“Our lease says no pets.” Bill put the plate on the table and stood beside it, his arms folded, a nonjolly, nongreen giant.
Quinn poured chow into a bowl and put it on the floor. “Come on, baby. Dinner.”
The dog sniffed the food and began to eat cautiously. Quinn filled a second bowl with water and put it beside the first. Katie bent to eat, and she looked so sweet that Quinn stroked her head.
Katie squatted and peed.
“Quinn!” Bill yelled, and the dog cringed away from his voice.
“I’ve got it.” Quinn grabbed a paper towel from the roll beside the sink. Katie looked apologetic and distraught, and Quinn murmured her consolation as she mopped up the urine and then took a bottle of spray disinfectant out of the cupboard. “She’s a submission pee-er,” she told Bill as she scrubbed. “I didn’t know because I’ve been holding her all day. She gets nervous when people pat her and—”
“Well, obviously it can’t stay here,” Bill said, triumph in his voice. “We can put paper down in the bathroom tonight, but tomorrow it goes.”
Quinn finished mopping without saying anything. When she’d washed her hands, Bill extended his peace offering. “Your stroganoff’s getting cold.”
Quinn slid into her chair and picked up her fork.
Bill smiled at her, approving. “Now Edie will take the dog—”
“I’m keeping the dog.” Quinn put her fork down.
“You can’t,” Bill said. “It’ll ruin the carpet and there goes our damage deposit. Plus you’re at school all day. Who’s going to take care of it then?” He shook his head, calm in his own logic. “You’ll give it to Edie.”
“No.”
“Then I will,” Bill said, and began to eat.
Quinn felt cold. “That’s a joke, right?”
“You’re being irrational,” Bill said when he’d chewed and swallowed. “This dog would drive you crazy in no time. Look at it. All it does is shake. And pee.”
“She’s cold,” Quinn said, and Bill shook his head and kept on eating. “Are you listening to me?” she said, as she felt the heat rise in her.
“Yes, I’m listening,” Bill said. “And I’m taking care of you by taking it to Edie.”
Quinn went dizzy for a minute with rage and then bit back her anger because yelling would only create a problem she’d have to fix.
“It’s the sensible thing to do,” Bill told her. “Eat your dinner.”
Looking at his smug, sure face, Quinn realized she’d created a monster. Bill thought she was going to give in because she always had; so why should he expect anything else? She’d trained him to be smug. She looked around. This wasn’t even her apartment. Bill had picked it out and moved them in, and when she said, “It’s too beige,” he’d said, “It’s five minutes from school,” and that made so much sense she’d given up. And he’d bought furniture, everything in minimalist stripped pine, and when it was delivered and she said, “I don’t like it, it looks cold and modern,” he said, “I paid for it, and it’s here. Give it a chance, and if you still hate it in a couple of months, we’ll get something you like.” And she’d said okay because it was just furniture, not worth fighting over.
Katie leaned against her leg, her butt rolling on the carpet. Katie was worth fighting for.
And maybe the furniture had been worth fighting over, too. All that damn beige.
Bill smiled at her across the table, equally beige.
In fact, right about now, anything was worth fighting over.
“Now, don’t sit over there and sulk,” Bill said. “Edie will be good to the dog.”
“I hate this furniture.” Quinn shoved herself away from the table and got up to get her coat.
“Quinn?” Bill sounded a little taken aback. “What are you talking about?”
“All of it.” She shrugged into her peacoat. “I like old stuff. Warm stuff. I hate this apartment. I hate beige carpet.”
“Quinn.”
She turned her back to him to pick up Katie. “And right now, I’m not too crazy about you, either.”
The last thing she heard as she went out the door was Bill saying, “Quinn, you’re acting like a child.”
Nick was just getting into Carl Hiaasen’s latest when somebody knocked on his door. He’d only been home an hour, the cubes in his second Chivas hadn’t started to melt yet, and now company. One of the many benefits of being single was that he got to be alone a lot in a quiet place, so he dropped the book on the floor and pushed himself out of his ancient leather armchair, determined to get rid of whoever it was.
