My Bluegrass Baby (10 page)

“Your logic is very twisty.”

“I didn’t say it was healthy,” he acknowledged. “The good news is I think I’ve worked
through being so angry at her. Between lashing out at you—sorry—and seeing Lydia at
the Derby, I think I’ve got closure. She’s not the mythical she-beast I’d built up
in my head. I mean, she’s an awful person and I don’t want to be anywhere near her.
But she’s lonely and sad, and the bomb she dropped in the middle of my life didn’t
exactly work the way she’d hoped. At least I can walk away from this with my head
held high. Yeah, it’s embarrassing, but at least she was wrong. And she did me a favor,
saving me from proposing.

“I was wrong,” he admitted. “I was wrong to judge you so quickly and to take my anger
out on you.”

“I’m glad I could help, I think?” I unwrapped the Ho Ho and sank my teeth into chocolaty,
spongy goodness, which had a considerably nicer aftertaste than the vodka.

“You know, it occurs to me that I don’t know anything about you,” he said, chewing
on his sandwich. “I mean, you clearly looked into my background, but all I know about
you is that you have a deep, almost unnatural love for your home state.”

“Actually, I wasn’t born here. My mom died when I was ten and I moved here from Michigan
to live with my grandparents.”

He winced. “See, that’s something I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t talk about it much,” I assured him. “My grandparents were really wonderful
people. But they weren’t sure what to do with me when I came to live with them. I
mean, they were almost sixty and raising a kid again. And I was pretty quiet and withdrawn.
Gran insisted that Grandpa spend bonding time with me, like he did with my cousins.
When Grandpa asked how he should arrange the tea party for my teddy bears, and she
realized he wasn’t just being his usual sarcastic self, she told him to take me to
the tribal burial mounds at Wickliffe.”

“Isn’t that how Stephen King stories start?” he asked, grinning cheekily.

I smacked his shoulder, making him wince. “It’s a state park near the Illinois state
line. History had always been one of my best subjects in school, so I was running
around this place like it was Chuck E. Cheese’s. They have all of these little buildings
housing half-exposed burial mounds that ancient tribes used to bury their dead on
the riverbank. It brought me right out of my shell. I came alive. I asked questions.
I came up with elaborate justifications for why burial mounds should still be used
today. Grandpa was a little disturbed by my being so fascinated by ancient Native
American death traditions. But he was just glad I was talking. Every weekend we could
get away, we would visit some museum or state park. We traded weird random facts we’d
learned from
Reader’s Digest
or the newspaper’s ‘Did You Know?’ section. When we ran out of historical locations,
we started on the odd roadside attractions—Mammoth Cave, Big Mike’s Mystery House,
Tombstone Junction. Every once in a while, we let my grandma come with us.”

“And do your grandparents still live in Wickliffe?”

I chuckled, thinking of my grandparents’ snug little house on the outskirts of town.
Coming from a large northern city where I didn’t know my next-door neighbors, much
less the name of my mailman or the local funeral-home director, I loved the sense
of community and continuity I’d found in Ballard County. It was reassuring that my
high school math teacher had taught my mother in the very same classroom twenty years
before. And I liked knowing that if I went to the church potluck with my grandparents,
Mrs. Hopkins would provide her famous Coca-Cola fudge cake, and she would save me
a corner piece because she thought I was a much nicer teenager than her “god-awful”
grandkids.

Mrs. Hopkins eventually forgave me for selling my grandparents’ house to one of those
god-awful grandkids, which meant she had to see him regularly.

That’s when I realized that I hadn’t answered Josh’s question and I was just staring
off into space with a weird smile on my face. “Um, Gran died of breast cancer right
after I graduated from college.” I tipped my head against the wall, willing myself
not to sound maudlin or pathetic, but it was difficult with liquor in my system. “Grandpa
retired and opened up a bait shop with a couple of his cop buddies at Lake Barkley.
But he had a heart attack about two years ago and passed away.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. And, given the soft tone of his voice, I actually believed him.

“They had a good life together, and one wouldn’t have wanted to live very long without
the other.

