Yours, Mine, and Ours (23 page)

“Oh, you should have seen her, she was
so
good. Big waiting room full of cats and dogs, and don’t get me started on the kid with the garter snake in the birdcage.”

I smiled. “But that sounds like the best part of the story.”

“I hate snakes.” He patted the sofa. “C’mon, Olive, c’mere!” She trotted across the room and in a flash of skinny black legs had hopped back up on the couch beside him. “She was really scared, I mean, she’d been shaking
so
bad in the waiting room and then on the scale and then on the exam table. But she didn’t nip or even growl. The vet fell in love with her, couldn’t believe how good-natured she was after all that abuse.”

“How many bones, did you say? That her former owner now has to count?” Whatever the answer? Not enough.

“Let it
go
, gorgeous. He was smited big-time by Adrienne. She bashed his head into a wall, for God’s sake.”

There were times I loved Adrienne and, more important, respected her.

“You sound … torn.”

“Hey, he was a big-time jerkoff. Who had his
head
bashed into a
wall
. Along with his buddy’s head.” Patrick, far too good for his own good, shrugged and continued. “Anyway, Olive’s malnourished. The vet figured she could have grown a lot bigger—maybe black Lab big—but didn’t get enough to eat when she was a puppy or, if she did, it was the wrong stuff to feed a puppy. Actually, she’s still a puppy, the vet figures she’s about a year and a half old. But she’s all done growing, he said. I mean in height. Her legs won’t get longer.”

“Clever girl,” I told her. “You will be easier to accommodate in here if you do not take up as much room as you might have. Well done. And get down.” I snapped my fingers and pointed to the carpet. Olive instantly obeyed. “Do not let her on the furniture, Patrick.”

“Um, sure. No prob.” But his gaze slid away from mine. Lord help the poor man if he had to lie about something serious, because he was terrible at deceit of any kind. “Anyway, he gave her all her shots and told me the best kind of dog food for her and she’s also got some puppy vitamins she has to take once a day. I just wrap them in cheese and down they go, slurp! Someone should invent Vitamin Cheese for dogs. And people, come to think of it. And the best news is, when that shithead stomped her, he didn’t break anything, she’s just gonna be super-sore for a few days.”

“Stomped?”

“Whoa!” He bounced up from the sofa and lunged just in time to catch me by the shoulder. Somehow I was already halfway to the door. “Concussion, remember? Humiliated and hospitalized, is that ringing a bell? Head bashed into wall, is
that
ringing a bell?”

It was. It was the bell a boxer heard just before he beat his opponent to death.

And the winner is … Shiro!

“Oh, man, I know that look. Quit it, you’re making me really fucking nervous. Do
not
go all ‘ya feel lucky, punk?’—okay? We’ve got enough trouble hiding Olive from your neighbors and your landlord.”

I thought about it, then relented. Patrick was right, and I did occasionally let cooler heads prevail.

It occurred to me that my boyfriend had asked me to do something against my nature, and I had agreed.

Was this what being in a relationship was? I would have to think about that. And in my mind, I apologized to Adrienne for doubting her methodology. Or her motive.

“I suppose we shall have to move.”

He looked relieved that I had discarded my felony assault plan. “Look, the situation’s okay for now. C’mon, babe, come back over here and sit down.” I followed him, and Olive followed me. He guided me to the couch and then began to walk back and forth in front of me. Olive thought this was a splendid new game and followed him. It looked like he had a small, four-legged black shadow aping his long strides.

“For now, I think you can use the trees behind the building. Nobody ever goes back there because of the fencing.”

“And the wood ticks.” It was dreadful. If you
glanced
at the small clump of trees you had to start picking the wretched things off.

“Not so much in December, but yeah. And who wants to play in a bunch of dirty snow? I never saw anyone even come near that area all the times we went outside. So I don’t think anybody’ll notice if we don’t push our luck.”

“Hear that?” I asked Olive. “Do not push our luck.”

“Oh, and see this?” He pointed to the handle of the deck door. There was a small bell on the end of a two-foot-long length of string. “She’s gonna associate the bell ringing with taking a dump, and I think it’ll help her catch on. That’s for right now, but it’s not a long-term solution, right?”

“Correct. I am impressed, Patrick. I did not know you knew dogs. And you had no notice. I am—we are grateful.”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, my sister had one when she was little. Before my—it was a long time ago.”

He ran his fingers through his thick black-red hair and I realized he was nervous. About what? And for what reason? Odd. I could not recall Patrick being nervous about anything. He was loving and protective and handsome and charming and passionate and handsome and gorgeous and handsome … really quite handsome, the man could have modeled suits for Armani.

Hmmm. I was not often so easily distracted by my own train of thought. Now what had I been thinking about?

“You’ll be set for a while. Look at this!” He was pointing to a neat pile of canine accessories: a leash, a collar, quite a lot of an expensive dog food (the kind they only sold in veterinary clinics), several toys. As if she knew what I was looking at, Olive went to the pile, extracted some sort of rubber toy shaped like a hamburger, took it in her mouth, and gently bit down.

Squee! Squee!

“If you have your dog on a leash, you can bring them inside PetCo! Now tell me, how cool is that? So I left her in my car, went in and bought a leash, then came back out and put it on her and away we went. That’s where I got all this stuff.”

Squee!

