When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae (3 page)

“Please, Maisey? I was planning to put my office in this one.”

“Can’t you put it there?” Maisey pointed past Libby to the room across the hall.

“Please? This one’s a bit bigger . . . I need room for my desk and file cabinets and stuff.”

Maisey scowled and re-zipped her duffel bag.

Libby watched her hoist it back up over her shoulder and stood aside to let her pass. Then she thought of something else.

“One other thing, please, Maisey—no drugs.”

Maise wasn’t a bad kid, mind you. But Libby was no dummy, either

Maisey jutted out her chin. “I don’t do drugs, Aunt Libby. I haven’t in
ages
.”

“Good for you. Good for you, Maise. Thank you. I’m glad to hear it.”

Maisey crossed the hall and dropped her duffel bag into the smaller bedroom.

Libby leaned against the doorframe and rubbed her forehead. A small victory. But a victory nonetheless. And who knows, maybe she wouldn’t be there long. Maybe she’d decide to enroll in college or something.

Suddenly a pounding on the door thudded through the house. A loud pounding.

“Who’s
that
?” Maisey had re-entered the room to collect one of her boxes. “Sounds like someone’s plenty pissed at you!”

The jacket.

Libby had forgotten to take it off. Forgotten the whole plan to leave it on the doorknob, to avoid having to stand face-to-face with that man again.

She jumped toward the stairs, too freaked out to answer Maisey. The pounding had sounded pretty loud. Can you tell if someone’s pissed at you by how they knock on the door? Of course not. And it could be enthusiastic pounding . . . except that Libby’s doorbell was broken. Which meant the guy had been out there, standing in the drizzle, pressing the button for goodness knows how long.

Who wouldn’t be tempted to pound pretty hard after standing in the drizzle pressing a broken doorbell for awhile?

Libby yanked the door open.

“Haven’t left yet, I see.”

She pulled the jacket off and held it out to him. He took it, but slowly. He was looking over her shoulder.

Libby turned and there was Maisey, big grin on her face.

“So it’s your jacket,” she said and then squealed and practically knocked Libby over as she pushed past through the door and out onto the stoop, where she knelt and threw her arms around Bo’s neck.

“Maisey! Hadn’t you better ask first?”

Maisey appeared not to hear. She stroked Bo’s head, crooning ecstatically, while the man looked down at her, apparently amused. Maybe because of her piercings. And the tattoo—a dandelion head with a few seeds blowing away—visible on the back of her neck. Not that people who live in the country don’t know about the whole piercing and tattooing thing.

Libby pushed open the storm door again. “Maisey, the man wants to leave now.”

“What’s his name?” Maisey meant the dog. And was asking the neighbor, not Libby. Maisey instinctively goes for the person most likely to indulge her.

“The dog’s name is Bo,” Libby said. “Now please finish moving your stuff into your room, Maise.”

The teen stood up, rolling her eyes for the benefit of her audience and saying, “Bye, Bo,” in a dramatically regret-filled voice.

Libby thought about asking the man whether he moved all the signs—like telling Maisey which room was hers, it would have helped to re-establish where everyone stood. But her manners won out. Of course they were all moved. No point in suggesting he wasn’t acting, now, in good faith. Plus, she could always check them, later.

“Thanks for lending me the coat.”

“Your doorbell’s broken.”

“I know.”

“And there’s something in your hair.”

She reached up and as she did remembered. The pine pitch. Great. So she looked like a freak. Just great.

She watched him walk down the drive.

“So who is he?” Maisey said. “He is gorgeous. And so’s the dog.” She giggled.

“Shush!” Libby closed the door. “He’s within earshot still, you ninny.”

“So? What do you care?”

Libby scowled. “Maisey. Please no bedding my neighbors.”

“Yeah right, like I’d sleep with a senior citizen.”

Ouch. Why did Libby get the feeling that wasn’t directed solely at her neighbor? Especially considering that he was probably younger than her . . . by a good five years, she bet. “Knock it off, Maisey. You’ll find out for yourself how young you still are—when you’re his age. And it will come before you know it, too.”

“Yeah, sure. And anyway, I have a boyfriend.”

That little disclosure should have set off a whole slew of warning bells, of course, but Libby was mentally exhausted by then, and its significance didn’t register properly. So all she said was, “Do me a favor,
Maisey
, and please finish getting your stuff out of my office. The movers are coming tomorrow and my desk has to fit.”

Then she went and put on a kettle for tea. And some mayonnaise. She’d read, somewhere, that mayonnaise would get pine pitch out of hair. Better to smell like a sandwich than pine pitch.

Gorgeous. Yeah, well, maybe. Tall enough, anyway.

She’d left her cell on an overturned box in the living room. Now she retrieved it and dialed Paul at work.

4

He didn’t pick up until the fourth ring. That was kind of odd—he’d moved to a real office, so unless he was in a meeting, he was generally at his desk. And when Paul was at his desk, he was a first ring kind of guy.

Yeah. A real office. Actual walls. Not a cubical. When Libby was working there, he’d had neither. He was in the lab. “There” being Cal4 Laboratories. That’s where Libby and Paul had met, in the research department, two biologists, part of Cal4’s crack “benign skin conditions” research team. Or as they called it, Psori-Ops. Short for Psoriasis Operations. Ha ha ha, guess you had to be there. Anyway, in the lab, the phone is almost always out of arm’s reach, and even if the researchers happened to be near it when it rang, they resented being interrupted. They had more important things to do. They almost always let incoming calls go to voicemail.