But when he yanked the door open, it was Quinn, swathed to her nose in a thick, fuzzy blue scarf, her copper hair shining under the porch light, and shutting the door on Quinn was never a possibility. She was holding a skinny black dog that looked at him with imploring dog-orphan eyes, so he said, “I don’t want a dog,” but he stood back to let her in.
Quinn brushed by him and put the dog down as he shut the door. She pulled the scarf from her mouth and said, “That’s good because you can’t have her.” She smiled down at the dog, who was cautiously surveying the apartment, and then she turned to him, all shining eyes and glossy hair, her cheeks glowing red in her round little-girl face. “I’m keeping her.”
“Dumb idea,” he said, but he said it without heat, smiling at her from habit and from pleasure because she was there. “Drink?”
“Yes, please.” Quinn unwound her scarf and dropped it on the hardwood floor next to his mother’s old braided rug, and the dog immediately curled up on it, looking at Nick as if it expected to stay. Don’t even think about it, dog.
“Boy, what a day,” Quinn said.
“So tell me.” Nick went out to his tiny kitchen and she followed, taking a glass down from the pine shelves over his sink while he cracked ice from a tray in his ancient fridge.
“I don’t even know where to start,” she said.
The kitchen was a tight fit for two, but it was Quinn, so it didn’t count. She held the glass to her chest because they were too close for her to hold it out, and he dropped the ice into it and then reached past her for the Chivas on the shelf, absent-mindedly enjoying her nearness. “Start with the worst stuff,” he told her, as he poured about a quarter inch in the glass for her. She was driving home, so that was all she was going to get. “That way we’ll end on an up note.”
She grinned up at him and said, “Thank you. Can I have some more?”
“No.” He nudged her toward the living room with his hip as he put the Chivas back. “You’re too young to drink anyway.”
“I’m thirty-five.” Quinn dropped to the rug beside the dog, all long legs and bright hair above her paint-stained sweater and jeans. “I’m allowed to do anything I want.” She stopped as if she’d just heard herself say something radical instead of sarcastic, and then she shrugged. “Okay, the worst is that I had a fight with Bill.”
Nick appreciated the color for a moment, the copper in her hair, the honey of the oak floor, the soft blue of her sweater and the faded greens of the rug, and most of all Quinn herself, everything she was, glowing in the middle of all that warmth. Then he registered what she’d said. “What?”
“I had a fight with Bill. At least, I think it was a fight. It’s hard to tell because he never gets mad. I told him I was keeping this dog and he said no. Like I was a little kid or something.”
Quinn was so flustered, widening her big hazel eyes at him, that Nick grinned. “Well, you act like a little kid sometimes. You live in an apartment. Where are you going to keep a dog?”
She shook her head, her hair swinging like copper silk. “That’s not the point. The point is that I want it, and he just said no.”
“Well, he doesn’t want it.” Nick settled back into his armchair, determined not to get sucked into Quinn’s fight but not worried about it. He could resist getting involved in Quinn’s life. He just couldn’t resist her company. “He shouldn’t have to live with an animal if he doesn’t want to
.” The dog looked at him reproachfully, so he ignored it.
Quinn shook her head. “And I shouldn’t have to live without one.”
“So one of you will give in,” Nick said. “You’ll work it out.” He watched her stick her chin out and thought, Bill, you just became a dog lover. He’d known Quinn since she was fifteen, and when she dug her heels in like that, there was no moving her.
“I’m not working it out,” Quinn said. “I’m keeping Katie.”
“Who?”
“Katie. That’s her name.”
Quinn pulled the dog onto her lap and stroked its head, and Nick studied it, trying to see what Quinn saw in it. Slick and bony, it looked like a rat on stilts, and its huge dark eyes made him nervous. Save me, it seemed to be saying. Take care of me. Be responsible for me forever. He shook his head. “Couldn’t you have named it something about a thousand times less cute than Katie?”
