In Which I Am Stranded with Ho Hos
While my horse barely made it around the track in one piece, Kelsey’s more scientifically chosen entry squeaked out the win by a nose, netting her four hundred dollars. She rewarded her loyal subjects with a twenty-four-pack of Red Bull and a bulk barrel of Skittles.
Ray was pleased with our good behavior at the Derby and even more so when the Columbus-Belmont staff gave us the thumbs-up for our recruitment campaign. Meanwhile, the printer’s deadline for my state fair project was looming. I’d decided on the “Bizarrely Bluegrass” theme: uniquely, charmingly Bluegrass events. But Josh’s constant hammering about my cheerleader tendencies had me doubting the overall look as well as the idea behind my promotional campaign. Which was just freaking irritating. And I was procrastinating, which was completely unlike me.
Josh—Vaughn—whoever he was—was confused when I returned to my cold-shoulder methods after the Derby. He seemed hurt that I would respond to his intimate revelation with more distance. So he reverted to his previous delightful tactics of implying that I was incompetent and ridiculing my ideas in front of the rest of the staff at meetings. But it seemed halfhearted, as if he were doing it out of habit rather than actual disdain.
For my part, I was still in get-even mode over Josh’s mind games at the Derby. But I’d already eliminated several of my best ideas because they could be traced back to me too easily. These included an elaborate scenario in which I had Kelsey intercepting his dry cleaning so I could pull all of the tiny threads out of his perfect pants with a stitch picker.
While the thought of Josh’s pants disintegrating in the middle of an important meeting was beyond entertaining, I decided on more of a psychological torture route. Josh would expect me to attack him with petty girl tricks. He would not expect what was coming.
• • •
“How exactly did you convince him to do this?” Kelsey whispered. We sat waiting in a state-issued car while Josh took a restroom break at a McDonald’s a few blocks from our destination in Fort Mitchell.
“I told him there would be several celebrities present,” I told her, slicking a coat of cranberry gloss across my lips and flipping the visor mirror up. “And there will be. Charlie McCarthy is prominently displayed right up front.”
Kelsey clapped her hand over her face. It had taken quite a bit of acting to convince Josh that he should attend the special presentation at the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell instead of me. I had to pull a reverse Br’er Rabbit on him. As in, “Oh, please, let me go to this super important museum event because it would go a long way in ensuring I meet the right people.” But I had really wanted him to swoop in and take over and arrange to take Kelsey with us as support staff to record the presentation for the commission’s site.
Vent Haven is the world’s only museum dedicated to the history and preservation of the art of ventriloquism. Housed in a private home in Kenton County, the facility boasts a collection of hundreds of dummies, from Edward Bergen’s iconic Charlie McCarthy to more historical specimens, such as the cigarette-smoking “Granny” dummy constructed in the 1850s. Aside from the collection being unique and pretty darn cool, traveling to see it was one of the first long-distance road trips I’d experienced with my grandfather, so it held a special place in my heart.
The museum director had contacted me the month before to say that Jimmy Burkhardt, a comedian who had made quite a name for himself using a mix of stand-up and puppetry, was making a sizable monetary donation to the museum for its upkeep. He was also adding several of his earlier dummies to the museum’s collection, including Jojo the Caveman and Bob the Judgmental Banana. It was a boon for the museum, and presented a wonderful media opportunity to remind visitors about the museum and promote the ConVENTion, the museum’s annual summer gathering of voice-throwing ventriloquists and their pint-size friends. Two birds, one stone, lots of quirk. And since Josh seemed to have trouble with puppets, it was just the right opportunity to introduce him to the other side of Kentucky tourism.
“And how did you describe this to Josh?” Kelsey asked, casually checking her camera settings as Josh made his way across the parking lot, straightening his tie.
“I said it was a museum featuring oral history and hands-on art exhibits,” I said, my lips twitching. “Also, I may have changed the name in his press packet to ‘The Fort Mitchell Vocal Craft Museum’ so he wouldn’t realize where we’re going. I made it sound super complicated and dithered that I just wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get everything set up. I changed the time on the video team request sheet a few times. I didn’t know if I could handle working with a celebrity, et cetera, et cetera. He finally got so frustrated with me that he said he’d take over. I think, in his head, this is something a director of marketing would do.”
“You’re pure evil,” Kelsey told me. “And I would like to formally file my objections to this plan. It seems a little mean. Usually I like a little mean, but if someone found out about my spider issues and exploited them at work, I wouldn’t rest until I’d pawned everything they ever loved and used the money to pay for my therapy.”