“My cousins, Guy and Jake, are the only family I have left. They’re married and have
kids of their own, so they’re pretty busy. I see them sometimes on holidays, and that’s
pretty much it. It helps, having Ray and Kelsey, and the rest of my ‘office family.’
Ray’s wife makes sure I get a homemade birthday cake every year. Melody invites me
to holidays with her bizarre family, which actually makes me feel a little better
about not having many relatives. Our coworkers really helped me pull through when
Grandpa died.”

I sagged against the wall, feeling lighter and hollowed out from my confession. Josh
wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me against his side and protecting my
back from the unforgiving Sheetrock. It showed a level of consideration I was sure
I didn’t deserve. Josh wasn’t so bad, I supposed, when it came down to it. So much
of my dislike of him had boiled down to insecurities and resentment. And as far as
the Lord Gel-demort thing went, well, okay, so he was well groomed. But he’d started
his career in a big city where designer labels and putting the man in manicure were
important. We’d started off on the wrong foot, and while his attitude hadn’t been
great, the majority of the tension was the result of my antagonizing him. I pushed
and he pushed back.

Now if we could just push the damn closet door open and get out of here, I could tell
Kelsey I’d learned my lesson. And then beat her, severely.

“So this whole rabid devotion for all things Kentucky isn’t an act, is it?” he asked.

“I think ‘rabid’ is a bit unfair,” I retorted. “But yeah. When you don’t know what
it’s like to have a home and you find one, you get a little
enthusiastic
.”

“But there have to be things about living here that even you don’t like, like bluegrass
music. You can’t possibly
like
bluegrass music, right? Or when you drive home from work, are you cranking up the
Jean Ritchie and rocking it out?”

“No,” I scoffed. “I really, really dislike it. Okay? But I don’t have to like everything
about my state. For instance, I’m not a big fan of KFC, but that doesn’t mean that
I’m not going to smile and sing the extra-crispy recipe’s praises should it ever come
up in conversation while we’re promoting what’s great about Kentucky.”

He grinned broadly, cursed blue eyes all a-twinkle. “Oh my God, are you recording
me right now?” I demanded, scooching away into a kneeling position and jabbing him
in the chest with my finger. “Are you going to use this rant as blackmail material
when selling me out to the fast-food cartels?”

He grabbed my hand to prevent further poking. “No, you paranoid freak, I just love
watching you get all passionate in your defense of fried chicken. Isn’t it exhausting,
being this wound up over everything?”

“A little,” I admitted. “Isn’t it boring
not
getting wound up about anything? That’s what scares me about you. You don’t even
care! You don’t care about this job. You’re going to take the contacts you make here
with companies like Delacour and use them to open some soulless marketing temple to
your alpha-male awesomeness.”

God. Damn. Vodka. And its ability to melt my already compromised verbal filters.

“Oh, come on.” He pulled on my wrist, dragging me toward him in an off-balance crouch.
“You’re always saying crap like that about my work. Why don’t you take me seriously?
I had to have some skills for the commissioner to bring me in to take over
your job
.”

I glared down at him, more than a little irritated that the conversation had taken
this turn after we seemed to be making some progress. “I don’t take you seriously
because you say things like that. Oh, and because you shoot me ‘Blue Steel’ every
time you think I’m looking at you.”

“I do not do ‘Blue Steel’!” he exclaimed, the slightest tint of red creeping into
his cheeks, as I had basically accused him of unironic Derek Zoolander impersonations.
I gave him my best skeptical “nonmodel” expression. “Okay, it’s a little bit of a
pose. But you don’t make it easy on me, you know. Do you know what it’s like coming
into an office where you’re supposed to be replacing someone that nearly everybody
loves?”

“
Nearly
everybody?”

“Theresa,” he noted. “And Gina.”

“Dang it,” I groused.

“The secretarial pool hates me and I think Melody may be misdirecting my faxes to
Bangladesh. I’m still not entirely sure that Kelsey isn’t the one removing the screws
from my office furniture. Every time I sit down, my chair falls apart in a different
way.”