Paul’s phone habits changed when he made the jump from research to product management a year ago. Libby was laid off two weeks later. It wasn’t a huge surprise, getting laid off—she was a senior biologist, high-salaried, and the company had been bumping along through a pretty rocky spot for nearly two years. Plus—well, she didn’t have any proof of this, but it’s not that hard to figure out—after she and Wallace split, people began whispering that she and Paul were an item. Which happened to be true. It wasn’t an issue when they were more or less equals, but when he got promoted . . . not that Libby thought she was let go because management knew they were sleeping together. But, you know. Office politics always figure into these things. And everyone knew Paul was a favorite with the owners. Getting Libby out of the picture made things cleaner.

“Paul here.”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hi, babe. What’s up?”

He sounded funny. Maybe.

“Guess who just showed up, looking for a place to stay?”

“I dunno, who?”

“Maisey.”

“Oh yeah?”

Now, that was weird. Libby had told him about Maisey and Maisey’s mom. You’d expect a response that was a bit more . . . focused. Something with at least a hint of outrage.

But Libby wasn’t the sort of woman to act petulant. He was at work, after all. “Would you believe it—Gina told her she could live with me.”

“Oh, no kidding?”

No mistaking it—something was going on.

“Paul, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

That confirmed it. “Not nothing. What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. I’m not sure. They’re calling us all together this afternoon. Right at 4:00.”

Uh oh. Cal4 upper management had a formula for announcing layoffs. And at 4:00 p.m. company meeting was not a good sign.

Libby made the obligatory sympathetic noise, but truth to tell, her real response was more like, oh brother, here we go again. Which wasn’t fair, and she immediately felt guilty about it. What was an annoying long term houseguest compared to maybe losing your job? So she took a deep, very silent breath and said, “You’ll be okay.”

“Yeah,” he said in the same muttery voice. “Look, I’ll see you for dinner, right?”

“Sure. You wanna do ribs?”

We’d found a new ribs place on Culver a month before.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good luck, Paul.”

“Yeah.”

Libby couldn’t really say Paul was happier since jumping over to the marketing side of the shop. In some ways, it was more stressful. Even though he was a bit closer to the decision-makers. The researchers used to joke, in the lab, that the Cal4 execs didn’t even know their real names. They used to put labels on their foreheads, the same labels they used for labeling samples. And joke that it was new corporate policy to help Robbie and his son keep them straight.

Libby turned off her cell and grabbed a box of files to take upstairs to her office.

Maisey had blown up an air mattress and pushed it up against the wall beneath the loathsome northward-facing window. She had the window cracked and was sitting on the mattress, smoking a cigarette.

Libby glared at her but decided to postpone that battle until some other time.

♦ ♦ ♦

Paul leaned over and pecked Libby’s lips, then slid into the booth across from her. He looked okay. Anyway, he didn’t show any signs of being newly jobless.

“So—who’s gone this time?” Libby closed her menu.

“Nobody,” he said. “You’re never going to believe this.”

“No layoffs?”

“Nope. We’ve been acquired.”

“Acquired?” Now this was something different. Not that rumors didn’t flare up from time to time. But Libby and Paul both knew enough about the company’s bottom line. Cal4 wasn’t exactly the coveted jewel of the nation’s biotech industry. “Who by?”

“A cosmetics company.”

“Oh, Paul, you’re kidding me!”

“Nope. Dormet Vous Lustre. ‘Making your skin like yesterday’s, today.’”

Libby had seen their ads. On late-night cable, if she recalled correctly. And website pop-ups. Yech. “Paul! Why? What—”

“Apparently they think some research we own will be good for their, ah, wrinkle creams and stuff.”

Libby rolled her eyes. “Robbie.”

“Robbie.”

He was a smooth talker, that man. Robert Donavan. Could sell a comb to a frog. “So, now what? Is it a done deal, for sure?”

“For sure. He introduced our new masters during the meeting.”

“Are they—what is Robbie’s title now?”

“President. We’re a wholly-owned subsidiary. And Junior’s VP Operations.”

“Business as usual, in other words.”

“Yeah, except that we’re not out to save the world anymore.”

That was how the labbies coped. By telling themselves that they were saving the world. Not in so many words, of course. But they all believed their research was serving a higher good, that it might one day help people live more comfortably. Or, you know, be cured of some skin disfigurement. “Well,” Libby said, “for a woman who wants to, er, look her best, I suppose wrinkle cream is kind of important.” She remembered, all of a sudden, Maisey’s “senior citizen” crack but pushed it out of her mind. This was Paul’s time. Poor guy, he looked tired.

A server stopped by and Paul asked for a combo special, full rack of ribs plus dessert. He overeats when he’s stressed. Which, Libby thought suddenly, seemed to be more and more often these days. Hopefully the relaxed fit corduroys she’d bought him for his birthday last month were relaxed enough to withstand this latest turn of events.

“So,” she said. The server had left. Time to get to the important part. “Your job?”

“Looks like I’m safe, for now.”

“Well, it’s the same products, right?” She tried to sound supportive. “Only a different market.”

He sighed. “Yeah. A different market.”

The waiter brought their drinks. Decaf Earl Gray for Libby. Cola for Paul. “It might be fun. A change.” Try that.

But he just sighed again.

Libby hesitated. Because there was something else that needed to be covered. It would be nice if Paul would remember and bring it up. But he was preoccupied, obviously. . . might as well get it over.

“Paul? What do you think . . . what about
Skin Tones
?”

Yeah.
Skin Tones.
The newsletter Libby wrote and desktop published for Cal4 every other month. She’d taken over as editor while she still worked there. Then, when she was laid off, they’d asked her to keep it as a contract job. A minor godsend, since it was now Libby’s only source of income.

“Oh.” Paul looked at her. He’d forgotten about it. That she had a personal stake in Cal4 still. Natural for it to slip his mind, she guessed, given the circumstances.