Crazy for You

  “Saran Wrap,” Darla said.

  “Or a really sexy nightgown,” Quinn said. “Or black lace underwear—”

  “I have a transparent plastic raincoat,” Darla said, her voice calm again. “Max’s mother gave it to me because it would go with everything.”

  “That could be good,” Quinn said.

  “The boys come home late on Friday,” Darla said. “Max’ll be home alone tonight at five-thirty.”

  “Tonight?” Quinn was a little taken aback with how fast Darla was moving—things must really be bad—but she nodded anyway. “Good idea.”

  “I like this,” Darla said. “Great sex in the living room in broad daylight.”

  “I’m jealous,” Quinn said, partly for encouragement and partly in truth.

  “This is a plan.” Darla nodded, back to her old positive self. “And it’s just a little plan, it won’t change anything important, just make things the way they used to be.” She beamed at Quinn. “This is a very smart idea. Thank you.”

  Quinn looked down at Katie uneasily. “Don’t mention it.”

  Darla put the car in gear. “Let’s go get you an apartment fast. I have to be home by five.”

  “Look, don’t get yourself too invested in this,” Quinn said. “A little change, fine, but be practical. Don’t expect miracles or revolutions.”

  “Like you and Nick?” Darla said.

  Quinn closed her eyes and thought about Nick. All that zing. “Okay, you’re right. We deserve miracles and revolutions. We’ll both go for it.”

  “Damn right,” Darla said. “This is going to be great.”

  “Damn right,” Quinn said, and thought, Oh, boy.

  Five

  Meggy had found one apartment in Tibbett—“None of the others allowed pets, dear”—and that one was not attractive. “You can’t live here,” Darla had whispered, staring in horror at the water-stained walls, and Quinn was saying, “I can if it means I keep my dog,” when the landlord bent to pat Katie.

  A minute later they were out on the street, braced against the gusts of March wind. “I said housebroken only,” the man said before he slammed the door on them.

  “She is housebroken,” Quinn said, thinking evil thoughts about the landlord, who clearly did not understand dogs, but Darla looked approvingly at Katie for the first time.

  “She knew that was a lousy place to live,” she said. “Good dog.”

  “Well, how’s this for an alternative?” Quinn said, glaring at both of them. “Now I have to live with my parents.”

  “There must be something else,” Darla said. “If you’re sure you’re not going back to Bill.”

  “I don’t like him,” Quinn said. “Okay? Can we get that clear? He stole my dog. He’s out.”

  “Right.” Darla nodded. “Okay, forget him, I’ll never mention him again. How about buying? If you can swing a down payment, mortgage payments could be cheaper than renting.”

  “Buy a house?” Quinn thought of the Tara-like subdivisions that ringed Tibbett. Buying a house was serious stuff. “What would I do with a whole house?”

  “Not all houses are huge,” Darla said patiently. “Find a little two-bedroom deal. Your mother works for a realtor, for heaven’s sake. Let’s go ask.”

  “Buy a house.” Quinn got into the passenger seat again and let Katie scramble her way into the backseat as she thought about it. A house. Her own house. Independence. Maturity. Privacy. The same flare of excitement that had caught her when she decided to keep Katie and kiss Nick came back. “You know, I could do that. Buy a house. Just me.” Her own house. With a fenced-in backyard for Katie. And a couch in the living room for Nick. “I could do that. Maybe. I like it.”

  “Why do you have that look in your eye?” Darla said. “We’re talking about real estate, not sex.”

  “They’re both exciting,” Quinn told her. “I’ll talk to Mom tonight and see what I can afford, and we can go look tomorrow. Are you busy tomorrow?”

  “Only in the morning at the shop.” Darla smiled. “And tonight. I’m going to be very busy tonight.”

  When Max came home at five-thirty that night, Darla met him at the door, naked under her transparent raincoat.

  “Hey, babe,” he said and kissed her cheek as he pushed past her into their sunken living room. “We’ve only got—”

  “Hey, yourself,” she said. “Jeez, you really aren’t seeing me anymore.”

