2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) (24 page)

This was their fourth stop of the day and Walmart,
like the rest, had nothing for them by way of elephants, which left specialty
stuffed animal shops, Catherine guessed. Although she didn’t even know if such
things existed anymore. Back when she was Cara’s age they’d had an entire store
at the mall devoted to stuffed animals in every shape, size, and species. A
place like that would certainly have these Gingermelon animals, and probably
elephants aplenty.

“We could always just go get that Elefun game we saw,”
Tara offered.

“And that helps how?”

“At least it’s an elephant, right? And a game as well.
A win-win if you think about it.”

Catherine ignored her, turning into the next aisle where
the smell of rubber was overwhelming from volumes of bikes stocked on
multilevel racks.

“How about a bike?”

“One with an elephant on it?” she smirked.

“Why not?”

“Because I think Cara will know the difference, let
alone the fact that there are no elephant bikes either.”

“Just trying to be a problem solver,” Tara shrugged.

Catherine was close to giving up. Maybe this was what
Christmas was destined to be like, not just this year but on into the future. A
lot of hunting and gathering and little to show for it.

Tara grabbed her by the arm, stopping her, and
Catherine’s heart skipped a beat that their search had just paid off.

“See the guy over there?” she whispered, pointing
through to the next aisle from between the upper and lower racks of bikes.

Catherine took in the man perusing the mountain bikes—nice
looking, dress pants, a crisp button down, no tie.

“He’s a classic snurge.”

“Snurge?”

Tara shuddered and nodded at once. “They get off on sniffing
bicycle seats.”

“Eew,” Catherine whined.

“They prefer used bikes, ones that have just been
ridden, but in this weather, I guess you take what you can get.”

“Oh my God, Tara, that’s so gross.”

“Don’t look at me; I’m not the one doing it.”

“But how do you even know about it?”

“All I’m going to say is I wouldn’t let a guy like
that near my nethers,” gesturing at her lower half. “Never again.”

“You’ve slept with a snurge?” Catherine wrinkled her
nose.

“In my defense, it’s hard to detect a fetish like that
if you’re never around bikes. Unforeseeable, really. Then I saw him at the gym—”

“Again,
eew
.”

“I second that.”

“And you like being single, why exactly?” Catherine
nudged.

“I’m not saying it doesn’t have its pitfalls,” Tara
admitted.

An understatement as far as she saw it, but there were
more pressing things to concern herself with. “Can we please just get back to
what we’re doing here in the first place?”

“Alright, alright.” Tara whipped out her phone and
started tapping away and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. “You know, I don’t
even see a single Gingerfruity thing online. Nobody sells them.”

“Maybe that’s because I said Ginger
melon
.”

“Why it’s Catherine Trager!” The disembodied voice was
too happy, too perky, too much like it was calling her down as a contestant on
The
Price is Right
who should respond in kind, running and cheering with her
hands in the air—so lucky to be spotted.

“Crap,” she said under her breath.

“That’s only marginally better than shit, you know,”
Tara joked.

But Catherine didn’t have time for jokes right now,
seeing as how the owner of the obnoxiously charged voice was heading in for the
kill. “Well, if it isn’t Sophie Watts,” she said using her own brand of fake
excitement.

The woman was closing the gap quickly, too quickly,
and then she was right there in Catherine’s personal space, reaching out. She
heard Tara say “What the—” but must have blacked out on the rest because Sophie
Watts was
hugging
her now. A power play.

“Oh my goodness, you’re even bigger!” the woman
chuckled, like it was
sooo
funny. “After the last time I saw you, I’d
just assumed that you would have had the baby by now. You aren’t due yet?”

“Now
that’s
a bitch move. See, Cat, that’s what
I’m talking about,” Tara asserted.

“Excuse me?” Sophie Watts asked in a well-I-never
tone.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she explained, “we just dealt with
some broad out in the parking lot over a parking space, and I was pointing out
that it might have been a little questionable that she had the right of way for
the spot, but
this here
is definitely out of line.”

Sophie Watts looked around like Tara had to be talking
about someone or something else.

“Oh, I’m talking about you,” she assured her.

