Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (17 page)

“Honestly,” I told Ben as I came in. “What were you
doing? Looking through the keyhole?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He looked dignified and offended. “The letter flap. The keyhole is one of the modern ones, you can’t see anything through it.”

“Benedict Colm!”

He shrugged. “Oh, come on. Did you really expect me not to look or listen in? Besides, if you’d decided to invite him in, I’d have liked some warning, so I could make up an important meeting somewhere right now.”

“Well, you didn’t get out of the way when he said I should open the door!” I said.

“That’s because,” he said, his voice filled with a tone of long-suffering patience, “you didn’t give me enough warning. The next time, try to say something like, ‘You really want me to open the door, right now?’ to give me time to get up and out of the way. Or else, consider kissing him again. That ought to be good for a delay.”

“The next time? There won’t be a next time,” I said.

His eyebrows went up. “So, okay, you don’t put out on
the first date, but I understand hetero guys find that nice, you know? He probably thinks you’re an old-fashioned girl and is even now considering how best to slip the engagement ring onto your finger.”

Out of nowhere something like a black tide of rage came over my mind, obscuring all. “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “He took me out because he wanted to ask me about refinishing places in town, and he hoped I could dance.”

“Yes, of course,” Ben said. He mumbled something I couldn’t make out, which was just as well, because I felt suddenly very tired.

“I’ll go to bed now, okay?” I said.

He didn’t say anything, and I went to bed. Which didn’t exactly help. I did very little sleeping, as my mind kept kicking up all sorts of images of bodies gone gelatinous in Dumpsters, or, more pleasantly, Cas Wolfe’s lips on mine.

By the time I woke up, with the gray light of morning coming through my window and the subdued noise of Sunday traffic picking up outside, my blankets were all tangled in a mess around me, and I felt as if I’d been riding a storm all night and woken up exhausted by the lightning and the wind. And in a foul mood. Which did not improve when I found my bathroom door locked.

I knocked. A mumble answered me. “I need to use the bathroom,” I said.

“Use the powder room?” he suggested, speaking as though he were talking between his teeth. Okay then. I made it to the powder room and peed, and washed my face and hands, glaring at myself in the mirror. Then I went back to the kitchen. Seeing my table like that erased all thought of coffee or breakfast—even if I’d had the slightest notion what to make or get for breakfast, which I didn’t. Instead I put on my slippers and went out back into my shed.

It was just as I’d left it yesterday, of course. I grabbed
wood putty, one of the smaller spatulas, and some fine sandpaper. Back in the kitchen, I realized the slashes on the table were clean. Meaning someone had inserted the cleaver, then pulled it up from the pine, without really wiggling much. Also, they were deeper than I’d thought, but they didn’t go through.

I sanded around them carefully, wiped up the dust with a paper towel, then dabbed on the putty. It was the sort that’s made from wood dust, so that it would pretty much match the table once dried, sanded, and waxed.

That done, I started the coffee. And then I realized Ben was still in the bathroom. Because I hadn’t heard the shower, and still didn’t—any water running through the pipes anywhere in the house could be heard all over the house—I wondered what was going on in there. Um . . . I walked back to the bathroom and knocked on the door.

“Yes?”

“Ben, did you get lost in there, or something?”

He opened the door. I screamed. He glared. All over his face, from forehead to chin, was a green-blue substance. “What on Earth?” I said. “Did I make you go on the warpath for some reason? Are you going to take my cattle and burn my house?”

He glared. Moving his lips minimally—which accounted for the constrained voice—he said, “It’s a mask. Maybe you should try it sometime.”

I waved it away. “Have. It’s sticky and unpleasant. Must you do that now? In my bathroom?”

He only sighed, and I realized that was an unproductive line of questioning. If Ben had decided this was the time for warding off the demons of old age, this was the time for warding off the demons of old age. As someone who didn’t attend that church, I had no right to criticize the rituals.