I shrugged, just before Josh opened his car door. “I’m more like ninety percent evil. And I’m noting your objections, while ignoring them.”
Josh stretched his seat belt across his waist as I started the car. All morning he’d been pissy about my driving, making noises about city driving in Atlanta training him for almost any traffic situation. And then I reminded him that the area just across the river from Cincinnati had changed quite a bit since he’d lived in Kentucky and I’d spent more time there. Reluctant to actually say that he didn’t trust my skills behind the wheel (or my willingness to sacrifice his side of the vehicle in an unavoidable collision), he’d grumbled his way into the passenger side.
We pulled out of the parking lot and made our way into the residential area surrounding Maple Avenue. Josh frowned as we passed the respectable one-family homes. “Are you sure about these directions, Kelsey?”
“Yep.” Kelsey’s lips popped on the p sound just as she cracked her gum.
Josh looked vaguely annoyed, though I don’t know whether it was due to Kelsey’s oral pyrotechnics or because he seemed to think we were in the wrong place. I turned in to the museum’s parking lot and the color drained out of Josh’s face.
“Hey, why does that sign say ‘Vent Haven Museum’?” Josh asked, an edge of panic creeping into his voice. He tugged at his tie, which I was starting to recognize as his tell that he was uncomfortable and upset. A tiny bit of guilt tugged at my conscience, but then I remembered how he’d manipulated me at the Derby party. He’d managed to make me feel sorry for him. He’d given me hope that we might be able to put the hostilities behind us and build some sort of friendship. He had this coming. If he wanted to fight dirty, I would fight downright filthy. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have any exploitable phobias.
“I’m not sure,” I said blithely. “But we’re in the right spot. We should probably get inside, the presentation is starting in about thirty minutes.”
Josh was distinctly uneasy as we hustled up to the entrance of the main building.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he stammered. “What—what is this place? Mother of—” He yelped as a display came into view, showing examples of early jointed dummies, or “vents,” that looked like a collection of dismembered limbs. Even I found that to be a little off-putting, and I had no problem with dummies. A leering clay-brown head with manically wide eyes and a super-wide grin stretching its top lip demonstrated the exaggerated features found on most vents, allowing the dummies to emote to the back row of the audience if necessary.
“I read somewhere that the overdone faces communicate the appropriate emotions to the audience, but up close, they make people uneasy,” I said casually, picking through the brochures by the front desk and tucking one into my bag for future reference. I smiled at Josh, even though the cross-sectioned plaster dummy head that showed the inner works and how a ventriloquist moved the dummy’s eyes was a bit unnerving. “Then again, it’s almost impossible to create an effective dummy without them.”
Kelsey was so fascinated by the exhibits that she broke out the camera and started filming B-roll shots of the interior.
“Did you know the last stop on the tour is a big room with dozens of vents all lined up in rows of chairs, arranged in order of who made them? They call it ‘the schoolroom,’ ” she said.
Josh shuddered and turned an even pastier shade of eggshell.
“It’s kind of crazy how much entertainment history is represented in this building. Vaudeville, early TV, cartoons.” She paused, grinning excitedly. “They have this one dummy, Woody DeForest—which is pretty damn funny if you ask me—that belonged to Don Messick. Messick was a voice actor who did the voices for Scooby Doo and Papa Smurf and a bunch of other Hanna-Barbera staples. So if we go by six degrees of separation, we are that much closer to knowing my all-time hero!”
“Okay, I don’t think you can call a cartoon character your hero,” I told her. “Also, I don’t understand why you would pick Daphne as your hero when Velma is clearly the superior choice.”
“Oh, it’s easy to like Velma.” Kelsey sniffed. “Daphne’s genius was covert and misunderstood.”
Josh wheezed, pulling at his collar. “Could you two stop talking for just a minute?”
“Oh, wow, look at this!” I held up a disembodied baby-doll-style head on a stick that demonstrated how pulling the lever hidden inside a dummy’s body made the jaw move up and down and moved the eyelids. Josh recoiled, stumbling back into the wall as he glared at the pair of us with a combination of wrath and pleading. That tiny tug of conscience came niggling back at the corner of my brain, but I ignored it.
“I thought this was a vocal arts museum,” Josh hissed, tugging at his blue paisley tie to the point that it was slipping free of his collar.
“Ventriloquism is a vocal art,” I insisted brightly. It was disturbing how innocent and guileless I could make my voice sound when I wanted to. It really was.
