Dangerous Curves Ahead: A Perfect Fit Novel (3 page)

Ellis nodded slowly at the wealth of information her father had gifted her. He knew all kinds of useless facts; if he ever went on a game show, he could rack up some serious cash. But Dr. Walter Garret wasn’t the type of man who would play or even watch a game show. He was a scientist by trade, a physiologist who studied the physical and biochemical functions in humans and animals. Truthfully, Ellis had no flipping clue what her father did for a living.

“I bought you some chocolates.” Walter looked at her nose. “I put them in the cabinet above the sink in between the brown and white sugars.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said.

“I asked your mother to order Chinese food tonight. Chicken with garlic sauce, dumplings, and fried rice. That’s what you like.”

“Yes, Daddy, I do.”

That was how he showed her he loved her. Food. Not once had he ever said the words, nor could she remember him ever embracing her, but he always spent time with her. He always asked her to come in his office and sit with him while he researched, feeding her gummy bears and marshmallows, only quiet foods so her chewing would not disturb his thinking. He was the reason she had eight cavities the year she turned ten. Every filling had been worth it.

She gently placed her hand on his knee, earning her a look at her forehead. “How’s work, Daddy?”

“Good, good.” He nodded. “Very good. My colleagues and I are studying the heart functions in bears while in hibernation and how the organ adapts to stressful situations. We hope to compare it with the functions of the human heart during rest.”

Ellis drifted off while her father spoke in scientific terms she would never understand. “I’m glad to hear that, Daddy,” she said when he paused. “Where’s Mom?”

“In the garden. The deliveryman should be here in fourteen minutes. Please ask your mother to wash her hands.”

“Of course.” She smiled at her father and left him to go find her mother, wondering what it was about him that had caused her mother to fall in love.

*   *   *

She found Dr. Phillipa Gregory sitting in the middle of her tomato plants frowning. Ellis took the chance to study her mother as she rolled a small tomato in her hand. Phillipa was a tiny speck of a woman with a huge brain and big mouth. She was head of Women’s Studies at Durant University, author of four feminist-themed books, and a former wild-child hippie. Phillipa drove her bonkers, but Ellis could honestly say she missed the pain in the ass while she was in the big city. And every time she saw her in the garden she thought,
It’s good to be home.

“Ellis, come here,” she ordered in her still-thick Queens accent. “Doesn’t this tomato look sickly to you?”

“Um.” Ellis studied the small perfectly red fruit, not at all bothered by her mother’s lack of greeting. “Yes?”

“It’s too yellow on the bottom.”

“Okay, if you say so.”

“I do.” Phillipa took off her enormous straw hat, revealing her very long mass of silver hair, and wiped her brow with her forearm.

“Daddy would like you to come in for dinner and wash your hands. The deliveryman should be here in twelve minutes.”

Phillipa waved her hand, brushing off her husband’s request. “The food will still be hot if I’m three minutes late. Sit and chat with Mommy for a little while.” She patted the dirt beside her.

Uh-oh.
Phillipa wanted to “chat” with her. Chats weren’t good. They usually involved Ellis biting her tongue while Phillipa offered up life lessons.

“How about we sit together on the glider?” Ellis suggested instead of saying no like she wanted. Ellis couldn’t control her mother’s mouth but she could control where she sat, and she wasn’t about to walk around for the rest of the day with brown smudges on her behind. That would give somebody else an excuse to study it.

“Oh, I forgot Miss Fancy Schmancy boutique owner can no longer sit in the dirt.” Phillipa rose more gracefully than Ellis ever could, more gracefully than any woman in her mid-sixties should be able to, and joined Ellis on the back porch.

“I never liked to sit in the dirt. Just because you’re a crunchy granola hippie doesn’t mean I am.”

“How did I raise such a smartmouth?” Phillipa looked skyward in mock horror. “My own daughter!”

“I learned it from the best.” Ellis shook her head at her mother’s bad acting as she sat next to her on the glider. “What did you want to talk about?”

“Oh, nothing.” Phillipa gave Ellis a sideways glance. “I’m just waiting for you to tattle on yourself for being rude to Agatha Toomey in the coffee shop.”

“She told you?”

What a bitch!