“There’s coffee when you’re ready for it,” I said, and
noted as I said it that he was dressed in a robe of a color that very nearly matched his mask. So he hadn’t showered yet. That would be fun, because there was only one shower in the entire apartment.

He mumbled something and closed the door.

I went back to the kitchen and had a cup of coffee. I knew I really should go to Denver today, as I had some finished pieces I needed to deliver, but as far as I knew I hadn’t sold anything from the consignment already at Shabby Chic. The owners would have called and told me if that were the case. And my car was running funky, and the only way I could figure to get money for gas would be to go to the convention and borrow from Mom and Dad. But the convention was in Denver, so I’d have to get there in order to borrow the money to get there. It seemed like one of those puzzles they give you in math class, where you have three goats and a lion and you’re supposed to transport them across a river in two trips.

I chewed on my lip, thinking. Last month had been an unproductive month; my money to buy good but abused pieces had been almost zero because E had had a growth spurt and had needed new clothes. And the discarded things I’d found hadn’t been all that good. Which was what had prompted yesterday’s trip to the Dumpster. I shuddered at the thought.

But if I went to Denver and took the few pieces I had finished, at least it would increase the variety of my work at the store, and the chance I would sell more. It would also allow me to look for veneer, where I had a better chance to get it. And though the dresser in bits wasn’t a good piece, it was sort of showy, the kind of piece that would attract people to my area of the consignment store. So getting it done as soon as possible was of the essence. If only I could figure out how to get the lion not to eat the goats. I’d never understood why, in that puzzle, one couldn’t just muzzle the lion.

Ben stumbled into the kitchen as I was deep in my thoughts and poured himself a cup of coffee. Like me, he drinks tea during the day but coffee in the morning, and, thank heavens, he didn’t care if his morning coffee was a particular brand or brewed in a particular way.

“Do you mind if I shower first?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Go.”

I went.

Maneuvering around the bathroom was harder than normal, because every possible surface was covered in Ben stuff. The man had brought his own bath sheet—though I supposed I shouldn’t chide him for it, because it was oversized and he bought those on purpose. Also, I supposed in the end, it was a concession to my housekeeping because he knew how hard it was for me to do laundry. Unfortunately he’d also brought a myriad of beauty products at which I could only stare in half-shocked wonder. The green-blue thing in a plastic tub atop my toilet tank was, apparently, essence of blue-green algae, and it promised to remove ten years from your skin if used every day. Right. Ben could look nineteen. Sure thing. If he ungrew about four inches and lost all his beard and half of his body muscle.

“You can use any of that if you want to, Dyce.”

“Right.” And I could also dance the polka in my underwear. I’d just never seen any good reason to. I went back to my room and got jeans and a T-shirt and underwear and socks. I’d gotten out of the habit of walking out of the bathroom naked and dressing in the bedroom when E had become ambulatory and started noticing things. The day he’d asked me what had happened to my penis—logical, because he had one and therefore it must be standard equipment—had been the last day I’d been casual about nudity around him.

I took the clothes with me back into the bathroom, showered quickly, dried, brushed out my curls, and got
dressed. And opened the bathroom door to the sizzle of bacon and the smell of cooked eggs mingling with the coffee.

I was fairly sure it was too early in the morning to be hallucinating. Perhaps I hadn’t woken up and had just dreamed I had woken? It would at least explain that horrible green-blue thing on Ben’s face.

But as I walked into the kitchen, I found that Ben was responsible for the smell. He was at the stove, frying bacon and eggs in my largest frying pan—a big aluminum thing I had bought at a restaurant supplier during one of the more delusional times in my marriage.

“Well, good morning, Mrs. Cleaver,” I said. “I see you’re making the house a home.”

He gave me a smile. “I thought you might be hungry. If you’re not, I’ll feed it to the dog.”

“I don’t have a dog.”

“Don’t care. My mom always said that and we don’t have a dog, either. If I go out back, wave the pan and call ‘Dog,’ I’m sure one will show up.”

“You’ll get Doug,” I said. “The college student next door.”

“Well, maybe he’ll appreciate me more.”

