Bet Me

  “You guys okay?” Brian said.

  “What?” Cal said, jerking his head up.

  “Is there something wrong with the chicken?” Brian frowned at them both. “You guys looked strange.”

  “No,” Min said, picking up her fork again. “The chicken is wonderful.”

  “Okay,” Brian said. “You need anything else?”

  “A waiter with some class?” Cal said.

  “Yeah, right, like I’d waste that on you,” Brian said, and wandered off.

  “So anyway,” Min said, scrambling for a safer topic, “when Diana told me about the cake, I turned to Emilio in my hour of need, and he called his grandmother. So he’s my hero.”

  “Wait’ll you taste the cake,” Cal said. “She only makes it for weddings and it’s like nothing else in this world.”

  “When did you eat wedding cake?” Min said.

  “When Emilio got married,” Cal said. “When my brother got married. When everybody I’ve ever known got married. Tony, Roger, and I are the last hold-outs, so there have been a lot of weddings. And now Roger’s going down for the count.”

  “Well, at least you and Tony will have each other,” Min said brightly. “So you have a brother. Younger or older?”

  “Older. Reynolds.”

  Min stopped eating. “Reynolds? Reynolds Morrisey?”

  “Yes,” Cal said. “Husband to Bink, father to Harry.”

  “Isn’t there a fancy law firm called Reynolds Morrisey?”

  “Yes,” Cal said. “My father, his partner John Reynolds, and my brother.” He didn’t sound too thrilled about any of them.

  “Cozy,” Min said. “So how is Harry?”

  “Permanently scarred from watching us on a picnic table.”

  Min winced. “Really?”

  “Hard to say. I haven’t seen him since. Bink probably has him in therapy by now. So what’s your take on Bonnie and Roger?”

  “They’ll be engaged before fall,” Min said, and they began to discuss Bonnie and Roger and other safe topics for the rest of the meal. When they were finished and Cal had signed the charge slip, he said, “So lunch with me is risky. Does that mean you need an apology for our last lunch?”

  “No.” Min smiled and tried to look unfazed. “I’ve been working on the theory that if we don’t talk about it, it didn’t happen. Although a lot of people seem to know about it. Greg, for example. He ratted us out, and now my mother wants you to come to dinner.” Cal looked taken aback for a minute, and she said, “I told her you were a complete stranger so dinner was unlikely.” Then out of the blue, she blurted, “So what was that on Saturday?”

  “Well.” Cal took a deep breath. “That was chemistry. And it was phenomenal. I’d be more than interested in doing that again, especially naked and horizontal, but—”

  Min’s pulse picked up, but she slapped herself in the forehead to forestall him and her own treacherous imagination.

  “What?” he said.

  “I’m remembering why you never ask guys to tell you the truth,” she said. “Because sometimes they do.”

  “My point is,” Cal said, “that Liza was right, I had no business kissing you like that because I don’t want anything that serious. I just got out of a relationship that was a lot more intense than I’d realized and—”

  Min frowned. “How could it have been more intense than you’d realized?”

  “I thought we were just having a good time,” Cal said. “She thought we were getting married. It ended okay, there are no hard feelings—”

  Min looked at him in amazement. “She wanted to get married, you didn’t, but there are no hard feelings.”

  “She said if I wasn’t ready to commit, she’d have to move on,” Cal said. “It was pretty cut and dried.”

  “And you’re the guy who’s supposed to be a wizard at understanding women. It was not cut and dried. She either hates you, or she thinks you’re coming back.”

  Cal shook his head. “Cynthie’s very practical. She knows it’s over. And so are we because, even though it was great, this is not something either one of us wants to pursue.”

  “Right,” Min said, understanding completely if not happily. “It would be different if we were at all compatible. I’m not averse to commitment, especially if it’d be that much fun, but the last thing I need is to fall for somebody I already know is no good for me just because he kisses like a god. Also, I’m waiting for the reincarnation of Elvis and you are not him. But—”

  She stopped because Cal had a strange look on his face.