The woman’s expression turned cagey as she realized she
was on enemy ground. “I didn’t mean anything by… anything.”

“Sure, of course, nothing at all,” Tara said
offhandedly, searching through her purse like she had better things to do in
there.

The cagey look morphed into outright concern, as if
Sophie Watts saw her producing pepper spray or a knife or more likely brass
knuckles. “Listen, I just wanted to say hi. Nothing more.”

“Oh? Really? Then go right on ahead.” Tara gestured
that she had the floor.

Catherine’s eyes volleyed back to Sophie this time,
who was trapped with her mouth hanging open in disbelief.

“I, uh… already did.”

Tara laser-focused on the nervous woman. “Actually,
you didn’t. Not a hey, hello, or how-do-you-do. I heard a slap and a slam and
an outright jab. But no hi at all.”

Catherine could have kissed her henchman right there.
On the lips. In the middle of the store. But Tara might like it a little too
much considering her sexual frustrations at the moment, and there would
definitely be lesbian rumors all around Nekoyah in minutes’ time, which was
something she didn’t need to bring down on her family.

Sophie Watts recuperated all too quickly though, reclaiming
her jaw from the floor and unleashing a blow Catherine hadn’t seen coming. “By
the way, did I hear you two discussing Gingermelon animals a minute ago?”

Definitely a baited trap dangling there before her,
but one that she didn’t know how to evade just the same.
Kind of?
Maybe?
Or Tara’s likely response,
What is it to you?
All of the above sounded ridiculous,
more like a politician trying to avoid answering a simple question that would
show his true colors, a lily-livered shade.

“Yes.” Catherine tried to sound certain and sure of
herself even though she knew the hammer was about to come down because she
could see an ugly joy dancing in the woman’s eyes.

“But of course Cara is asking for one. Every little
girl wants Gingermelons this year,” Sophie Watts tittered.

“They
are
popular,” she agreed, having no idea,
seeing as how she had just learned of them yesterday and had since had no luck
actually finding one, or finding anyone who knew anything about them. The fact
that someone finally knew what she was searching for was a boon; the fact that
it was Sophie Watts sucked total ass.

“I feel so sorry for those moms out there who don’t
sew. They must be panicking over the whole craze.” Her tone so blatantly
not
sorry
for anyone that Catherine was surprised Tara wasn’t already swinging.

“Sewing?” Catherine blurted.

“They’re handmade. Didn’t you know?” The woman’s eyes
widened in the thrill of the moment.

“Of course she knew. Everyone knows that.” Tara waved her
hand that held some kind of shiny metal and Sophie Watts took a step back,
expecting more than the nail file that Tara started shaping her nails with.
“Oh, did I scare you?” she asked innocently.

“No, not at all. I just have to get on my way. I have
wrapping to do. A whole zoo of Gingermelons for that matter. Sally is getting
one of everything.” And with that she sauntered off like only the wicked ice
queen could.

“
Gack!
” Tara exclaimed in cartoon form. “What
the hell was that? Like nails on a chalkboard. Awful. Just plain awful.”

“That was my own special version of hell,” Catherine
said lowly, turning in the other direction to head deeper into the store even
though they were obviously done here. No Gingermelons to buy. A total bust.

“Wait! Catherine!” The voice of the devil herself.

“She’s ba-ack,” Tara sang out like little Carol Anne
in
Poltergeist,
the movie that had literally scared Catherine witless
when she was about Cara’s age and saw it at a friend’s house.

Catherine turned back to Sophie who was keeping a
definitive distance from Tara. “I meant to ask if you were going to be at the
party on Friday?”

“Of course.” As if there was nowhere on earth she
would rather be than there to observe Sophie’s party-planning perfection. There
were a lot of other places, but Cara would be at the party so she would be
there no matter what.

“Well good.” The
for you
was implied and hard
to miss. “Since you are, I was wondering if you could possibly bring in
napkins.”

The proverbial olive branch, reaching it out like a
request for paper products made up for swiping the whole party out from under
her. Sophie Watts, the bigger person, willing to release her hold on a minute
detail and hand it over to her predecessor in a gesture of goodwill and no hard
feelings.