I stretched my legs out and bit down on my lip to prevent a laugh from escaping. I’d
seen Kelsey carrying an Allen wrench into Josh’s office a few times before her declaration
of ceasefire, but I’d had no clue what she was up to.

“You do good work,” he told me. “It’s visually interesting and funny and memorable.
We have different styles, that’s all. And mine happens to appeal to a broader audience.”

“Thanks.” I sighed. “And your work is . . . classically beautiful. And if I were interested
in taking a tour of every distillery and winery in Kentucky, I’m sure your campaign
would be what convinced me to do it.”

Josh snickered. “That was physically painful for you, wasn’t it?”

I nodded, pressing my lips together. “Yes, it was.”

“So you think I’m an alpha male?” He nudged me in the ribs, smirking at me.

“You have your Greek letters tattooed somewhere on your body, don’t you?”

He grinned and rolled down his sock to show me his frat’s insignia on his ankle. “I
knew it!” I cried.

“I was young and stupid . . . and drunk. So drunk.”

“Was the butterfly tramp stamp unavailable?”

“Hey! I thought we were playing nice,” he said, nudging me again.

“Sorry,” I said, hastily adding, “dude.”

A lovely, silent moment passed, allowing me to close my eyes and appreciate the warmth
radiating from Josh’s body and the swimmy vodka-soaked feeling in my head.

“Can I ask you a serious question?” I asked.

He snorted. “Are we asking any other kind tonight?”

“Why did you move back here when your life imploded?”

“It’s a fair question.” He shrugged. “I wanted to come back to what was familiar.
I wanted to be near my family, and away from all of my business contacts that had
received that damn e-mail. It’s a lot cheaper to live here than in a major city. Even
in a place like Louisville, the cost of living is a lot more reasonable. I could buy
a house here for what would maybe get me a room in a nice duplex in Atlanta . . .
with four roommates.”

“Got it.”

“And a shared bathroom,” he added.

“I got it,” I said again.

“Do you have any idea what a bunch of guys can do to a shared bathroom?”

“I
got
it,” I repeated, smacking his arm.

“Ow,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what hurts more, your fists or your firm grasp of
sarcasm.”

I frowned, feeling more than a little guilty for how I’d been treating Josh. Yes,
I’d been angry about his being hired, but it wasn’t his fault that he’d derailed me.
It hadn’t been intentional, at first. There was plenty to like about him. He was an
interesting guy. He was a good listener. He made me laugh, sometimes with him, sometimes
at him. Now that I could see something beyond the slick, irritating exterior, I was
much more comfortable talking to him. And despite said slick, irritating exterior,
there was something very decent about him. When he wasn’t trying to annoy the living
hell out of me. Which wasn’t often.

I had to stop thinking in sentence fragments.

“I’m sorry. I’m so tired of this,” I said, sighing and laying my head on his shoulder.
“I can’t keep up. I mean, we’re both working toward the same thing, right? At this
point, I’m more concerned about losing the job I have than about not getting the promotion.
I mean, this is not the way grown-up professional people behave.”

“You mean you give up? We’re calling a truce?”

“Not on the competition,” I insisted. “Just the sabotage. I think we can both admit
that it’s not exactly inspiring us to do our best work when we’re so worried about
what the other is doing that we’re not concentrating. Just imagine what we could come
up with if we were actually doing our jobs.”

“It’s a crazy theory, but it just might work,” he said, stretching his hand out to
me. “Normal, professional interactions from here on out, I promise.”

His hand felt so warm and pleasantly heavy against my own. I could practically feel
the ridges of his fingerprints against my skin. “Same here. And don’t worry, I’m pretty
sure Kelsey stopped unscrewing your furniture a while ago.”

“I knew it!”

In Which I Learn New and Disturbing Acronyms

6

After outlining some basic tenets of our treaty—no more insults at meetings; try to
heal the rift in the office; use words, not psychological violence—we abandoned the
angsty background conversations in favor of small talk. Favorite restaurants, college
stories, worst jobs. (Josh worked maintenance at an indoor flea market. I waitressed
the late shift at an off-brand Waffle House.) And of course, we debated the merits
of the Cardinals’ versus the Wildcats’ offensive lineups, but we managed to keep it
surprisingly civil.