  He turned around as she opened the coat. “What—”

  “I have plans for you.” She dropped the coat just as the door opened behind her.

  “I brought—” she heard Nick say, and she went cold all over, not hard to do since she was naked and there was a considerable March breeze hitting her backside. Bending over to pick up the coat was not an option, and it was transparent anyway. Before she could think of anything else, she heard Nick say, “Or not,” and the door closed again.

  “What are you doing?” Max looked amazed and horrified, and neither was the emotion she’d been going for. “The boys will be in here in a minute.”

  “I—” She was stuck. “The hell with it.” She walked past him, too embarrassed to pick up her coat. Too embarrassed to do anything really but walk into the bedroom and lock the door and sit on the bed with her arms wrapped around her and think about killing herself.

  “Darla,” Max said on the other side of the door.

  “Go away,” she said, and then she heard somebody knock on the front door, heard Max open it, heard her sons’ voices, one of whom said, “Why couldn’t we just walk in?”

  “Oh, God,” she said, and let herself fall backward. After ten minutes of self-flagellation, she put on her T-shirt and jeans and concentrated on figuring out who she was madder at, Max or Nick. The fact that neither of them had done anything wrong, that she was the one who’d been stupid, didn’t make it any easier to forgive them.

  An hour later, she was calm enough to go out to her kitchen to make hot dogs for the four of them camped around the TV where they watched the videotape of the last football game, rerunning the parts where Mark had made his touchdown.

  “The tape just came in this afternoon,” Max told her on one of his trips to get food. “Bill called from school. I didn’t have a chance to tell you—”

  “Not a problem,” Darla said, handing him a bowl of popcorn. “Take this out there, will you? Thank you.”

  Max retreated without another word.

  Nick came out half an hour later for a beer.

  “Sorry about that,” Darla said, wishing Max had been an only child.

  “About what?” Nick said. “You got any chips?”

  “Sure.” Darla reached up into the cupboard, glad to turn her back to hide her burning face. She handed the bag to him across the kitchen island and said, “Thanks.”

  “For what?” Nick said.

  Darla took a deep breath. “For pretending nothing happened so I don’t feel bad. It doesn’t work, but I appreciate it.”

  “Well, in that case, it was my pleasure,” Nick said. “You have a nice ass.”

  “Hey,” Darla said, her face flaming hotter, but she grinned in spite of herself.

  “Not that I’ll ever see it again,” Nick said and wandered back out to the living room.

  Okay, she’d forgive Nick. But Max—

  Once they were all fed, she fixed herself a plate and locked herself in the bedroom again.

  Few things she’d tried in her life had ever gone so wrong. And Max hadn’t helped. He’d just looked horrified that she was naked. Even for a second he could have looked happy—

  Of course knowing Nick was right behind him might have had something to do with that, but it was still a great gesture, damn it. Naked right there in the living room, too. She thought wistfully of how exciting that could have been, naked in the living room in broad daylight. They could have—

  She saw Max’s face again, appalled.

  Rats. She bit into her hot dog and thought evil thoughts about Max as she
chewed.

  At eleven that night, Max stumbled into their pitch-dark bedroom, crawled into bed beside her and whispered, “Now, about that naked bit at the door—”

  “Touch me and you’re a dead man,” Darla said in a voice like lead.

  “Good night,” Max said and rolled away from her.

  What Quinn could afford, her mother told her Saturday morning, was nothing she should live in. “Seventy-five thousand, tops,” Meggy told her. “And there’s not much out there for that. Maybe you’d better stay with us until you patch things up with Bill.”

  “Give me the list,” Quinn said, and picked Darla up at noon, determined to find a place of her own. She’d been thinking about it all night, a cozy little place where she could have people over without worrying about the neighbors hearing through the walls. Up until now, she hadn’t done anything worth overhearing, but if she had a house of her own, she might. There was reason enough to buy a house right there.