“Turn that damn camera off, Kelsey, I mean it,” he said, yanking at his tie full-force now.
“Okay, okay,” she said, hitting the power button with a decisive snap. She shot me a significant look, which I blithely ignored.
“Are you all right, Josh?” I asked sweetly.
“Fine, fine,” he muttered as sweat popped up on his brow. “Let’s just get on with this.”
We wandered deeper into the museum in search of the director. Having toured the museum before, I intentionally wandered a little until I found the main collection room: rows upon rows of dummies, each more sinister-looking than the last to the dummy-phobic eye, sitting on their pristine white display cubes as if waiting patiently for their cue to enter stage left. There were vents of every size and age—fluffy animals; cheerful boys; cranky grandpas; and sweet-cheeked, nonsmoking grannies.
Josh froze in his tracks. “I’m going to need to leave now.”
Okay, maybe Kelsey was right. Josh was so pale now that his face was the color of skim milk and his pupils were so wide there was hardly any color in his eyes at all. I chuckled uncomfortably and patted his arm. “Oh, come on, what’s scary about a sweet little puppet? Even kids love puppets.”
“Not all kids,” he wheezed. Just behind him, I saw someone from the museum staff carrying the Jojo the Caveman dummy, a bulgy, hunched male character with bushy red eyebrows and a scraggly beard. I started to call out a warning, but Josh had already turned toward Jojo. He let out a hoarse shriek, like the bark of a sea lion, and collapsed. The back of his head hit the floor with a dull, sickening thud.
The museum staffer let out a shriek of her own and called for the director. Kelsey shot me a scathing look, different now because she actually meant it. I frowned, biting my lip as I considered how much trouble I could be in if Josh had actually injured himself when he fell—beyond the obvious damage to his well-crafted hair. “Okay, maybe I was a little overzealous this time,” I admitted.
• • •
Though his head had bounced off the floor pretty good when he landed, Josh refused an ambulance. He did accept the director’s offer to rest in her office while we conducted the check ceremony. Kelsey got great footage for the Web site. Joe Burkhardt was charming and funny, using several voices and throwing them around the room to make his remarks about the museum’s importance in preserving ventriloquism’s legacy. The museum staff expressed their gratitude by making a special cave diorama for displaying Jojo the Caveman. It was marketing gold. But I couldn’t concentrate on any of it because I was worried about Josh and his bruised noggin.
The good news was that he refused to admit he had passed out due to fear of dummies. He said he had a “blood sugar drop,” which was fine with me. I couldn’t be blamed for a blood sugar drop. We loaded him into the car and drove home in silent deference to his headache. We took him to his apartment in Capital Towers, one of the newer McApartment buildings in the center of town, low on both personality and square footage.
I was a bit shocked that a status-conscious guy like Josh would live in a haven for newly divorced men and recent evictees from their mothers’ basements. I wondered if his story about Lydia and her supposed credit card rampage could be true after all, and if this was all he could afford. What if I’d been wrong at the Derby and he really was a flawed, approachable human being?
That just made me feel worse about the whole dented-skull thing.
Josh refused our help getting into the elevator, saying he would see us at work. Kelsey snatched the car keys out of my hands and held them out of my reach. “We’re going to talk and you are really going to listen to me. Because this isn’t coming from Kelsey, your awesome assistant who knows and sees all, but Kelsey, your friend, who cares about you as a person and the overall condition of your soul. You are heading down a very dangerous path, Sadie. If this promotion was the One Ring, you would be Gollum. If it was a white whale, you would be Ahab. If it was the Iron Throne, I’m pretty sure you would be a Lannister, and nothing good ever happens to a Lannister.”
“Get to the point, Kels.”
“Look, at first, messing with Captain Cheekbones was fun, but the distraction is starting to affect our performance at work. And I know you don’t want that. I know Josh can be annoying and snotty sometimes, but he’s also our potential boss. Or at least, my potential boss. He could have really hurt himself today, Sadie, whacking his head like that. And it would have been entirely our fault.”
“I know,” I admitted. “I didn’t mean for him to concuss himself. I just wanted to scare him a little.”
“Well, cut it out. It used to be fun to come to work, but now it’s just sort of stressful. I know, deep down, that’s not what you want. You’re both working toward the same goal. Can’t you just suck it up and act like grown-ups for a little while?”
