I could almost imagine the smirk I heard on her lips. Almost. I really did wish I had a picture.
“No, but once you know how the meat tastes, it’s not hard to work with it,” she said.
I shook my head. “Yes, it is. That’s why your page is so popular.”
“Is it?”
“You’re kidding, right? Everyone I know uses it. Why don’t you update it anymore?”
She paused for a moment. “I cooked the meat that Brandon, my fiancé, used to bring home. He died in a motorcycle accident two years ago. Hit by a drunk driver. So I stopped blogging.”
I could hear the tightness at the edges of her voice, and something protective in me twitched—which was weird. I barely knew her. But I didn’t like that she’d gone through this. Why do all the bad things always seem to happen to good people?
“Do you still cook other things?” I asked, getting us off the topic.
“Not really. It kind of lost its allure for me.”
“So if you don’t cook, what have you eaten today?”
“Hmmm. Well, I’m still blowing through the gift cards I got for Christmas, so I went to Starbucks and got my coffee,” she said. “Then I went to Kristen’s house to go swimming. She has a toddler. We had watermelon and macaroni and cheese for lunch. Kristen made it, so the mac and cheese was very soggy.”
“And where was Tucker? Did you leave him alone at home, heartbroken in a small closet?”
“Oh, you mean did I leave him in a crate?”
I smirked at the jab.
“No, he came with me and he went swimming too. And he got a puppuccino at Starbucks.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “A what?”
“A puppuccino. A cup of whipped cream for dogs.”
“That’s a thing?”
“It is. There’s all kinds of things you can get for dogs at restaurants. You can get ice cream at most places as long as it doesn’t have vanilla beans in it. And there’s a cupcake shop called Nadia Cakes that I take him to that has doggy cupcakes they make from scratch.”
I arched my eyebrows. “Wow, he really is on vacation.”
“There’s a reason why you’re paying me the big bucks for my dog-sitting services.”
“I’d have paid more.”
“I’d have done it for less.”
I smiled and jammed another pillow behind my back.
“I’m going to put you on speaker. Hold on,” she said. “I have to get some work done and I need my hands.”
I heard shuffling.
“What are you painting?”
“Want to see it?” she asked, sounding slightly farther away than before.
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Hold on, I’ll send you a picture. It’s really lame. You’re gonna laugh. There.”
I put my cell phone on speaker and clicked on the picture message she sent. “Is that…an astronaut cat?”
“I told you it was lame.”
I zoomed in. “It’s well done. It’s just…a cat’s head on an astronaut’s body?”
“Yeah. I do freelance work for a company that takes your pet’s face and photoshops it onto different templates. Then they send it out to an artist to paint it. They’re not all cat astronauts. Sometimes they’re dogs playing poker.” She laughed.
I tilted my head to study the picture. “It’s pretty impressive that you can paint that, though. I’d love to see what you did on your own. You’re obviously talented.” I wasn’t bullshitting her. It really was good.
“It got easier to paint something I was given than to find inspiration. I have an Etsy store too. It’s all kind of mindless.”
“You should paint Tucker. Paint him duck hunting in the boat,” I suggested, grabbing the room service menu from the nightstand and starting to look over the breakfast options.
“Kristen said the same thing. You have an accent, you know that?”
I looked up. “I do?”
“Yeah, I can hear it when you say ‘boat.’ It’s kind of nice. I like it.”
She’d never said anything complimentary to me before. I’d lay on my Minnesota accent extra thick from now on.
“So what do you do while you paint? Do you listen to music?” I asked.
“I watch the ID channel. Real-life crime shows.”
“Ahhhh, that’s why you’re so convinced I’m a murderer.”
“How many acres of hunting land did you say you have?”
“My family owns two hundred acres in northern Minnesota,” I said. “Why?”
“There you go. The perfect place to hide a body. I bet you have a hunting lodge that locks from the outside and everything.”
I chuckled and crossed my legs at the ankle. “Do I look like a psychopath to you?”
“Ted Bundy was a good-looking guy. Charismatic too.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment since it sounds like you’re saying I’m good-looking and charismatic. But aren’t most psycho killers cruel to animals? I think Tucker would tell you that I’ve never raised my hand to him in anger.”
“Hmmm,” she hummed. “Well, that does go against the typical serial killer profile. Unless you use Tucker to lure your victims.”
I smiled. “He is kind of a chick magnet, isn’t he?”
“I bet the two of you make a killing.”
“No, so far he’s only brought home one girl, and he’s been keeping her to himself.”
There had to be an eye roll in the ensuing pause.
“Are you ready for my question of the day?” she asked, a smile in her voice.
“Shoot.”
“What’s the nicest thing you’ve ever done for a stranger?”
She had good questions, and this one was easy. “I donated my bone marrow.”
“Wow. You did? That’s a pretty big deal. How did that happen?”
Tucker walked around in the background, making a familiar clicking sound on the floor with his nails.
“I can hear Tucker,” I said.
“Oh yeah, his nails are pretty long. I’m going to take him into PetSmart tomorrow and have them cut, actually. He’s almost out of food too.”
“Save your receipts so I can reimburse you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “So bone marrow, tell me.”
“Right. I grew up in a really small town in northern Minnesota. Population three thousand. So everyone knows everybody else. There was a little girl in the town who got leukemia, so a lot of the townsfolk—”
“‘Townsfolk’?” She sounded amused.
“Yes, ‘townsfolk,’ we actually talk like that there.”
She laughed at this. I liked her laugh. It was musical.
“A lot of the townsfolk registered on Be The Match because she needed a bone marrow transplant. She ended up getting one. Nobody she knew. But I was in the registry after that, and I ended up being the match for a guy with lymphoma. So I donated.”
“Did they live?” she asked.
I nodded. “They did. I’m friends with the guy on Facebook. He’s been in remission for four years now. And Emily too. She just graduated high school.”