“Unlikely. He usually has a different girl over every weekend.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s always like that,” he said, seeming completely undaunted by this as he dished the food into two equal portions on the plates. “All the good ones are straight or taken.”

I grinned at him, amused. He set the pan in water in the sink, put the plates on the unblemished portions of the table, and said, “I see you’ve been working already.”

“Just on the table. And it’s not as bad as it looks. I see you went shopping. Yesterday?”

“Yeah, while you were on your date.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

He opened his mouth, but must have seen my expression and shrugged. “Fine, Dyce, have it your way. You know, you should stop kissing random guys on your front porch.”

“I know. The UPS man will be so surprised.”

He gave me a look as if I’d taken leave of my senses. “Dyce, I’ve seen your UPS guy. If you kiss him—I repeat
if
you kiss him—I will have you committed. Unless you can prove you have a damn good reason to think he will turn into a prince, or something.”

“No, it’s just . . .”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid as I get older,” I said, sitting down to note that Ben had set the table with napkins and silverware, “I’ll start attacking guys on the street and . . .”

“And?”

“Having my wicked way with them.”

Ben choked on a piece of bacon, and I had to pound his back before he could breathe again. But he picked up the napkin and pressed it against his face while his shoulders shook.

“What is so funny?” I said.

“You,” he said, setting the napkin down. “I will not ask what gave rise to this undeniably charming illusion that you’re in danger of becoming a nympho. Instead, tell me what you intend to do today.”

“I don’t know. Depends on muzzling the lion.”

His eyes went big. “You have a lion?”

I shook my head. “Remember Mr. Ziggler and those problems he used to give? You have a boat and three goats and a lion. You need to get them across the river. You can only take two animals at once and you don’t want the lion to eat the goats. How do you do it in two trips?”

Ben frowned. “First, I haven’t had enough coffee. Second, why do you need to solve that now, and third, I think you have the problem wrong.”

I sighed. “Well, probably. I never understood why anyone was keeping a pet lion with their goats, either, or why they needed to take it across a river, or why the lion didn’t have a muzzle.” I looked up to meet with a glance of utter incomprehension. “No, I’m not trying to solve the problem right now. I mean, it’s just an example.”

“An example of muddling . . . er . . . muzzling the lion?” he asked, and that slip of the tongue was totally intentional.

I sighed again. “Look, most of the money these days seems to come from my consignments at Shabby Chic. But last month I could only leave very few pieces with them, not enough to take up my space. Because the store is arranged by craftsperson—mostly—the fewer pieces you have, the less chance someone will wander to your area and buy something. I now have a few—unfortunately not many—pieces finished, and I should go to Denver and put them out. But I can’t, because I doubt my car will make it that far and I don’t have money for gas. But if I don’t do it, chances are I won’t have money next month, either. I could ask my parents for a loan, but they’re in Denver, so I would have to get there first.”

He looked at me a long time, then sighed. “I could loan you money,” he said. “But I’m not sure your car would make it that far.” He drew a figure in bacon grease with the tip of his fork. “Dyce, isn’t Mahr supposed to be giving you child support?”

I shrugged. “Some. Not a lot, because it’s shared custody.”

“And he had better lawyers. So, does he? I never hear you—”

“Well, not in the last six months.”

“Uh . . . why not? I assume the child support is court—”

“Because he has better lawyers. If I take him to court, he’ll end up with full custody. Anyone looking at my life . . .”

Ben sighed again. “I have friends who are lawyers. And I could lend—”

I thought of that total for fixing his home. “No, Ben, please. I’ll manage. Now, if I could just figure out—”

“How to muddle the lion? Easy. We take my cow . . . I mean my car.”

“What? First, your car is in the shop, and second—”

“You can take me to get my car. Your car is good enough to go four miles. They called earlier to say my car was ready. It’s what got me up.”

“Oh. Weird, I didn’t hear.”

“They called my cell. Of course you didn’t hear.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, my car is ready and if you can take me there, we’ll pick it up.”