“I’ll think about it,” I grumbled. “And I do feel bad, Kelsey, really. The way he dropped like a sack of wet concrete drove home the whole ‘Josh is, in fact, human’ point. That and seeing his apartment building, which was plain sad.”
“An apology, which Josh richly deserves, would be a good place to start.”
I snatched the keys out of her hands. “I said I would think about it.”
• • •
Apparently I did not think quickly enough. The next time I saw Josh, he was perfectly friendly. We swapped objectionable salad ingredients at a working lunch because Josh couldn’t stand avocado and I hated black olives almost as much as I hated C.J. Rowley. He even joked with me about the brochure I was printing about the “Unique Museums of Kentucky.” There was no hint that I’d sent him into the mouth of a dummy-phobe’s version of hell. And because he was pretending the whole thing had never happened, I decided to do the same and skip apologizing. I rationalized the potential apology away as being a painful reminder of Josh’s dummy trauma.
I was aware it was a stretch.
That wasn’t soul-cleansing enough for Kelsey, who enforced her own brand of office justice the following week. We had stayed late, going over the copy I’d planned to use on the travel guide sample pages for the state fair campaign. It was good, if I did say so myself, but a little generic. I needed to hone it to fit with my concept, which I hadn’t nailed down 100 percent yet. Meanwhile, Kelsey was threatening to nail my fingers down 100 percent if I didn’t make a damn decision on my opening paragraph.
“Just another hour, Kels, I promise.”
“So you told me,” Kelsey muttered. “About an hour ago.”
“I have peanut butter M&Ms in my office,” I singsonged.
“You’ve had peanut butter M&Ms in your office all this time and didn’t mention it? You are really pushing it, woman.”
“I’ll go get them.” I sighed, rising from my chair.
“And we’re out of the good red pens,” Kelsey called as I reached the hallway. “While you’re out there, can you grab another box from the supply closet?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Since the supply closet was all the way at the other end of the office, I stopped there first. After an incident involving an intern selling our printer cartridges on eBay, we kept the supply closets locked. Ray, Kelsey, Josh, and I were the only ones with keys for our department’s supplies. I pulled my key from my jacket pocket, put it in the lock, and heard, “Hey! Hey! I’m in here!”
“What the— Josh?” I called. “What are you doing in the supply closet?”
I opened the door and wham! I was shoved unceremoniously into the darkened closet, stumbling into a bulky figure.
“No!” Josh yelled, bumping me to a wall in his haste to get to the door. “Don’t let the door close!”
I turned just in time to see Kelsey’s face grinning from the light of the hallway. “You two have fun!” And then she slammed the door.
Josh battered his fists against the door as I yelled, “Kelsey, what are you doing?”
“You’re taking too long fixing your working relationship with Josh. So I thought I would help the process along.”
“I told you I would think about it!” I exclaimed.
“Not good enough,” Kelsey yelled. “Work it out.”
“Kelsey, open this damn door, right now!” Josh yelled. “This is illegal and insane!”
“You’ll be fine. There’s water, a bottle of vodka, PB&Js, and some Ho Hos in the top drawer of the spare filing cabinet.”
I reached behind said five-drawer filing cabinet and flipped the light switch. (Ray didn’t quite think it through when he moved the cabinet in there.) Blinking rapidly against the intrusive light, I saw that Josh had tossed off his tie and opened the top two buttons of his shirt collar. His light blue shirt was damp with sweat. He tore open the top drawer of the cabinet and rummaged around until he found a large bottle of water. He glugged down a good portion of it before he came up for air. Which reminded me: “But what if we have to go to the bathroom?”
“There’s a bucket in the corner,” came her muffled reply.
“I’m going to kill you, Kelsey!”
“No, you aren’t!” she cackled. “You’ll thank me later, I promise. Now, I am wedging a chair underneath the doorknob. It’s six o’clock. I am going out for a steak and a very large vodka-based drink. I’ll come back around midnight to check on your progress. If you two can’t find some common ground and agree to work together like a big boy and girl, I’ll leave you here overnight.”
“Kelsey!” we cried together, banging our fists against the door.
“What is wrong with you people?” Josh yelled, kicking the metal door. “I just want to come to work every day. I did not sign on for this! Dummies and getting trapped in dark rooms with crazy women! I just want to work like a normal person!”
Josh slumped against the door and slid down, coming to rest on the carpet. He looked up at me, making huge anime eyes that reminded me of a blue-eyed basset hound. “Why didn’t I just take that nice safe job at that nuclear testing facility in an undisclosed location? I could have learned to live with the end-of-the-workday strip searches.”