Ellis couldn’t believe the woman had contacted her mother so quickly. She thought she had until tonight before the hag tattled.

“Of course she told me.” Phillipa shrugged. “She said that maybe if you had a nicer mouth you and Jack would still be together.”

“Oh no she didn’t.” Ellis’s head snapped toward her mother. “I hope you set her straight about who dumped who because—”

“Relax,” Phillipa cut in. “I told her that you had no interest in Jack-ass and that you were moving on and dating again.”

That wasn’t true by a long shot but it was better than having Agatha throw Jack in her face at every opportunity. “Why are you still friends with her. She’s a bitch. Did she tell you I was there to buy a cookie?” Ellis huffed. “Or that she told me I should eat more fiber to help with my massive bloating or that she was willing to put me on a diet?”

“Yes.” Phillipa nodded. “She did, but don’t pay her any attention. If Aggie doesn’t recruit two new clients a week, a piece of her soul dies. And we’re not friends. She’s just somebody I exercise with, since my youngest daughter won’t.” Phillipa gave her another sideways glance. “It wouldn’t kill you to go to yoga with me three times a week. It’s just good for your heart, your balance. Everything.”

“Mom,” Ellis warned. Her mother was extremely fit and exercised religiously. She also had the metabolism of a ten-year-old boy. All of that made Ellis slightly bitter.

“Fine.” Phillipa put her hands up in surrender. “If you don’t want to talk about your health and potentially extending your life span, then we won’t. Let’s talk about your love life. When’s the last time you had sex?”

“Mom!”

“What?” Phillipa frowned as if she were confused, like it was okay for mothers to ask their daughters such extremely personal questions. “Sex is healthy. Didn’t you read my book
Your Body, Your Canvas
? It releases all kinds of endorphins.”

“We don’t have to have this conversation right now. The food should be here.” Ellis stood and tried to walk away but her mother grabbed her by the back of her pants, preventing her flight.

“There is nothing wrong with talking about sex, honey. It’s a natural expression of our bodies. I thought I raised you to believe that, but I guess our puritanical society has stomped all of that out of you.”

Ellis struggled to get away from her mother, but Phillipa proved to be freakishly strong. “I have to go to the bathroom. Please let me go.”

“You know your father and I have sex quite frequently, and we both are extremely happy.”

“Mother!” Ellis whipped her head around to stare at her mother. “This is not normal! You are not normal. No daughter wants to hear any detail about her parents’ sex life, and I can’t believe you think that I’d want to share any part of mine with you.”

Phillipa rolled her eyes, unperturbed by Ellis’s outburst. “I just thought that if you were getting some you wouldn’t be so stressed out all the time. I worry about you, Ellie. What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t?”

“I’m fine. I promise. Now let me go. Daddy is waiting.”

“How is the store doing?” Phillipa ignored her daughter. “It looked beautiful last time I was in but, honestly Ellis, I don’t understand why you had to quit law altogether.” Phillipa let her go and raised her hands to ward off the inevitable verbal attack. “I know. I know you hated doing corporate law and personally I don’t blame you for not wanting to represent those scum-sucking bastards, but couldn’t you at least take a few clients here and there? Do some environmental law or some civil liberties stuff? Do you know how much money it cost to send you to Harvard Law?”

Here we go again.
Phillipa and she had had this conversation every other week since Ellis announced that she was quitting her high-paying job in Manhattan. At first Ellis valiantly argued why it was better that she stopped practicing, but even all her arbitration skills couldn’t win her an argument with Dr. Phillipa Gregory.

Her mother just didn’t understand that her old life made her unhappy. Being a lawyer was Phillipa’s dream for her, and she went with it because she wanted to make her mother proud. But when she broke up with Jack, she realized that she couldn’t live her life for others. She should only do what made her happy.

“Thousands and thousands of dollars.”

“There’s a guy,” she blurted out before her mother could continue. “We just met and he’s gorgeous and I’m crazy about him.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

“What?” Phillipa stopped her familiar rant. “Who is he? What’s his name?”

“Um.” Ellis pulled her lower lip between her teeth. “I don’t want to tell you because I’m afraid I might jinx it. We really just met.”

“Oh, come on! I’m your mother.”