We ate the Ho Hos and the sandwiches, drained both bottles of water. We rejected more
vodka for fear that our coworkers would find us passed out drunk in the supply closet
the next morning. I rummaged through the other drawers in the filing cabinet to see
if Kelsey had left us additional goodies. But the remaining drawers were filled to
the brim with heavy reams of paper.

“What the . . . ?” There was no reason for the paper to be stored in the filing cabinet.
We stored paper on the shelves against the wall. I opened the bottom drawer and found
a note in Kelsey’s bold block print.
Everything you need to get out is in this room.

“I’m going to fricking kill Kelsey,” I said with a sigh, thunking my head against
the side of the cabinet. “Ow.”

Her wording sounded familiar, even through the slightly muddled, vodka-damp workings
of my brain. I swiped my hand over my face and tried to remember where I’d heard it
before.

“Are you concentrating or are you having an aneurism?” Josh asked.

“Shh.” I held up one finger.

“Seriously, are you okay? That looks painful.”

I reached out and pinched his lips shut. “Thass weally wude,” he slurred.

“Damn it, Kelsey, I hate you!” I groaned. I bent down and pulled out the bottom drawer
as far as it would go. “Two years ago, Ray arranged for us to do one of those low-altitude
ropes courses as a staff bonding exercise. Swing bridges, zip lines, climbing walls,
that sort of thing.” I pulled out the next drawer almost as much. “One of the last
exercises was this smooth wooden wall that we had to climb over as a team, set up
in the middle of a big sandy pit.” I pulled out the next drawer a little less; and
so on and so on until all five drawers formed a sort of stepladder to the tiled ceiling.
“The instructor told us, ‘Everything you need to get every person over this wall is
in this circle of sand.’ ”

I kicked off my heels and tentatively stepped into the bottom drawer. “We tried everything
to get over that damn wall. We tried pushing one person up to the top and having them
pull everybody else up. But it was too tall. We tried forming some sort of human pyramid,
but we were out of practice with our cheerleading skills.” I shot him a significant
look. He snorted and gave me a steadying hand while I walked up the “stairs.”

“Kelsey got frustrated with the jackassery of it all and plopped down on one of the
stumps that the instructor used for seating while he led us through the rules of the
exercise. Kelsey was the only one to notice that the stumps were arranged in tiered
heights inside the circle. She figured out that if we stacked the stumps into stairs,
we could prop each other up and get over the wall.” I stood on top of the filing cabinet
with a very worried Josh circling under me like a mama hen. The ceiling tile over
my head slid out of place easily and I prayed I wouldn’t see anything gross when I
put my head through the hole in the dropped ceiling. “She declared herself the stair-step
genius and never lets us forget that we’d still be stuck at that wall if not for her.
I can see her shoving those reams of paper into the cabinet to make it a stable enough
base to climb.”

“Maybe I should climb up. I’ve had less to drink,” he said.

“I’m fine, really, but thanks for . . .” I glanced down to see that Josh didn’t look
quite so worried anymore. He did, however, look very appreciative of my legs and whatever
else he could see from that angle. “Hey!”

“What?” He threw up his hands. “How am I possibly not supposed to look in this scenario?”

“So you’re a perv when it’s convenient.” I pushed up through the hole and very gently
settled my weight on the metal grid that supported the tiles.

“Okay, so you’re up there, now what?” he called as I carefully crawled through the
ceiling space. “Are you going to pull me up?”

“I don’t think the ceiling will support us both,” I yelled back, crawling over the
wall struts and sliding a tile out of the way. The drop down to the floor seemed far
more intimidating than the climb up. And I couldn’t help but notice Kelsey had helpfully
left my purse and keys just outside the door.

“So much trouble,” I grumbled, gripping the metal support outside of the hole I’d
made. I took a few deep breaths, held on tight, and let myself drop through the hole.
“Yipe!”

I fell unceremoniously to the carpet, balancing on the balls of my feet for just a
moment before crashing down on my butt. I lay there for a second and let the world
tilt back into place. “Ow.”