“That was very kind.” I was grinning like a fool at Olive. She just looked
so
cute with her rubber hamburger. “You must let me reimburse—”

He waved that away with the impatience of a millionaire who cared little for green pieces of paper because he knew he had more of them than he would ever spend. “Don’t worry about it. Like I said, this’ll do for now, but we need a long-term plan.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Yes. I suppose ‘we’ do.”

Squee!
Olive had trotted over to me, dropped the hamburger on the carpet, then lay down and rested her chin on top of it (
squee!
). Then she closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep.

If the evening had ended right then, it would have been perfect. Instead, there was a nightmare waiting in the room, and none of us knew it.

Then.

chapter fifty-five

“Okay,” he said,
preparing to shatter my sense of safety, the poor idiot. “So. I’ve been thinking about this. You know I close on my house in a few days, right?”

I nodded. We all knew. Patrick had moved back to Minnesota after many years away to reconnect with his sister. Cathie was several years younger; he had been away at college when she was still in elementary school.

What had started as a let’s-get-reacquainted-as-siblings visit had turned into roots Patrick wanted to plant in the Twin Cities. Cathie blamed my sisters and me for this, and was not shy about telling us.

For myself, I was not so sure. I think Patrick was looking for what Cadence had sought her entire life: a home. I thought he had decided to settle down for reasons of his own, and they did not all center around the Jones girls.

I had seen the house he had selected. It was … dazzling. There was no other word. It had once been a church built in 1910, and had been completely renovated and updated with an eye to being as green as possible. So it had state-of-the art appliances, a heated floor, and had been built to be sustained and sustainable.

If being eco-friendly had not been enough, the church-now-house had been renovated with the very best. Pine floors, red oak floors, rolling doors, a scrim curtain. A sixteen-foot-tall fireplace flanked with slate (and two others, not as impressive but still quite nice). Vaulted ceilings, a kitchen with two islands, a sizable dining room overlooking a lake, two-person spa tub, walk-in shower, walk-in closets, a wet bar, a three-car heated garage, balconies, and decks.

I loved Patrick’s house. Or the house that would be his in a few days. I had no idea why he needed so much room, but such things were not my business. His house, his wonderful house … even empty, it seemed to be waiting for a family to fill it up and make it cluttered and noisy and dirty and warm. When it came time for that, I knew the house would be ready.

I liked houses. I … I had never lived in one. The people I knew who had lived in houses seemed happy. They knew where they belonged. They liked going home to a house. Perhaps someday I could discover how that felt. I considered houses the emotional equivalent of a tornado shelter. I would like to find out for myself …

Never mind. It was a stupid thought.

“Right, you’ve been there, you know what it’s like. Shiro, there’s tons of room. Right? Tons.”

“Yes, that seems how you wanted it.” I would not pretend to understand.

“How I—?” He raked his fingers through his dark red hair. “I wanted a lot of room because of you guys. I really … it would be great if you wanted to move in with Olive the Dawg. You could stay as long as you wanted. You…” His eyes finally met mine. Yes, he was definitely nervous. His hands were fists, and he was unaware. “You could—
we
could all live together.”

Live together.

Live together? In that wonderful, wonderful house?

Together?

It was a generous shocking horrifying wonderful terrible offer.

“I—”

“Don’t answer right away, okay?” he said hastily. “I know it’s a big step. If you’re not comfortable—I mean, it doesn’t have to be forever.”

Ah. So Patrick’s plan was to wait until I was used to living in his beautiful beautiful house and then make me leave?

I eyed the side of his throat. One shot with stiffened fingers and he’d flop to the floor and wake up with a ferocious headache. And that was just
one
of the things I could—

“But if it
was
forever … Look, I know this is fast.”

Did he?

“Just think about it, okay? And if you change your mind, if you don’t want it to be forever, you could always move out.”

A cold thought from the bottom of my brain:
Max Gallo would not make such a mess of this. He would simply state what he wanted, and then wait for our response.

“I get that you’ll want some time, and like I said, you could always move back here, or someplace that takes dogs.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Which part?”

Stop trying to make me love you so you can dispose of me as fits your needs. Stop it.

“It’s too fast, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “I knew I’d screw this up. I’ve been thinking and thinking and … you know what?”

I hardly dared ask.

“Listen, maybe we should just forget I even said anything.”

On second thought, letting you live in my house would post great difficulty for me … Best if we forget the whole thing.

“I think that is safest.”

“Safest?”

“You do not truly know us.”

“Shiro—”

“You don’t know how ugly we are.”

“
Ugly
?” He gaped at me, big eyes getting even bigger in his shock. “Shiro, you and Cadence and Adrienne are the most beautiful women in the world! You’re all brilliant and brave and complicated and weird and wonderful and sexy and gorgeous and awesome and terrifying. I feel lucky that I get
all that
in one package, one gloriously smokin’ hot package—”

“Inside.” There was a roaring in my ears, the way it sounded right before the plane’s wheels left the runway. Or crashed right back into it. “You don’t know. We are so ugly inside. We can’t hide that from you if we live in the same wonderful house. It would be … impossible.”

Olive had opened her eyes and gotten up to press her body against my legs, whimpering. I could feel her trembling through my slacks.

“You can’t see it, Patrick. You can’t see our foulness and live. The part of you that thinks you like us would not survive that.”

“
Thinks
? Okay. You know what? I shouldn’t have sprung this on you. I just … it’s fast. I know that. But if it’s going to upset you, I withdraw the offer, okay?

“Listen, I’ve done some pretty shitty things in my life, too. Things I don’t want you to find out. Things I’m scared shitless you’ll find out.”