  “What?” she said. “I was kidding about Elvis.”

  “I’m no good for you,” he said, “but I kiss like a god?”

  Min considered it. “Pretty much. Why? Did you have a different take on it?”

  Cal opened his mouth and then stopped and shrugged. “I guess not. I don’t think you’d be bad for me, I just can’t take the hassle. You’re not a restful woman.”

  “This is true,” Min said. “But you ask for it. You’re such a wolf.”

  “I’m retired,” Cal said. “All I want now is some peace and quiet. I just need a break.”

  “That’s my plan,” Min said. “I’m taking a break from dating.”

  “Until Elvis shows up,” Cal said.

  “Right. As far as I can see, there’s no downside to this at all.”

  “No sex,” Cal said.

  “I can stand that,” Min said.

  “Yeah, you’re good at denying yourself things.”

  “Hey,” Min said, insulted. “We were doing just fine there and then you had to take a shot at me.”

  “Sorry,” Cal said.

  They got up to go, Min kissed Emilio good-bye, and they went out into the street.

  “Okay, it’s broad daylight and my office is only six blocks away,” Min said. “You don’t have to walk me.”

  “Fair enough.” Cal held out his hand. “We’ll probably meet again at Roger and Bonnie’s wedding. In case we don’t, have a nice life.”

  Min shook his hand and dropped it. “Likewise. Best of luck in the future.”

  She turned to go and he said, “Wait a minute,” and made her heart lurch. But when she turned around, he was holding her shoe, the red ribbons fluttering in the light breeze.

  “Right,” she said, taking it. “Thank you very much.”

  He held on to it for a moment, looking into her eyes, and then he shook his head and said, “You’re welcome” and let go, and she set off down the street without looking back, full of excellent food but not nearly as happy as she should have been.

  Charm Boy, she thought, and put him out of her mind.

  On Tuesday, Min looked at the salad on her desk at lunch and thought, There has to be more to life than this. It was Cal’s fault; she’d had real food in the middle of the day and it had tainted her. Until Cal, she’d never thought about food except as something she couldn’t have. Even before she’d started dieting for the bridesmaid’s dress, there’d been no butter in her life. There should be butter, she thought, and then realized the folly of that.

  But there could be chicken marsala.

  Min shoved her salad to one side, logged onto the net, and did a search for “chicken marsala” because doing a search for “Cal Morrisey” would not have been helpful to her damn plan.

  “Very popular dish,” she said when she got 48,300 matches. Even allowing for the weird randomness that more than 48,000 of them would demonstrate if she ever got that far, that was still a lot of recipes. There was one with artichokes, that was insane. One had lemon juice, which couldn’t be right, another peppers, another onions. It was amazing how many ways people had found to garbage up a plain recipe. She printed off two that sounded right and went to log off the net, but instead, on a random impulse, Googled for “dyslexia” instead. An hour later, she logged off with a new respect for what Calvin Morrisey had accomplished.

  When she got off work, she stopped by the grocery. There was something about having a
plan for dinner, a recipe in hand, that made her feel much less hostile about food. Of course, she was going to have to adapt the recipe. It called for the chicken to be breaded in flour, which was just extra calories, and carb calories no less. Skip the breading. Salt and pepper she already had, and parsley had no calories, so she picked up a jar of that. Skinless, boneless chicken breasts she was familiar with, no problem there, but butter and olive oil? “It is to laugh,” she said and got spray olive oil in a can. Mushrooms were mostly water, so she could have those, and then there was the marsala. She found it in the cooking wine section. Resolutely passing by the bread section, she checked out feeling triumphant, went home and changed into her sweats, cranked up the CD player, and sang her head off to her Elvis 30 album as she cooked.

  An hour later, Elvis was starting all over again and she was staring at the mess in her only frying pan trying to figure out what had gone wrong. She’d browned the chicken in the non-stick skillet and then followed all the other directions but it looked funny and tasted like hell. She tapped her spatula on the edge of the stove for a few moments and thought, Okay, I’m not a cook. I still deserve great food, and dropped the spatula to pick up the phone.