“Sadie?” Josh yelled. “Are you okay?”

“I did not stick the landing,” I called back, eyeing the security camera mounted on
the wall ten feet away. “But I am going to have to pay off Leonard the security guy
to make sure that footage doesn’t make it to YouTube.”

“You are going to let me out, right?”

I waited for a long moment, jangling the keys loud enough that he could hear them.

“Oh, come on!” he shouted.

“I’m just kidding, jeez!” I unlocked the door and Josh came tumbling out. He plowed
into me, nearly bowling me over, but his quick hands shot around my waist and caught
me, dangling me in a precarious dip.

“Sorry,” he said, not moving from our Fred-and-Ginger position. “Thank you for climbing
through the ceiling for me.”

My fingers curled around the collar of his shirt to help me stay balanced. He was
so very close. I could feel his breath against my lips. His nose was practically nudging
my own. “You’re welcome.”

Those soft-looking lips curled upward as he bent his head toward me. I felt the barest
brush of his mouth over mine and pressed forward, capturing his lips. He moaned softly,
the sound traveling from my mouth to my throat and thrumming through my chest. I clutched
his shoulders tighter, pulling him to me as he kissed along the line of my jaw.

When I turned my head, I opened my eyes and realized the security camera had a very
nice shot of the two of us making out like it was Times Square on V-J Day. “Josh?”

“Mmm?” he murmured as he took possession of my bottom lip, worrying it between his
teeth.

“Josh?” I whispered again. “Security camera.”

He gasped, looking up at the camera with a quick, guilty expression. His hands slipped
from my waist and before I could catch myself, I dropped like a rock.

“Oof!” I cried as I hit the carpet. “Ow. Again.”

“There seems to be a theme here,” he said as we collected the evidence of our campout
from the closet. “I think I should drive you home.”

“I can crawl through the ceiling, but you don’t trust me to drive?”

“Would you rather see a headline reading, ‘State Employee Caught Driving Home from
Work Drunk’?”

“Good point,” I admitted. “But first, we have to do something.” I retrieved a Swiss
Army knife from the bottom of my purse and pulled out an assortment of Allen wrenches.
“Kelsey’s desk will never be right again.”

Josh pulled my purse open and peered inside. “What all do you have in there?”

•   •   •

I guess team-building exercises do work,
I mused as Josh drove me home in his impeccably clean pickup. I hadn’t expected him
to drive anything as simple as a Toyota, but there was a production plant just outside
Georgetown and driving one was considered a gesture of support for the state. The
man was an evil genius.

I lived in a quiet corner of suburbia outside of Frankfort, mostly duplexes and modest
single-family homes. It had taken me years to save up enough to purchase my part of
a duplex, and it was my pride and joy. I was never so glad to see it as when Josh
parked his truck in the driveway. Aside from feeling sort of hollowed out by all of
the emotional disclosure, I was tired and coated in a thin layer of dried sweat and
ceiling dust. I wanted a shower, and some ice cream, and then maybe another shower.

There was this awkward moment in my driveway when neither of us knew what to say.
Bad, ill-fated ideas about inviting Josh in for “coffee” started bubbling in a corner
of my brain. I’d enjoyed talking to him, enjoyed the hell out of kissing him, and
I was afraid that whatever progress we’d made would evaporate by morning. Also, there
was the small chance he would need to use my shower and that would be—
bad, bad, bad, naked, using my loofah, bad.
Or at least that’s what I told myself when the invitation was on the tip of my tongue.

My only excuse is that I was very tired and stuffed to the gills with peanut butter
and vodka, so I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I knew a good-night kiss was probably
not in order. I had been confused enough by the casual touching earlier. So I gave
him a firm handshake and bade him good night.

“Hold on, I’ll at least walk you to your door,” he said, jogging around the bumper
as I walked toward my porch.

“To prevent me from being mugged during the fifteen-foot walk to my stoop?” I snickered.
“You’re right, that lawn gnome looks shifty.”

“All gnomes look shifty to me,” Josh muttered, stopping in his tracks as he took in
the full view of my front yard. “Wow.”