“You want to get a dog of your own and call her Killer, be my guest,” Quinn said. “This is my dog, and her name’s Katie.” She looked at him, suddenly thoughtful. “You know, a dog would be good for you.”
“No.” Nick settled deeper in his chair. “An apartment is a lousy place for a dog. Also, I do not need another responsibility.”
Quinn looked at him with affectionate contempt. “A dog wouldn’t be another responsibility since you don’t have a first responsibility. It would be your first responsibility. It’d be a sign you’re maturing.”
“I have enough signs I’m maturing,” Nick growled. “I’m going gray.”
“I know.” Quinn sounded smug. “Just at the temples. It’s very attractive, but it’s probably going to cut down on those teenyboppers you’ve been dating.”
“I do not date teenagers.” Nick glared at her. He did not date teenagers. He had some morals, for Christ’s sake.
“Oh, please, how old is Lisa? Twelve?”
“Twenty-two,” Nick said. “I think.”
“An immature twenty-two,” Quinn said. “And you’re pushing forty.”
“Thirty-eight.” Nick thought about telling her he hadn’t seen Lisa since Christmas and decided not to. It would open up a whole different conversation he didn’t want to have, one they’d already had several times, the one about how he dated women who were too young for him so he wouldn’t have to get involved. That was true, but it also worked, so why discuss it? Time to change the subject. “So what’s new? I haven’t seen anybody all day. I worked right up to six. Bucky Manchester’s Chevy has a dead muffler.”
“He can afford it,” Quinn said. “Mama said Bucky’s making money hand over fist at the real estate office.” She took her first drink of Chivas, knocking back half of it at once.
“Well, that’s good because Max and I are siphoning some of it off.” Nick pointed his finger at her. “Don’t chug that. You’re driving.”
“Just home to Bill.” Quinn sipped her drink, tense all over again. “You know, if he doesn’t give in on this dog, I’m moving out.”
“Well, think about it first,” Nick said, definitely not interested in discussing Bill. “How’s school?”
“School?” Quinn blinked at him, readjusting subjects. “The same. Edie’s got the school play again, and Bobby’s giving her fits over it. If it isn’t athletics, he doesn’t care about it. She wants me to do the sets and costumes, but I said no. More headaches I don’t need. And Bobby’s driving Greta nuts, too, but all our money is on her since she’s been school secretary forever, and he’s just brand-new. He can’t run the school without her.”
“You call him Bobby to his face?”
“No. We don’t even call him Bobby in the teachers’ lounge. Edie started calling him the Boy Principal when he took over in November, and now everybody calls him the BP. I think that’s one of the reasons he’s so mad at her.”
“That would do it,” Nick said, mostly to keep her talking. Quinn talked with her entire body: arms, eyes, shoulders, mouth. She was performance art, so alive that sometimes he argued with her just so he could watch her flush and gesture.
Her smile was rich in her voice as she said, “Well, that, and I think he overheard her one day after he’d been shooting his mouth off, and she said”—Quinn shifted tone to mimic Edie’s blonde little soprano, the quasi-Southern lilt with the scorpion’s sting—“‘You know, it’s so much easier to like Robert when he’s not in the building.’” Nick grinned, and Quinn finished, “Well, yeah, but the BP didn’t think it was funny.”
“No sense of humor,” Nick said.
“No brains,” Quinn said. “He thinks he knows it all. Smug little twit. I used to think Harvey was a mess, but now that he’s gone and we’ve got the BP, I realize how lucky we were to have somebody that let Greta run the school. Bobby’s obsessed with changing everything, and he’s screwing things up right and left, and he won’t listen when we tell him he’s making mistakes. The only person he listens to at all is Bill, but then he thinks Bill hung the moon. All those championships. If Bill wins the baseball trophy this spring, the BP will probably ask Bill to adopt him. And as far as I’m concerned, they deserve each other.”
The shadow was back in her face again, and Nick felt uneasy. “Look, Bill can’t be dumb enough to risk losing you over a dog,” he said finally, not wanting to get in the middle of the mess but wanting to give her some kind of comfort. “When he sees how much it means to you, he’ll give in.”