“I take it that you don’t have a cell phone with you?” I asked. He shook his head. “Me neither. How long have you been in here?”
“Over an hour.” He sighed, drinking more of the water. “Right before quitting time, Kelsey asked me to help her move a ream of copy paper and next thing I knew, wham! I’m in the closet. I guess everybody left for the day without checking the supply closet to see if their colleagues were being held captive inside.”
“Damn unreasonable of them,” I agreed. “Hey, take it easy on the water. I do not relish the idea of hearing you pee into a plastic mop bucket.”
I plopped down on a few boxes of copy paper and tried to sit as primly as I could in a skirt and heels. Josh relinquished the bottle and wiped his sleeve across his brow. “Sorry, it’s just that I couldn’t find the switch. And I didn’t know any of Kelsey’s ‘supplies’ were in here. I’ve been sitting in the dark, without any idea whether I’d be let out.”
“I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t have threatened to lock Kelsey in the closet with Charlie. It gave her ideas. I am a bad influence.”
“Frankly, when I first got shoved in here, I assumed you’d put Kelsey up to it,” he said, eyeing the vodka bottle with heavy consideration.
“What!” I cried. “That’s mean. My shenanigans are charming and slightly exasperating. This is like something out of a serial-killer movie. We’re lucky Kelsey isn’t throwing a lotion bottle at us and screaming about getting the hose again.”
“Your ability to find the silver lining is incredibly disturbing. And need I remind you that your last ‘shenanigan’ nearly gave me a concussion?” he asked, sternly.
“I didn’t know you were going to faint!” I cried.
“But you knew something was going to happen, otherwise you wouldn’t have ambushed me like that. Do you have any idea what it was like, being trapped in that place, trying to put on a brave face for the sake of not humiliating myself in a work situation?”
I pursed my lips, trying to find the right words without incriminating myself, just in case Kelsey had a camera hidden somewhere. “No. I am sorry. It was wrong to do that to you and I appreciate that you didn’t go running to Ray to tell on me. Did you hear that, Kelsey? I said I was sorry!” I yelled, in the hope that she was still lingering in the hallway. No such luck.
Grumbling, I stood and pulled the vodka out of the cabinet and cracked it open as Josh said, “I thought at the Derby that we had some sort of moment when you scraped my frantic ass off the floor and kept me from humiliating myself in front of my psycho ex. I thought we’d reached a sort of ceasefire.”
I took a long, gulping drink from the vodka bottle. Josh pulled a face. “Good God, straight from the bottle? Really?”
I gestured to the small space. “Closet.”
He rolled his eyes, but snagged the bottle from me and took his own, much smaller, dose of vitamin V. Wincing, he practically whispered, “Anyway, we had what I thought was an important moment, and then you went right back to cold-shouldering me, before sending me into that hell-den of dummies. I don’t get it.”
And I was suddenly uncomfortable with the emotional and physical proximity in what felt like a tiny prison cell filled with Hammermill products. Josh sounded genuinely hurt. I sighed, taking another drink. Fine; if we were going to do this now, trapped in a supply closet, hovering around a bottle of Stolichnaya, all cards were going on the table. “I saw you, Josh.”
Josh handed me one of the less squished PB&Js and sat down, cross-legged. “Saw me what?”
“I saw you right after your little scene, talking to Gina in the hallway, laughing your ass off. Somehow, you managed to snap right out of your little panic episode and go back into charming mode with Boobs McGee.” He gave me a look so blank, I wondered if he’d hit his head again. “Look, we’re competing for a job, and I understand that we’re in a bit of a theatrical profession, but there’s no reason to play insane mind games with me. Was that even your ex? Or was it some actress you hired to make me feel sorry for you?”
“No, I wouldn’t do something like that! That’s almost as creepy and ridiculous as sending an automatonophobe to a museum packed with ventriloquist dummies!”
Now it was my turn for a blank look.
“It means ‘fear of human figures.’ It’s a real thing!” he exclaimed when I started to laugh.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh.” I giggled. “But I’m gonna.”
“Jerk.” He tossed a Ho Ho at me. “As far as me recovering too quickly in the hall, what was I supposed to do when Gina talked to me? Burst into tears right there in front of her? I sucked it up and put on a brave face. Maybe if your feelings were hurt or you had a question about the way I was speaking to a coworker—someone who has treated me considerably better than you have, by the way—you could have brought it up to me, instead of ignoring me and taking petty dummy-based revenge.”