  “So did the plastic raincoat drive Max mad with lust?” she asked Darla as she pulled out into the street.

  “No.” Darla’s voice was flat again, and when Quinn risked a glance, her face was tense.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “I met him at the door, naked. Nick was with him. It sort of wrecked the moment.”

  “Oh.” Quinn slumped back in her seat. “Well, you could have sent Nick over to me.”

  “He hasn’t said anything to you yet?” Darla said, perking up a little in shared outrage. “What a jackass.”

  Quinn glanced at her. “Does that mean you’re okay with the Nick thing now?”

  “No.” Darla settled deeper into her seat and folded her arms. “But if that’s what you want, I’m with you.”

  “Thanks.” Quinn’s voice sounded as flat as Darla’s to her own ears. This depression stuff was catching. “Any ideas?”

  “Not yet,” Darla said. “I’m still recovering from last night. But I’m not giving up.”

  “Good,” Quinn said. “Let’s go buy a house and then we’ll think of Plan B for you and Plan A for me.”

  But after they’d spent the afternoon looking at her options, Quinn had to admit her mother had a point. “They’re ugly. Even after I fixed them up, they’d still be ugly, poky little houses. I wanted something cozy and cute and these are all—”

  “Really, really ugly,” Darla said. “That’s why they’re cheap. There are two more in this neighborhood—”

  “No,” Quinn said. “They all look alike. I hate them.”

  “—and then one on the other side of town that’s eighty-five, but your mom wrote a note that it’s been on the market for a while so they might come down.”

  “The other side of town.” Quinn sighed and started the car. “Twenty minutes from school and anything else, plus how good can it be if it’s been on the market that long?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Darla said, “We don’t have to actually go in.”

  The house was tall and skinny, about one room wide, sided in peeling gray asbestos shingles and trimmed in dark gray rotting wood. It had a little side porch, but most of the porch rail had fallen off in pieces. Several of the storm windows were broken, the spouting swung drunkenly from the roof, and the tiny front yard was decorated with two twisted trees, one of which was dead. On one side was another house in even worse condition, on the other a weed-choked empty lot. As a finishing touch, the FOR SALE sign had fallen over.

  “We have the key, we might as well go in,” Quinn said. “Look at it this way. If it’s anything on the inside, I should be able to get a really good deal.”

  “Quick, before it falls down,” Darla said, but she shut up when they got inside.

  The downstairs was three rooms in a row, the side porch letting them into the middle room first. Its hardwood floors gleamed in the light from two tall windows framed in wide peeling white woodwork. An archway led into the front of the house, a living room with a bricked-up fireplace framed in bookcases, their leaded glass doors missing most of the panes. Two more tall windows looked out on the deserted street and the dead tree.

  “Lots of light,” Darla said. “Of course, the trees would give you nightmares.”

  Quinn turned around, imagining comfortable furniture, none of it stripped pine. A big couch, definitely. “I think I like it.”

  The other door from the center room led to the kitchen at the back of the house, an ugly little room with gray cupboards and counters, but more light from another tall window and a door with a dog flap to a big yard that was, miracle of miracles, fenced in.

  “Maybe a little paint.” Darla looked doubtfully at the cabinets. “You know somebody really depressed lived here.”

  Quinn pulled the retaining board out of the dog door, and Katie sniffed it as if it were the door to hell and then climbed through. After a cautious circuit of the yard—a mass of weeds spotted with barren earth—she stretched out in a run, doing a dog version of Born Free. “I really, really like it.”

  “Because of the backyard?”

  “It’s big,” Quinn said. “If the upstairs isn’t awful, I’m buying it.”

  The upstairs wasn’t awful. Two small bedrooms and one big one with another bricked-up fireplace, a bathroom with a clawfoot tub that had once been white, and lots and lots of wonderful light.

  “Somebody kicked this door in once,” Darla said, stooping to see the woodwork.