I was fortunate that the man who lived in the other side of the duplex was a retired
landscaper. While I had a black thumb and ruthlessly murdered any botanicals I came
into contact with, Mr. Leavitt was some sort of plant whisperer. And because watching
me slowly suffocate the sad, bedraggled hosta on my front porch had caused him physical
pain when he first moved in, he landscaped my side of the yard, too. He managed to
coax roses up trellises surrounding our building on all sides. Hanging baskets full
of petunias created midair waterfalls of yellow, red, and orange. He’d put a sweet
little fountain on the property line between our two yards, featuring a satyr pouring
water into a bowl. He’d circled the satyr with shamrock moss and herbs. It was a magical
fairy grotto in the middle of suburban monotony.

“Nice place,” Josh said, whistling under his breath.

“I have a really great neighbor.” Just as I said that, Mr. Leavitt’s porch light popped
on. Mr. Leavitt had granddaughters my age, so he felt the need to watch out for me
any time he heard me coming home late. I knew that at that very moment, he was standing
at his door, watching Josh’s every move to make sure he wasn’t “getting fresh.” I’m
not sure what my elderly neighbor would have done to Josh if he had gotten fresh.
But he had all those yard tools in the garage, so I chose not to think about it.

“You’re kidding. The only thing my neighbor has given me is a note on my door asking
me not to leave my paper on my doorstep past two p.m.”

“Tough neighborhood.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m living in one of those big storage containers.”

I tamped all potential invitations down and said, “If it makes you feel any better,
whenever someone gives me a potted plant for my birthday—which seems to happen a lot,
for some reason—it has to go directly into foster care with Mr. Leavitt.”

I nodded to the row of small potted ivy plants arranged in a tiered stand by Mr. Leavitt’s
front door. “No, that doesn’t help,” Josh said, shaking his head. “Well, despite it
all, tonight was sort of fun.”

“Yes, I will be treating the ‘fun’ for most of the morning with Tylenol.”

His arms tensed, as if he were debating whether to offer me a hug or a handshake.
He kept them clamped to his sides, gave me a little nod, and turned back toward his
car. I waved and pushed my key into my door.

“Hey, Sadie?”

I whirled around, all smiles, because I was sure he was about to lay down some serious
John-Cusack-in-
Say-Anything
romance on me.

“About C.J. Rowley.”

I was wrong.

“About Rowley and him telling me about the job.” He ran his hand through his hair,
rubbing it against the back of his neck in a tired, uncomfortable gesture. “I didn’t
know, Sadie. You’ve got to believe me. I swear he didn’t say anything about you when
we were talking about the job. If I’d known he was trying to screw with you, I would
have done something differently.”

“Like what?” I asked.

He pursed his lips. “I’m not sure. I just want to let you know. I’m not some Rowley
stooge. I’m not his puppet.”

“Poor choice of words,” I told him, and he barked out a laugh. “I believe you. I do.
You’ve taken way too much crap from me to be a mole.”

He nodded sagely. “True. You dish out a lot of it. You are a terrible person.”

“Hey! I am a
wonderful
person.” I poked his side, making him yelp and grab my wrist. I continued to jab
at his ribs, just to mess with him. He grabbed my other wrist, leading to an odd wrestling
pretzel-person configuration. “Everybody loves me!”

Mr. Leavitt’s door swung open. “Sadie, are you all right?”

Josh and I froze in place as my elderly, disapproving neighbor stepped onto the porch
in his robe and slippers. Bald except for a thinning white fringe around his ears,
with a long nose that reminded me of an eagle’s beak, Mr. Leavitt was not a senior
to be trifled with. And what a trifling tableau we made—disheveled, grown adults seemingly
tickling each other on my front porch in the middle of the night. Josh burst out laughing
and dropped his forehead to my shoulder. I called out, “We’re fine, Mr. Leavitt. Josh
was just leaving.”

“I was,” Josh promised solemnly.

“Well, then, I suggest you say good night and get movin’.” Mr. Leavitt gestured toward
his rheumy blue eyes as he walked into his apartment. “I’m watching you, pretty boy.”