Snow Job (6 page)

“Not to mention those nasty flip-flops,” Kel y agreed.

“They look like overused shower shoes. They’re gonna rake her over the coals about those.”

And so the rest of the evening passed more pleasantly than it had begun, in a haze of wine and wardrobe critique, and Elyce ended up sleeping on a couch for the second night in a row.

She had to admit after she woke the next morning that Emily’s couch was more comfortable than her own, primarily because it was ful -length rather than loveseat-size. She might have to abandon her plan to avoid spending money on new furniture and indulge in a couch that was a little more conducive to sleep. Astro, too, seemed to have passed a pleasant night. His morning stretch was particularly long and indulgent, and he shook himself out afterward with a lengthy wag at the end, as if he had slept especial y wel and felt even more vigorous than usual.

Elyce felt better than she felt she deserved to, given the quantity of wine she’d consumed the night before. It had been too long, she realized, since she’d gotten together with a few girlfriends and just talked things through.

Regardless of what happened over Christmas, she resolved to spend more time with Emily and Kel y in the future, even if it meant juggling schedules around to avoid seeing Karl in the process.

* * * * *

Through diligent time spent on the phone, Elyce had managed to secure Astro a spot in a trustworthy, nearby kennel starting Monday morning. It always tugged at Elyce’s heart to hear him whining when she left him somewhere unfamiliar, but with the pup safely secured she was able to get to work only an hour past her usual arrival time. And covered in only a fraction of the visible dog hair she remembered dealing with when she and Astro—and Karl—

had shared a house ful -time. She had made a preemptive strike, though a superficial one, by wearing a pantsuit of a silvery-gray wool-silk blend. Against the pale fabric, the fine white hairs were not nearly as noticeable as they would have been against the charcoal pinstripes, deep navy or plum tones that Elyce tended to favor.

Fortunately, the smal boutique law firm at which Elyce was a junior partner had a somewhat more casual attitude with respect to both time and attire than many workplaces did. As long as Elyce made an appearance at some point every day and got the job done, she real y could have gotten away with jeans and t-shirts on days she wasn’t going to be appearing in court. On occasion, she did give in to temptation and show up at the office in jeans. Most of the time, however, she somehow liked the relative formality of a suit, as distinct from the extremely casual clothes she typical y wore when not at work. Although she cared about her job, the stress of practicing law often tried to fol ow her home. She found that such little separations, symbolic differences between work and home, helped her to switch gears.

Today, however, she was finding it difficult to concentrate on work despite such efforts. Home kept intruding in the shape of little white hairs that never brushed ful y away. They wound into the fibers of her chair and floated onto the polished walnut surface of her desk, reminding her of how they had floated over the hardwood floor she and Karl had selected together when they first moved into their Russian Hil house and were having it renovated.

The flaw in their choice was clear almost instantly—

every fine fiber that flew from Astro’s body seemed to stand out starkly against the gleaming darkness, and they laughed about the many extra dogs they could have fashioned from al the hair they gathered up from the corners. Wads of it, skimming the polished planks in the air currents the broom created, and Elyce wondered if Karl was stil keeping up with it or if the corners were now buried under drifts of soft, white fluff from Astro’s coat.

Or if he had now found somebody else to do the housekeeping.

Elyce pushed the loose pages of a summarized deposition into a tidy pile on the desk in front of her, trying and failing again to make sense of the words. She noticed that her computer screen had idled to blackness yet again, and she nudged her mouse to one side to wake it up.

Some new email had appeared, and she wondered if perhaps that was the road to productivity. Elyce knew quite wel that email was rarely, if ever, a route to productivity, but today she would take any type of work she could concentrate on. She glanced at the subject headings, scanning the senders’ names to see if any were worth interrupting her reverie for.

One was from Andrew, with nothing written in the subject line, an etiquette breach about which Elyce usual y had strong feelings but made a necessary exception in Andrew’s case. She couldn’t help it, she found Andrew cute, and even some of his more noticeable quirks had a somewhat charming quality most of the time.

Dear Ms. Anderson,

I was sorry we weren’t able to meet Friday evening. I
was glad you seemed to understand that only the severity
of my potential histamine response, and not any inherent
unwillingness, motivated my refusal of your kind offer of
dinner. Perhaps when we see one another tomorrow to
discuss progress on the Superfund site and any new
developments on the Nash issue, we can also arrange
fulfillment of the “rain check” on which we agreed.

Assuming of course that the threat of imminent
anaphylaxis has been mitigated by removal of the canine
in question, is an evening repast at your domicile still a
viable option? I want to stress that I was extremely
amenable to that proposal.

On a lighter note, please see attached photographs of
Ursula the ferocious kitten, stalking a catnip mouse on a
string with startling speed and accuracy!

Regards,

A. Barron, Esq.

Elyce chuckled at the deliberately verbose tone of the letter, Andrew’s usual mode of written communication since one of their earliest meetings when Elyce had teasingly asked if he talked and wrote like a lawyer
all
the time.

“
All
the time,” he’d assured her with a disarmingly cheeky wink. “Even in my most unguarded moments.”

Every email he had written her since had been excruciatingly formal in tone, as had hers back to him, and she sometimes wondered if the little game between them had inadvertently slowed the development of their relationship.

Dear Mr. Barron,

With regard to your proposal, I agree that tomorrow’s
meeting would be opportune for discussion of
rescheduling our dinner engagement. I will no longer be
in custodial possession of the canine in question on
Friday of this week. However, I suggest we avail ourselves
of the services of food service professionals rather than
relying on my admittedly meager abilities in the area of
meal preparation. I make this suggestion only out of
concern for your gustatory well-being, and said
suggestion should in no way be construed as an attempt
to quell or deter your aforementioned amenability.