“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “Sometimes I don’t think he sees me. I think he just sees the person he wants me to be. You know? The person he can cope with. Because the real me is too messy and difficult.”
Nick shook his head. Bill couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to miss who Quinn was and what she meant to him. She leaned forward to pull the dog into her lap, and her hair swung like copper silk, the lamplight making it gleam rich against the pale gold flush of her skin.
It would take a real moron to miss Quinn.
“So tell me about how you found this rat,” he said, just to see her eyes flash, and when she jerked her head up and glared at him, he laughed.
Good old, safe, predictable Quinn.
When Bill rolled over the next morning, Katie was stretched out between him and Quinn on the bedspread, a damn dog in bed with them in spite of his plans for newspaper in the bathroom. Quinn had just said, “No,” and put a folded blanket beside the bed, and of course during the night the dog had jumped up. It was a miracle it hadn’t peed in the bed. He felt his temper rise and calmed himself the way he always did, with deep breaths and clear thinking. Quinn was just confused. She’d come in late last night and shook her head when he tried to talk to her, refusing to eat the stroganoff he’d reheated for her, taking the dog into the bedroom with her. She was acting like a child, but he was used to dealing with children. He was a teacher. Patience was everything.
Besides, last night after she’d stomped out, he’d tried to figure out what was wrong and realized that she was probably just tense because she wanted to get married and have children like he did. Of course, he had plenty of time to have kids, but she was thirty-five and not getting any younger. And there he was, not telling her they were getting married because he was focused on the season. So all he had to do was get the dog out of the way and propose early, and then they’d get married and have the children she wanted, and he’d wake up and find Bill Junior snuggled between them. The thought warmed him. A little boy with all of his strength and honesty and intelligence and all of Quinn’s sweetness. All he had to do was be patient and get rid of the dog and things would be fine.
The dog stretched, all skinny legs and body, and then curled closer to Quinn’s back.
“Get down,” Bill whispered as sternly as he could without waking Quinn.
The dog opened its eyes and glared at him.
Bill shoved at the dog’s butt with his hand. “Down.”
The dog curled a lip and growled low in its throat, viciously staking its claim to Quinn, and Bill pulled his hand back.
/> “What’re you doin’?” Quinn mumbled sleepily over her shoulder.
“That dog growled at me.”
“You prob’ly woke her up.” Quinn yawned and patted the bed on the other side of her. “C’mere, Katie.”
Katie stood up slowly, stretching, insolent, and then clambered over Quinn’s waist to curl up victorious against her stomach. Quinn let her hand fall carelessly along the dog’s back, patting a little as she drifted back to sleep.
Bill took some more deep breaths and then sneezed. Probably allergic to dog dander.
That dog was history.
“Is Max here?” Nick straightened from under the hood of Mary Galbraith’s ancient Civic and said, “Pardon?” but he’d recognized the voice even before he saw the slender blonde in the powder blue suit. First National Bank Barbie, Darla called her, which was a lot kinder than Lois Ferguson’s nickname for her. She did have that plastic look that made it hard to believe she was stalking Max, but there she was. “Hi, Barbara. Nope, he’s out right now. Your car’s all right, I hope.”
“Oh, he did a wonderful job.” Barbara looked uncertain, out of place in the dingy garage, but then Barbara looked out of place anywhere but the bank. She gave Nick the creeps, but he knew that wasn’t fair. For one thing, she was damn good at her job. Nobody’s deposit ever got screwed up when Barbara took it.
“I don’t know when he’ll be back,” Nick said, when Barbara seemed stalled out on the next thing to say.
“I just brought him these.” She stuck a painted tin out toward him tentatively, and Nick felt sorry for her and wary for Max. The tin was plaid with a painted green bow and a painted white card that said THANK YOU! “They’re cookies,” Barbara said. “Because he did such a good job.”
“Oh.” What the hell was he going to do with cookies? “Why don’t you put them in the office? I’ll tell Max you left them.”
“Thank you. That would be nice.” Barbara stood there, perfectly dressed, stuck again.