“Damn it, I wish that didn’t sound so reasonable,” I grumbled, picking at my sandwich.
“And for the record, that was my ex, okay? Seeing her really did send me into a tailspin. And apparently sent her into one too, judging by the e-mails she’s been sending me. She didn’t like that you called yourself ‘my’ Sadie and keeps writing to make sure we aren’t ‘serious.’ So thanks for that. Derby Day was the first time I’d seen her since a rather unpleasant ‘No, I didn’t cheat on you, but I am breaking up with you anyway because you’re freaking crazy’ conversation in which she threw a really heavy brass paperweight at my head. And seeing her again made me realize a couple of things.”
I slid into a sitting position across from him, taking another drink from the Stoli bottle. “Wait, wait, is this going to be another woeful story that makes me feel sorry for you, and then I end up getting pissed at you, bringing out my stabby instincts?”
“First of all, ‘stabby’ isn’t a word,” he told me, pointing a finger in my face. I batted it out of the way. Why was he touching me so much? Why was I giggling so damn much? Maybe drinking the vodka wasn’t such a great idea after all.
I handed him the bottle.
“There are other things,” he said, hesitantly. “Things about you that are clearly very different from Lydia.”
I snorted. “I would hope so.”
“I misjudged you, a couple of times. When I first saw you at the McBrides’, it was like this instant recognition. I had been so closed off for such a long time, but you, you looked so open. Even if it meant showing that you were anxious to the point of throwing up. And I liked that about you, that you were willing to just let those emotions hang free and you weren’t worried who saw. Smiling and really flirting with you, instead of ‘being charming because I have to’ flirting? That was more than I’d been capable of in months, as far as talking to a woman. And then you found out who I was, and you brought those shields up so quickly. And then you were downright hostile. I guess I was tired of being jerked around by women who ran hot and cold. And I saw you as standing between me and the life I was trying to rebuild, which sort of lumped you together with my ex in my mind. And I may have taken some of that frustration out on you.”
“Your logic is very twisty.”
“I didn’t say it was healthy,” he acknowledged. “The good news is I think I’ve worked through being so angry at her. Between lashing out at you—sorry—and seeing Lydia at the Derby, I think I’ve got closure. She’s not the mythical she-beast I’d built up in my head. I mean, she’s an awful person and I don’t want to be anywhere near her. But she’s lonely and sad, and the bomb she dropped in the middle of my life didn’t exactly work the way she’d hoped. At least I can walk away from this with my head held high. Yeah, it’s embarrassing, but at least she was wrong. And she did me a favor, saving me from proposing.
“I was wrong,” he admitted. “I was wrong to judge you so quickly and to take my anger out on you.”
“I’m glad I could help, I think?” I unwrapped the Ho Ho and sank my teeth into chocolaty, spongy goodness, which had a considerably nicer aftertaste than the vodka.
“You know, it occurs to me that I don’t know anything about you,” he said, chewing on his sandwich. “I mean, you clearly looked into my background, but all I know about you is that you have a deep, almost unnatural love for your home state.”
“Actually, I wasn’t born here. My mom died when I was ten and I moved here from Michigan to live with my grandparents.”
He winced. “See, that’s something I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t talk about it much,” I assured him. “My grandparents were really wonderful people. But they weren’t sure what to do with me when I came to live with them. I mean, they were almost sixty and raising a kid again. And I was pretty quiet and withdrawn. Gran insisted that Grandpa spend bonding time with me, like he did with my cousins. When Grandpa asked how he should arrange the tea party for my teddy bears, and she realized he wasn’t just being his usual sarcastic self, she told him to take me to the tribal burial mounds at Wickliffe.”
“Isn’t that how Stephen King stories start?” he asked, grinning cheekily.
I smacked his shoulder, making him wince. “It’s a state park near the Illinois state line. History had always been one of my best subjects in school, so I was running around this place like it was Chuck E. Cheese’s. They have all of these little buildings housing half-exposed burial mounds that ancient tribes used to bury their dead on the riverbank. It brought me right out of my shell. I came alive. I asked questions. I came up with elaborate justifications for why burial mounds should still be used today. Grandpa was a little disturbed by my being so fascinated by ancient Native American death traditions. But he was just glad I was talking. Every weekend we could get away, we would visit some museum or state park. We traded weird random facts we’d learned from Reader’s Digest or the newspaper’s ‘Did You Know?’ section. When we ran out of historical locations, we started on the odd roadside attractions—Mammoth Cave, Big Mike’s Mystery House, Tombstone Junction. Every once in a while, we let my grandma come with us.”
