“Yeah,” she says, then grabs Molly’s arm and drags her to Mrs. Dahl’s front porch. The older woman squeals with delight when she sees them, then ushers them inside. Just as she’s about to shut the door, she sees me and grins.
Today is one of her good days, apparently, and she doesn’t mistake me for Roger trying to drag her to bingo.
“Got a couple of foxes in here for you, Cal. Maybe I’ll talk you up while they’re in here.”
“Please don’t do that,” I mutter under my breath, because shouting it will only encourage her. Instead, I restart the mower and finish the yard.
Chapter Fifteen
Mollly
Karl was stubborn as the day was long. Is there anything worse than being stubborn and being wrong?
—Augusta Glower, Bad Luck Club
“I realize I was talking up fate with Harry last night,” Tina says, “but that was mostly to convince him to help you…and himself. Our man Harry really needed to grow a spine. But fate has officially taken the wheel, my friend. In fact, I retroactively agree with myself. We are passengers on this journey, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens next.”
Mrs. Dahl set us up at the dining room table with a tea service—like, a legitimate silver tea service—and a plate of cookies that look of indeterminate age, and went off to grab some photo albums. I emailed her the story about the Easter Bunny incident yesterday, and her daughter, who checks her email for her, apparently wants to talk to me. Hopefully she wants to thank me and not lambast me for writing about her eccentric mother, like Cal implied she might. Because Mrs. Dahl fascinates me, and she has stories worth telling. Maybe I can even get one of these stories into a local paper. A few of the bio pieces I wrote about the residents of Sleepy Fields made it into the Seattle Reader, a quarterly publication focused on narrative nonfiction.
To be honest, I enjoyed writing about Mrs. Dahl more than I did typing up my copious notes from talking to Harry, who became very loquacious and even had a PDF of the club’s rules. It was a huge break in the Bad Luck Club story, but we’re about to see something even more epic: photographic evidence of Mrs. Dahl’s furry husband!
But I’m not as excited about this moment as it deserves because my mind’s stuck on Cal. On his chest, revealed in all its tanned glory, and the memory of being pinned beneath it as I rode my way to the best orgasm of my life. On the mystery of this man who mows the lawns of old ladies and helps lost souls and still, somehow, thinks karma is stacked against him.
Of course, as soon as Mrs. Dahl skedaddled, it took Tina all of no seconds to bring up Cal.
“You’ve been spending way too much time with Dottie,” I say, trying for nonchalance, because, yeah, it’s weird that we saw Cal here. And if we hadn’t caught Harry at the right time, place, and level of desperation, he wouldn’t have cracked like an egg.
“Besides,” I add, shaking the thought off as if it’s a pesky fly. “I don’t even need Cal’s participation for the story anymore.” Although I haven’t run that by the Rogue Word editor yet, I’m confident there’s enough of a story without one. It’s not as juicy, perhaps, but there have been a few big stories about authors hoodwinking publishers into publishing fiction as fact over the last few years, and they always get plenty of clicks. “Fate can keep it in her pants. I mean, you saw the way he talked to me. He acts like I’m one of the drapes in Cry-Baby. No one needs that.”
“What I saw,” Tina says, drawing out the last word, “is that he undressed you with his eyes, and you can’t tell me you didn’t notice his chest. That man is fine.”
She must have muttered the magic words, because Mrs. Dahl, whose hearing aid apparently gives her super-hearing powers, bustles out with a fat photo album.
“Are you talking about that young man next door?” she asks, her eyes sparkling, because she knows she caught us.
I’m not going to discourage her. If nothing else, I’d like to know why he’s here. It would be nice if there was one less mystery in the Cal Reynolds lexicon.
“As it happens, we were,” I say. “Do you know him?”
“Caleb used to live two doors down,” Mrs. Dahl says, “next to Lea. His wife was a pretty little thing. Lea talked her up like she was the Madonna reborn, but I didn’t much like her.”
Well, knock me over with a feather. That wasn’t the way most people spoke of the dead, particularly if they’d died young and beautiful. Then again, Mrs. Dahl wasn’t most people. She might be saying it just to be contrary.
“Why not?” I ask carefully, trying not to reveal any interest.
Tina crunches into one of the shortbread cookies, which was a mistake, judging from the way she immediately cringes and sets it down.
Mrs. Dahl shrugs. “When you’re this many years young, you get to know a thing or two about people,” she says, extending her arms as if to bring attention to the bright scarlet dress she’s wearing at five p.m. on a Friday. Then again, let’s be honest, she probably has much more interesting evening plans than I do. Tina has to work—a dog-sitting gig with a very strict guest policy—and Harry has another date, this one with someone Tina and I hectored him into contacting after we spent forty-five minutes poring over his online dating profile and matches. It’ll be just me and the two dogs, waiting for Mary and Aidan to join us in the morning. She’s sent me several texts to remind me she’s coming, as if I’m liable to forget and attend a morning sex orgy.
“Give me two minutes with a person,” Mrs. Dahl continues grandly, “and I’ll know if they’re steadfast or sour. I’m never wrong. Alice, the poor thing, was a sour.”
“Which am I?” Tina asks, leaning forward.
“Oh, I’d never tell,” Mrs. Dahl says airily, although what she said about Alice suggests she would tell, just not us.
“What about Cal?” Tina says, shifting her gaze to me. “Will you tell us about him?”
Mrs. Dahl looks from Tina to me, and a wicked smile forms on her face. “You’ve taken an interest in him, Molly.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” I mutter. Although, truth be told, Mrs. Dahl would probably be nonjudgmental about the whole tree thing. Hell, I’d be shocked if she hasn’t had sex against a tree, possibly in furry costumes. “He may be a bit like Husband Number Three. You said things got bad with Henry because he was too brooding.”
“Henry,” she says pensively. “Hm. You’re not wrong, but he was my favorite. A brooding man often makes a spectacular lover. That’s the problem with men today, not enough grit. Not enough fire.”
And just like that, I’m flashing back to yesterday’s hike, to the sensation of that bark digging into my back while Cal thrust inside of me. He has plenty of grit and fire.
Maybe Mrs. Dahl wasn’t putting us on about her ability to judge people at a glance, because the twinkle in her eyes suggests she sees right through me. Tina’s stuck on what she said about Henry, though. “He was seriously your favorite?” she asks. “Wasn’t your second husband a millionaire inventor?”