  “Emilio?” she said when he answered. “Do you deliver?”

  The Parker seminar was turning into the worst mess Morrisey, Packard, Capa had ever seen, mostly because the idiot who was in charge of training kept changing the seminar information. “I’m faxing some information over,” she’d say when she called. “Just slot it in somewhere.”

  “That bitch must die,” Tony said when she called at ten till five on Tuesday. “I’ve got a date with Liza tonight.”

  “I’ll stay for the fax,” Roger said. “Bonnie will understand.”

  “You go, I’ll stay,” Cal said. “I’m dateless and too tired to move anyway.”

  Tony and Roger left, both heading for warm women, and Cal read the fax and tightened the seminar packet one more time, trying to feel grateful that there wasn’t any place he had to be, no woman demanding his time and attention. At seven, he turned off the computer with relief and realized he was starving.

  Emilio’s seemed like an excellent idea.

  “Don’t tell me,” Emilio said when Cal came through the swinging doors into the kitchen. “Chicken marsala.”

  “I’ve had enough chicken marsala for a while,” Cal said as the phone rang. Emilio turned to get it and Cal added, “Something simple. Tomato and basil on spaghetti—” No. Forty percent of all pasta sold was spaghetti. No imagination. “Make that fettuccine—”

  He stopped when Emilio held up his hand and said, “Emilio’s,” into the phone. Emilio listened and then looked back over his shoulder at Cal and said, “We usually don’t, but for such a special customer, we’ll make an exception. Chicken marsala, right? No, no, no trouble at all. You can overtip the delivery boy.”

  He hung up and smiled at Cal. “That was Min. She wants chicken marsala. You can deliver it to her.”

  “What?” Cal said, dumbfounded.

  “You know the way. It’s probably on your way home.”

  “It’s not on my way home, it’s not on anybody’s way home except God’s, the damn place is vertical. What gave you the idea I’d do this?”

  Emilio shrugged. “I don’t know. She called, you were here, you two are great together, it seemed like a good idea. Did you have a fight?”

  “No, we didn’t have a fight,” Cal said. “We’re not seeing each other because I’m all wrong for her and she’s waiting for Elvis. Call her back and tell her your delivery boy died.”

  “Then she won’t have anything for dinner,” Emilio said. “And you know Min. She’s one of those women who eats.”

  Cal thought about the look on Min’s face when she ate chicken marsala. It was almost as good as the look on her face when she ate doughnuts. Which wasn’t anywhere near as good as the look on her face when he’d kissed her, that had been—

  Emilio shrugged. “Fine. Brian can take it to her.”

  “No,” Cal said. “I’ll take it to her. Hurry up, will you? I’m hungry.”

  Chapter Six

  Forty-five minutes later, Cal was climbing the steps to Min’s place when something small and orange streaked past him and almost knocked him down the hill. He finished the climb cautiously, but when he looked around at the top, nothing was there. He rang the doorbell, and Bonnie came to let him in.

  “Hi,” he said. “Min ordered takeout.” He held up the bag, feeling stupid, his least favorite feeling in the world.

  “And you’re delivering?” Bonnie said as she stepped back.

  “Well, you can never have enough extra cash,” Cal said and hit the stairs, knowing she was watching him. When he got to the top, he heard Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel” through Min’s door and sighed.

  Min looked surprised when she opened the door at his knock, and he felt pretty stunned himself: as far as he could see, all she was wearing was a very long, very old blue sweatshirt and lumpy sweatsocks. Her hair was down in frizzy waves, and she was wearing no makeup, so the only color on her face was the fading yellow bruise from where he’d clocked her.

  “What the hell?” she said. “How did you get in the front door?”

  “This is how you open the door to delivery guys?” Cal said, staring at the good strong legs he’d scoped out in the bar on Friday.

  “No, this is how I open the door to Bonnie,” Min said. “Stop ogling. I have shorts on under this.” She pulled up the edge of her shirt and he saw baggy plaid boxers that were only marginally less ugly than her shirt and socks. “Why did you get in the front door?”