I look forward to our next meeting.

Regards,

E. Anderson, Esq.

The only other message that caught Elyce’s eye was, probably

not

by

chance,

from

Karl.

From

[email protected], rather. It was stil strange to see his new email address, rather than the old, familiar karl.nash@fgc_pc.net that had flashed into her inbox so many times over the preceding years.

E, thanks again for watching ’Stro. I’ll pick him up from
the kennel this afternoon on my way home from the
airport. Hope he didn’t eat your house too badly—one
good munch would about do it with that place.

About Christmas… I want to get an early start
Saturday (surprise, surprise) so my plan is to pick you up
around six with coffee and donuts and we’ll eat on the way
to the airport. If you’re home Friday night I could swing by
and load up the skis and luggage. One less step for the
morning. Reply or call my cell, let me know. See you
Friday or Saturday. K.

She frowned at the none-too-subtle dig at her house, but had to agree with his assessment of her home’s structural

integrity.

She’d

dreaded

the

inevitable

earthquakes and felt lucky to have avoided riding out any major shakes in the tiny cabin. Stil , it had survived in that spot for over twenty-five years, so perhaps it had hidden strengths.

K , Astro was an angel-pup. I didn’t leave him
unattended though. Why did we think crating was a bad
idea again? At some point, maybe I’ll have a dog run
installed for him. Have you already booked the kennel for
next week? You should call and double check. I’m just
saying. Okay on Saturday a.m., I don’t know if I’ll be home
Friday night though. I’ll call if it looks like I’ll be home at a
reasonable hour. Otherwise, see you Saturday at the
ungodly hour of six. I will only unlock the door for coffee
and donuts. Love, E.

Frowning again, Elyce deleted the extra word at her closing, leaving only “E” at the end of the email and hitting send.

Another productive day at the office
, she thought wryly, looking at the clock and marveling that it was nearly five already.

“What do you mean, it may become a nonissue?”

Elyce sighed, feeling the twinge of tension along her shoulders that nearly always signaled the onset of a headache. Shifting her head subtly from side to side in an attempt to ease the strain, she smiled at Andrew in what she hoped was a winning way. “I mean, things may change after the Christmas holidays. Who knows? Maybe Karl wil have a change of heart. Mainly, I think we just need to stop worrying about it right now. Nothing is going to happen between now and January.”

Andrew was pacing his office in the pattern he often fol owed—from the near corner of the desk to the corner of the room by the ficus tree, pause at the window to take in the view of the Victorian block across the street, reverse and walk between the chair and credenza to the bookcase, then back again to the near corner of the desk and repeat.

Elyce realized that Andrew was talking again and tried to focus on his words, rather than on the way his pants revealed the trim lines of his hips and buttocks. Had he taken up bicycling, she wondered.

“Don’t you think?”

“Um, what? I’m sorry, I lost you. I’m a little worn out, I worked late yesterday and I haven’t had lunch yet.”

“I said he may take advantage of the lul over the holidays to put some construction in motion, when he knows people are likely to be out of town and nothing’s going to court.”

“Andrew, I get what you’re saying. But the Nashes al go out of town over Christmas too, you know. Karl wil be in Colorado from this Friday on through the New Year.” Elyce met Andrew’s suddenly curious gaze with a bland lack of expression on her face.

At least she
hoped
it was a lack of expression, and not some tel tale look that gave away her plan to spend the same period of time in Colorado, sharing a room and presumably a bed with the subject of their current discussion. “Besides, have you ever tried to get construction people to do something over the holidays?

That just isn’t happening. I mean, Karl may have money, but he isn’t made of it. And his family certainly didn’t get rich in that business by throwing away money on things like that.”

Andrew shrugged, his even features handsome in the shaft of sun that streaked through the mul ioned sidelight to il uminate his face as he looked back out the window. Elyce noticed for the first time that his eyes were the same shade of brown as Astro’s. “I stil wouldn’t put it past him, but I suppose you would know.”

“January wil be more than soon enough to revisit it.

And besides, you need to start thinking about your own holiday planning and get your mind off work. How about your Christmas shopping, have you gotten any further?

There’s only a week left.”

“I know, I know,” he admitted, hands spread wide in a gesture of friendly defeat. “I’m almost done. Gift certificates count, right?”

“Gift certificates are a last resort,” insisted Elyce, not for the first time. “Maybe that’s what we should do on Friday instead of dinner. Finish your Christmas shopping.”

Andrew grinned. “I stil have to get a present for my mother. Do you real y want to spend the whole date talking about my mother? And what do you mean
m y
Christmas shopping? Don’t you stil have shopping left to do?” He was already relaxing, and Elyce relaxed too, sensing he had truly dropped the topic of Karl’s development for the time being.

“Nope. I’m done. I finish it by Thanksgiving most years.

It’s sort of a rule I have.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “How do you know what to get? I can never figure out what to buy for people. I end up getting something stupid at the last minute or, wel , gift cards. I buy a lot of gift cards.”

“Wel ,” she replied, considering, “there are different schools of thought. Buy something you’d like for yourself, is one way to go. Although that real y only works if you and the recipient have pretty similar tastes or it’s something with universal appeal. Buy the person something they wouldn’t buy themselves even though they obviously want it. For me, I’l usual y just be in a store or looking at a catalog and see something that reminds me of the person, or I’l remember they’ve mentioned that thing before. You know.”