“And do your grandparents still live in Wickliffe?”
I chuckled, thinking of my grandparents’ snug little house on the outskirts of town. Coming from a large northern city where I didn’t know my next-door neighbors, much less the name of my mailman or the local funeral-home director, I loved the sense of community and continuity I’d found in Ballard County. It was reassuring that my high school math teacher had taught my mother in the very same classroom twenty years before. And I liked knowing that if I went to the church potluck with my grandparents, Mrs. Hopkins would provide her famous Coca-Cola fudge cake, and she would save me a corner piece because she thought I was a much nicer teenager than her “god-awful” grandkids.
Mrs. Hopkins eventually forgave me for selling my grandparents’ house to one of those god-awful grandkids, which meant she had to see him regularly.
That’s when I realized that I hadn’t answered Josh’s question and I was just staring off into space with a weird smile on my face. “Um, Gran died of breast cancer right after I graduated from college.” I tipped my head against the wall, willing myself not to sound maudlin or pathetic, but it was difficult with liquor in my system. “Grandpa retired and opened up a bait shop with a couple of his cop buddies at Lake Barkley. But he had a heart attack about two years ago and passed away.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. And, given the soft tone of his voice, I actually believed him.
“They had a good life together, and one wouldn’t have wanted to live very long without the other.
“My cousins, Guy and Jake, are the only family I have left. They’re married and have kids of their own, so they’re pretty busy. I see them sometimes on holidays, and that’s pretty much it. It helps, having Ray and Kelsey, and the rest of my ‘office family.’ Ray’s wife makes sure I get a homemade birthday cake every year. Melody invites me to holidays with her bizarre family, which actually makes me feel a little better about not having many relatives. Our coworkers really helped me pull through when Grandpa died.”
I sagged against the wall, feeling lighter and hollowed out from my confession. Josh wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me against his side and protecting my back from the unforgiving Sheetrock. It showed a level of consideration I was sure I didn’t deserve. Josh wasn’t so bad, I supposed, when it came down to it. So much of my dislike of him had boiled down to insecurities and resentment. And as far as the Lord Gel-demort thing went, well, okay, so he was well groomed. But he’d started his career in a big city where designer labels and putting the man in manicure were important. We’d started off on the wrong foot, and while his attitude hadn’t been great, the majority of the tension was the result of my antagonizing him. I pushed and he pushed back.
Now if we could just push the damn closet door open and get out of here, I could tell Kelsey I’d learned my lesson. And then beat her, severely.
“So this whole rabid devotion for all things Kentucky isn’t an act, is it?” he asked.
“I think ‘rabid’ is a bit unfair,” I retorted. “But yeah. When you don’t know what it’s like to have a home and you find one, you get a little enthusiastic.”
“But there have to be things about living here that even you don’t like, like bluegrass music. You can’t possibly like bluegrass music, right? Or when you drive home from work, are you cranking up the Jean Ritchie and rocking it out?”
“No,” I scoffed. “I really, really dislike it. Okay? But I don’t have to like everything about my state. For instance, I’m not a big fan of KFC, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to smile and sing the extra-crispy recipe’s praises should it ever come up in conversation while we’re promoting what’s great about Kentucky.”
He grinned broadly, cursed blue eyes all a-twinkle. “Oh my God, are you recording me right now?” I demanded, scooching away into a kneeling position and jabbing him in the chest with my finger. “Are you going to use this rant as blackmail material when selling me out to the fast-food cartels?”
He grabbed my hand to prevent further poking. “No, you paranoid freak, I just love watching you get all passionate in your defense of fried chicken. Isn’t it exhausting, being this wound up over everything?”
“A little,” I admitted. “Isn’t it boring not getting wound up about anything? That’s what scares me about you. You don’t even care! You don’t care about this job. You’re going to take the contacts you make here with companies like Delacour and use them to open some soulless marketing temple to your alpha-male awesomeness.”
God. Damn. Vodka. And its ability to melt my already compromised verbal filters.
“Oh, come on.” He pulled on my wrist, dragging me toward him in an off-balance crouch. “You’re always saying crap like that about my work. Why don’t you take me seriously? I had to have some skills for the commissioner to bring me in to take over your job.”