  “Darla, I can fix all that.” Quinn turned to survey the upstairs from the landing and felt the same warm feeling in her solar plexus that she’d felt looking at Katie in the car the first day, much the same warmth she’d felt when Nick had almost kissed her. “I am going to buy this house.” She smiled, suddenly euphoric. “You know, three days ago my life was as gray as that kitchen downstairs, and today it’s full of infinite possibilities. Just think what tomorrow might be!”

  “Yeah,” Darla said, looking around. “Just think.”

  By Sunday night, Meggy had not only leaned on Bucky to negotiate a sale for seventy thousand, she’d gotten the seller to rent the house to Quinn before the closing. “You can move in Friday,” she told Quinn. The look she gave Katie, sitting patiently if nervously on the kitchen tile, said, And not a minute too soon.

  “Thank you.” Quinn hugged her mother. “I’m truly grateful. I know you think I should go back to Bill—”

  “Well, now he can move in with you,” her mother said. “It’s a good house. I had it inspected this morning. Lots of work, but a good foundation. Bill can work on it.”

  The hell he will, Quinn thought, but she kept her mouth shut.

  “You’ll need seven thousand for the down payment,” Meggy went on.

  “Got it,” Quinn said. “I have over eleven in savings. I’ll even have some left over for furniture.” A new bed. And Nick can help me move.

  “New furniture.” Her mother walked to the archway and gazed around the living room, lit only by TV. “It’s been years since I did that.” Her eyes fell on the couch, currently occupied by her husband who was oblivious to her. “Maybe I’ll get a new couch and give you this one.”

  Nick had blamed the couch, Quinn remembered. It’s this couch. “I’d love to have the couch,” she said. “You can keep Dad, though.”

  “Mmm,” her mother said, and turned to survey the rest of the room. “This place could use some changes.”

  “Little changes,” Quinn said, suddenly nervous.

  Her mother’s eyes went back to the couch. “Certainly.”

  Joe looked up and caught them watching him. “We got any beer?”

  Quinn turned back to the kitchen to get him one. “Little changes, Mom. Just little ones.”

  On Monday, Quinn was still sure that buying the house had been a brilliant decision, but her optimism flagged a little as the day wore on and school did not go well.

  It began with first period when several athletes scowled at her through attendance and the rest of the students seemed subdued. The word was out that she’d du
mped the coach. They’d get over it, but it was still disconcerting since she was used to being liked.

  Then the BP stopped her in the hall on her way to the teachers’ lounge on her break and said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this over a dog. Don’t you realize what you’re doing to Bill? To the school? We have a levy, Quinn.” She’d stared him down and he’d gone off in a snit, but if anything went wrong with that tenth WBL trophy or the levy, Quinn knew there would be hell to pay and she’d be footing the bill.

  Then at lunch, she had to deal with Edie and the faculty.

  “Your mom said you left Bill,” Edie said, her bright blue eyes watching Quinn across the scarred plastic wood-grained table in the teachers’ lounge. “She’s a little upset.”

  “Yep.” Quinn popped the top on her Diet Coke, ignoring the avid interest of the rest of lunch group, especially the two women sitting next to them. Marjorie Cantor, the biggest mouth in school, was probably torn between sucking up to Quinn for inside info and cutting her dead for leaving that nice Coach Hilliard. Tidy little Petra Howard just looked confused. Petra, always vague, had decided the previous month that her students were plotting against her—given Petra’s abysmal teaching skills this wasn’t complete paranoia—and now she spent as much time as she could in the lounge, hiding out, distracting herself with the lives of others.

  “That’s a nice sweater, Quinn,” Petra said now. “Such a pretty color.”

  “Thank you,” Quinn said, before turning back to Edie. “Mom’s always a little upset with change.”

  “She’s afraid you’re throwing away security.” Edie’s lips pursed a little. “Your mother is a great one for security.”

  “Really a very pretty sweater,” Petra said.

  “I can make myself secure,” Quinn said.

  “Hey, I’m on your side,” Edie said. “It’s your mom who’s upset.”