasn't made uneasy by the scrutiny, and strangers stand out. Is my mother a stranger to them? I think yes. I think she was even before she left the first time.

There were many For Sale signs on lawns. There were many Going Out of Business sales advertised in windows. The few cars and trucks parked on the streets were old, though neatly kept. He didn't see a single vehicle from the twenty-first century. That could have been a matter of personal preference but, as he took in obvious signs of a town sliding into the void, plus the lack of car dealers.h.i.+ps, Blake doubted it.

His phone buzzed, alerting him to a text. He plucked it off his hip and read: R U in town tonite? 3rd month-aversery of divorce let's f.u.c.k!

Jeanine! In Vegas and feeling sentimental; how charming. He wished she would have called instead; he found texting for s.e.x (or to turn down s.e.x) to be a little cold for his taste. He wasn't Rake, dammit. He wasn't a G.o.dd.a.m.ned barbarian.

So sorry, out of town for a few days. Congratulations again. Your ex was a fool.

He hadn't had a chance to put his phone away when it buzzed again. U R a sweetie!!!! Sorry to miss U LV not the same when U R not here!!!

He sighed; he loathed text-speak (another reason why he preferred the more personal touch behind a phone call). Was it so difficult to spell out words and use appropriate punctuation?

Sorry again. Hope to see your lovely face next time you are in town. Ciao, bella.

And that was that, and just in time, because here was the Dipsy Diner (G.o.d!) on the corner of Main Street (there are main streets literally named Main Street? outside of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction?) and Elm, across from a Realtor's office and beside a drugstore with a For Sale sign in the windows on either side of the door. He stepped inside, rolling his eyes at the cheery ka-jang jang! of the bell hanging directly over his head (like a scythe, one that sounds cheerful as it separates your head from your spinal cord) and spotted his mother, seated in her favorite location: a booth equidistant from the kitchen and the restrooms. She nodded and waved him over and, as he couldn't see a weapon, he crossed the room to her.

"Mother."

"Blake." She shook her head at him but found a smile. "We've had this talk every year since you were three."

"Right, too formal. Mom? Mommy. Mama. Madre. Mre?" He could remember explaining to his mother on his third birthday that only babies used "Mommy" or "Mama," while Rake laughed and laughed in the background. Now Blake only used "Mother" ironically, except when he honestly forgot.

Distracting her with multiple languages would work, but not for long. But here came the waitress with menus and their water. Excellent; his mother would never eviscerate him in front of a witness. Blake thanked the waitress and gave himself over to the luxury of enjoying a water gla.s.s his brother wouldn't steal and drain in three noisy gulps. Meanwhile, the waitress, who was likely sixteen due to employment laws but looked a harried twelve, was bending an attentive ear to Shannah Tarbell.

"Mult.i.task, dear," she was suggesting, accepting the menus. "You have to go back to the kitchen anyway, so grab dirty plates on your way. You've got to refill drinks for another customer; ask the new customers if they want drinks right away, since you'll be over there anyway."

"Oh! That's ... yeah. D'you want drinks? I mean besides water?"

"Mom, you're not in charge of her training. Leave her be." He didn't even have to look to know he was getting The Glare. I have literally faced death and walked away unmoved. And yet I'm terrified of my mother, a pet.i.te woman in her fifties I'm almost certain I could take in a fight. If I had any sort of a life, this would probably bother me.

"Milk, please," his dictator-for-life mother was saying, "and more ice water."

"Okay. Yeah. Those are good...." The small brunette flapped a hand at the tables behind and around them, over half of which were empty. "Thanks for being nice about it. I'm just..."

"New, yes. You'll get it."

"Hope not," she muttered, already heading back for drinks. "Want out of this town."

Shannah sighed. "You and several others." Her gaze settled back on Blake. "Which brings me to the subject of this meeting."

"I'm impressed you waited this long, Mom," Blake said. "Such restraint!"

"My first and last favor to you this evening."

He smiled at her fondly disgruntled tone. "Shall I take that to mean you'll decline to pick up the check?"

A stifled hmph was his reply; then she leaned forward to catch his gaze. Like a cobra hypnotizing a sparrow, he thought. "You get a chance to look around Sweetheart?"

"Yes."

"Not a lot going on?"

"That was my impression, yes." Minefield. This entire conversation is a G.o.dd.a.m.ned minefield.

"This restaurant is a prime example of what's gone wrong here."