I glared down at him, more than a little irritated that the conversation had taken this turn after we seemed to be making some progress. “I don’t take you seriously because you say things like that. Oh, and because you shoot me ‘Blue Steel’ every time you think I’m looking at you.”
“I do not do ‘Blue Steel’!” he exclaimed, the slightest tint of red creeping into his cheeks, as I had basically accused him of unironic Derek Zoolander impersonations. I gave him my best skeptical “nonmodel” expression. “Okay, it’s a little bit of a pose. But you don’t make it easy on me, you know. Do you know what it’s like coming into an office where you’re supposed to be replacing someone that nearly everybody loves?”
“Nearly everybody?”
“Theresa,” he noted. “And Gina.”
“Dang it,” I groused.
“The secretarial pool hates me and I think Melody may be misdirecting my faxes to Bangladesh. I’m still not entirely sure that Kelsey isn’t the one removing the screws from my office furniture. Every time I sit down, my chair falls apart in a different way.”
I stretched my legs out and bit down on my lip to prevent a laugh from escaping. I’d seen Kelsey carrying an Allen wrench into Josh’s office a few times before her declaration of ceasefire, but I’d had no clue what she was up to.
“You do good work,” he told me. “It’s visually interesting and funny and memorable. We have different styles, that’s all. And mine happens to appeal to a broader audience.”
“Thanks.” I sighed. “And your work is . . . classically beautiful. And if I were interested in taking a tour of every distillery and winery in Kentucky, I’m sure your campaign would be what convinced me to do it.”
Josh snickered. “That was physically painful for you, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, pressing my lips together. “Yes, it was.”
“So you think I’m an alpha male?” He nudged me in the ribs, smirking at me.
“You have your Greek letters tattooed somewhere on your body, don’t you?”
He grinned and rolled down his sock to show me his frat’s insignia on his ankle. “I knew it!” I cried.
“I was young and stupid . . . and drunk. So drunk.”
“Was the butterfly tramp stamp unavailable?”
“Hey! I thought we were playing nice,” he said, nudging me again.
“Sorry,” I said, hastily adding, “dude.”
A lovely, silent moment passed, allowing me to close my eyes and appreciate the warmth radiating from Josh’s body and the swimmy vodka-soaked feeling in my head.
“Can I ask you a serious question?” I asked.
He snorted. “Are we asking any other kind tonight?”
“Why did you move back here when your life imploded?”
“It’s a fair question.” He shrugged. “I wanted to come back to what was familiar. I wanted to be near my family, and away from all of my business contacts that had received that damn e-mail. It’s a lot cheaper to live here than in a major city. Even in a place like Louisville, the cost of living is a lot more reasonable. I could buy a house here for what would maybe get me a room in a nice duplex in Atlanta . . . with four roommates.”
“Got it.”
“And a shared bathroom,” he added.
“I got it,” I said again.
“Do you have any idea what a bunch of guys can do to a shared bathroom?”
“I got it,” I repeated, smacking his arm.
“Ow,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what hurts more, your fists or your firm grasp of sarcasm.”
I frowned, feeling more than a little guilty for how I’d been treating Josh. Yes, I’d been angry about his being hired, but it wasn’t his fault that he’d derailed me. It hadn’t been intentional, at first. There was plenty to like about him. He was an interesting guy. He was a good listener. He made me laugh, sometimes with him, sometimes at him. Now that I could see something beyond the slick, irritating exterior, I was much more comfortable talking to him. And despite said slick, irritating exterior, there was something very decent about him. When he wasn’t trying to annoy the living hell out of me. Which wasn’t often.
I had to stop thinking in sentence fragments.
“I’m sorry. I’m so tired of this,” I said, sighing and laying my head on his shoulder. “I can’t keep up. I mean, we’re both working toward the same thing, right? At this point, I’m more concerned about losing the job I have than about not getting the promotion. I mean, this is not the way grown-up professional people behave.”
“You mean you give up? We’re calling a truce?”
“Not on the competition,” I insisted. “Just the sabotage. I think we can both admit that it’s not exactly inspiring us to do our best work when we’re so worried about what the other is doing that we’re not concentrating. Just imagine what we could come up with if we were actually doing our jobs.”
“It’s a crazy theory, but it just might work,” he said, stretching his hand out to me. “Normal, professional interactions from here on out, I promise.”
His hand felt so warm and pleasantly heavy against my own. I could practically feel the ridges of his fingerprints against my skin. “Same here. And don’t worry, I’m pretty sure Kelsey stopped unscrewing your furniture a while ago.”
“I knew it!”