You’re also a giant pain in the ass.
“You want to ruin this for me? I’m superstitious. We’re probably going to break up tomorrow because I told you and now I’m never going to get to have sex again.”

“Okay, okay.” Phillipa relented and Ellis let out a huge internal sigh. “But promise that you’ll tell me about him soon.”

“Sure thing,” Ellis lied again, hoping her nose wasn’t growing substantially.

“Ellis, Phillipa.” Walter appeared in the doorway of the porch. “Dinner has been here for six minutes now.”

“We’re coming, Dad,” Ellis said, quickly heading inside. She had the awful feeling that she had made a terrible mistake. Her mother would probably never get off her back now. Maybe if Ellis prayed hard enough her mother’s memory would be wiped clean.

Yeah right, and maybe pigs will fly and there will be peace in the Middle East by Christmas.

Chapter Three

Every time Mike glanced out the window of Durant’s tiny police station he was greeted with a quiet tree-lined street. There were no hot dog vendors. No random homeless people relieving themselves in the alley. No occasional asshole calling him a pig. There was hardly any noise at all. When he’d first landed in New York City ten years ago that stuff excited him. He loved the noise, the energy. He loved the life the city had to offer him, but a few months ago something switched inside and he stopped being able to picture himself spending the rest of his life there. The problem was, he couldn’t picture himself anywhere. He didn’t know what he wanted out of life and that bothered him. Since he was thirteen years old he’d had his life planned out. Get the hell out of Buffalo. Go to college. Join the NYPD. For ten years he went after those goals with single-minded determination, and he accomplished them all.

Now what?

His thirteen-year-old mind hadn’t thought much past that. It wasn’t like him to not have a plan. Maybe that’s why he came back to Durant, the place he went to college, the city where he had some of the best times of his life.

Everything here was so … relaxed. It was the kind of place corporate America had yet to touch, made up of small trendy businesses and mom-and-pop shops. It was a place where people said good morning and smiled when they passed him on the street. And after being a detective in one of the city’s most active crime areas, coming back to his college town was like culture shock. In Manhattan he lived. He was always on the move. There was always something there to keep him busy but here … he could reflect on his life, decide his next move.

It turned out he sucked at being reflective. He was so used to doing, to being on edge all the time, it was as if he didn’t know how to relax.

The only police work he did that came anywhere close to exciting was acting as security for the senior citizen dance-a-thon. And that was exciting only because some ass had spiked the punch, causing a bunch of octogenarians to get a little freakier than they should on the dance floor.

It was entertaining but nothing to stop the surge of restless energy that continuously bugged him. Yet he didn’t regret leaving his old life behind. Ten years of working in the city’s poorest areas, ten years of violent robberies, ten years of throwing scared kids in jail had done something to him. It changed him. And when some animal brutally beat an eighty-nine-year-old woman for a purse that only contained nine dollars and Mike barely batted a lash, he knew it was time to move on. He didn’t want to become that hardened. He never wanted to be a man who couldn’t be moved.

And that caused him to wonder if police work was still his passion. But when he thought about it, he realized that there was nothing else he could do. So he left the NYPD and applied to Durant. He made this major move and took a substantial pay cut all so he could think about his life.

He could have gone back to Buffalo. His mother was still there running her flower shop. His sisters and their large families all lived within two miles of where he grew up, but going back to Buffalo was never really an option. There was too much history there. Too many things he didn’t want to remember.

“Mike, you hungry?”

Mike looked up at his new partner, Lester, who sat at the desk across from his. Lester was a veteran detective, a little gruff but a nice guy. He sort of reminded Mike of Danny Glover’s character in
Lethal Weapon
, which made him secretly wish his partner would utter, “I’m too old for this shit.”

“Yeah, I could eat,” Mike answered. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Extra-hot Buffalo wings.” Lester grimaced. “But those things give me the shits.”

Mike grinned at this overly honest answer. “Can’t have you on the crapper all day, old man. Maybe we should get you some cream of wheat instead.”

“Getting old fucking sucks.” The man grinned back, shaking his head. “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you it doesn’t ’cuz they’re full of shit.” Lester sat back in his chair and studied Mike for a moment. “How are you adjusting to the new job, city boy? Everybody treating you right?”