In your dreams, bitch.

“Oh, you need napkins?” Tara blurted. “Aren’t you
lucky that you’re in a store right now. Just a hop, skip and jump away from a
whole selection of napkins. I’ll be crossing my fingers for you that you find
the perfect ones!”

Sophie turned to Catherine. “Well I—I just thought
that since you’ve been such an active part of the class this year, maybe you’d
want to—”

“Do you
need
napkins?” Catherine asked.

“Well of course I can bring them. But if you wanted to
do something—”

“So you don’t need them,” she clarified.

“I’ll just bring them if you don’t want to,” Sophie
Watts said smartly.

“Well I think you’re going to bring them no matter how
I answer,” Catherine pointed out.

There was a moment’s pause and then a sigh. “Forget
it. I was only trying to be nice.”

“Ooh, really? It doesn’t come easy for you, does it?”
Tara noted.

As Sophie hobbled away on her designer heels,
Catherine turned to Tara, her eyes welling with tears of gratitude. “
That
was
amazing.”

“What?” she shrugged back.

“That. Nobody does that to Sophie Watts.”

“Who the hell is Sophie Watts anyway?”

“She is the all-knowing, all-doing,
perfect
mother.
And an almighty bitch.”

“Is this the woman I’m going to trounce in the
lighting competition?” A done deal as far as Tara was concerned.

“If you win, yes,” Catherine said conservatively,
considering it was probably rigged just like everything else Sophie Watts was
involved in.

“Oh, I’m gonna win alright. No one beats a Delrio at
lighting. Can’t happen.”

Catherine raised her eyebrows noncommittally.

“So what’s this party she’s talking about anyway?”
Tara asked.

“The Snow Party. At school.
That
is the room
mother for Cara’s class—”

“Wait, I thought
you
were the room mother for
Cara’s class.”

“I was. For a few months. I got ousted.”

“By that nightmare in Jimmy Choo’s? Jimmy himself
should come and take her heels away for giving his brand a bad name.”

Catherine smirked gratefully.

“How does that happen? She’s terrible! Why would
anyone want to give that woman any power at all? Does she have compromising
photos of Cara’s teacher? What?”

“I’m a crappy room mother,” Catherine admitted. “And
Sophie Watts has no shame to call it like she sees it.”

“Oh no she didn’t.”

“Plus, she carries drinks, food, paper products—spare
everything—all of it in the back of her minivan everywhere she goes so she can
save the day whenever anyone forgets anything. Like some kind of evil Superwoman.
There’s no way to compete with that.”

“How did I not know anything about any of this?”

“Because I thought you would think it was all
ridiculous. Why would anyone even want to be a room mother? That’s kind of what
you said back when I mentioned it.”

“But I don’t want any friend of mine to get bullied.”

“I wish Georgia felt that way,” she grumbled.

“Good old Georgia sided with Sophie Watts?”

A grim nod.

“Yeah, it figures. Some people are immune to those
women. Above their put-downs. Tall enough that the Watts’s can’t stare down
their nose at them.” A look passed over Tara’s face. The one she got when
things were about to get crazy.

“No, Tara,” Catherine reprimanded her gently but
firmly, like one would a dog who is getting a bit too rambunctious.

“You should bring the napkins,” she said. “Good old
Mardi Gras napkins. Or econo brand everyday table napkins with flower buds that
say spring, instead of holiday designs. That would just drive someone like her
crazy. Batshit crazy. It would be brilliant.”

Catherine felt a rumbling of righteousness in her gut.
“Do what she wants but not the way she wants it,” she said softly.

“Exactly.”

“But then she’ll just save the day with her perfectly
well-appointed emergency stash of napkins that match her plates and everything
else.”

Tara tapped her chin, thinking. “Two can play that
game.” A twinkle in her eye.

“What game?”

“She pushed you out of your seat and now we can push
back.”

“We?”

“We’ll take it over.”

“They aren’t going to turn around with two days’
notice and let us run the show. And definitely not after the last couple parties,”
Catherine pointed out.