  Then something orange streaked past both their legs and into the apartment.

  “What is that?” Min said, and Cal came in, leaving the door open behind him.

  “I don’t know.” Cal put Emilio’s bag down on an old cast iron sewing machine table beside a couch that looked like a moth-eaten, overstuffed pumpkin. “It ran past me on the steps—”

  “Oh, Lord,” Min said and Cal turned to look where she was looking.

  The mangiest-looking animal he’d ever seen was glaring at them from the end of the couch, its left eye closed and sinister. It was mottled all over in browns and oranges so that, in general, it matched the couch.

  “What is that?” Min said.

  “I think it’s a cat,” Cal said.

  “What kind?” Min said, an awful fascination in her voice.

  “Not a good kind,” Cal said. “Although you did say you wanted one.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Min said.

  “When I brought you home last week,” Cal said. “You said you were going to get a cat.”

  “That was a joke,” Min said, keeping an eye on the cat. “That’s what every woman in her thirties who’s been screwed over by men says. ‘I’m going to give up the bastards and get a cat.’ It’s a cliché.”

  “You know,” Cal said, watching the cat, too, “if you’re going to talk in code, you have to warn me.”

  The cat didn’t seem to be moving, so Cal looked around the rest of her apartment. It appeared to be the entire attic, its crazy angles punctuated by dormers, and it was furnished in ancient pieces, none of them antiques. He frowned and thought, This doesn’t look like her.

  Min tilted her head at the cat, nonplussed. “Why is its eye shut?”

  “My guess is, that one’s missing,” Cal said.

  “Hard life, huh, cat?” Min sighed. “I have extra chicken. I tried the marsala and screwed it up. Maybe the cat will be desperate enough to eat it.”

  “If you feed it, it’ll stay forever,” Cal said. “Yo, cat, the door’s open. Leave.”

  The cat curled up on the back of the couch and stared at him haughtily.

  “It looks very Cheshire,” Min said. “Like it could disappear a little bit at a time.”

  “And it’s already started with the eye,” Cal said. “Min, this cat probably has every disease in the Cat’s Book of Death.?
??

  “I can at least feed it,” Min said and went to get some chicken.

  “It does go with the couch.” Cal closed the door and moved Emilio’s bag from the sewing machine table to a battered old round oak table behind the couch. The cat watched his every move while pretending not to care.

  Min brought some chicken slivers on a paper towel. She put it under the cat’s nose and then stepped back. It sniffed at the chicken and then looked at her. “I know,” she said, despair in her voice. “It’s awful. You don’t have to eat it.”

  The cat lifted its nose and then nibbled at the closest piece.

  “That’s a very brave cat,” Min told Cal and went to the mantel to get her purse. “Let me pay you or Emilio or whoever.”

  “No,” Cal said, still looking around. The furniture was all comfortable, but none of it was interesting or attractive, nothing like Min. It was almost as if it were somebody else’s apartment. “Are you subletting?”

  “No,” Min said, fishing in her purse. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Nothing.” There were snow globes on the mantel, lined up on both sides of a kitschy old clock made from fake books, and he went over beside her to look at them, saying, “You didn’t pick out this furniture.”

  “It was my grandmother’s,” Min said. “Look, you’re not going to pay for my dinner. You did me a favor by bringing it, so—”

  “You collect these?” Cal said, picking up Rocky and Bullwinkle.

  “Cal,” Min said.

  “There’s enough food there for an army,” he said. “If you want company, I’m staying and eating half of it. If you don’t, I’ll take half with me, although I am reluctant to leave you alone with that animal.” Cal put Rocky down and looked at the next one. Chip and Dale. “Where did you get these?”

  “Friends,” Min said. “Family. Flea markets.” She paused. “You can stay.” She looked at the cat which, having wolfed down the chicken, now seemed to be considering sleep. “You I don’t know about,” she said, and it regarded her gravely, its right eye closed. “Wasn’t the other eye closed before?” Min said to Cal. “The left one?”