More of the NaNo
Nov. 11th, 2004 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perpetual_motionThe last three days worth of NaNo at your disposal. There should be no funky cuts or anything of the sort.
Word Count to Date: 17592
Tyler woke up in the wee hours of the morning to the phone ringing insistently by his bed. He threw out a hand, knocked his alarm clock to the floor, and managed to slam his knuckles against the lamp. He cursed, opened his eyes, and finally located the phone. Only years of being a salesperson kept him from sounding exceedingly cranky when he managed to get out, “hello?”
“Tyler?”
Julia’s voice cut through Tyler’s head like nothing else could. He jerked upright in bed and had to silently remind himself to breathe. “Julia. What are you calling for?”
“I found a few of your things when I was unpacking in my apartment.” Julia sounded like she would have preferred to find Ebola in her boxes. “I need your address so that I can ship them to you.”
Tyler stared across the room at the blank white wall and tried to remember his address. “I-um-I don’t know the address off the top of my head. I’m using the mailbox at the end of the road. My parents used to use a post office box.” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and stumbled out of bed. “Give me a second. I have the address in the kitchen somewhere.”
“Fine.” Julia’s voice was icy.
Tyler made it through the library and living room and into the kitchen without tripping over any of the boxes that were still packed up. He squinted at the clock in the kitchen and did a quick bit of subtraction in his head. “Why are you up at six in the morning?”
“I have things to do today.” Julia sounded completely disinterested in the whole conversation. “Shouldn’t you have been up and at an office of some sort by now?”
“I’m taking some time off, as you well know.” Tyler couldn’t help dropping every last ounce of concern or curiosity from his own voice. The best way to deal with Julia, he had discovered, was to stop caring whether or not he pissed her off intentionally. She was going to get mad at him for some inconsequential bit of nothing anyway. “How’s my alimony working out for you?”
“Your last check was late.”
“My accountant sends it off. Talk to him.”
“He’s an ass.”
~Why do you think he’s my accountant?~ Tyler rifled through a stack of papers on the edge of the kitchen table and cursed silently when he couldn’t find the paper where he’d scrawled the box address of the house. He took three steps to the counter and started digging through the papers there. “It’s here somewhere.”
“You never could keep track of anything.”
“Especially you.” Tyler has a quick memory flash of finding Julia at a restaurant where he was having a business dinner. She had been in the most basic idea of a dress and very tall shoes. The man she had been with had had watery eyes and looked overly frightened at the sight of Tyler stalking over to the table. There had been a very loud argument, and Tyler had gotten slapped. He’d retaliated by punching the watery-eyed coward in the nose. He’d been banned from the restaurant.
“Would you just find your address already?” Julia sounded like she was ready to crawl through the fiber optics of the phone and throttle Tyler. “I do have things to do today.”
“Congratulations.” Tyler finally saw the scrap of paper he was looking for and pumped his fist in the air before yanking it out from under a stack of bank records. “I’m at Box 248. Hugoton, Kansas.”
“Thank you.” Julia hung up the phone.
Tyler made a disgusted face and clicked off the cordless. “Why the hell did I ever marry you?” He dropped the phone onto the counter and decided, since he was up anyway, to start the day. He clicked on the coffee pot and walked back through the house to the bathroom. The pipes creaked when he went to crank on the hot water, and he made a mental note to get a plumber to the house to check things over. He’d moved into the house rather quickly, not really concerned with the pipes or the lights or heat as much as he was concerned with getting the hell away from Julia and San Francisco and the watery-eyed man that Julia had decided was a better match for her than Tyler.
The water finally warmed up, and Tyler got under the spray, making another mental note to buy a showerhead with some water pressure when he went into town that day. He stood under the spray for a few minutes and just let his head clear. He tried to remember when talking to Julia hadn’t left him feeling like he’d been beaten with a sock full of quarters, but he couldn’t honestly remember. A sudden, long note interrupted Tyler’s thoughts, and he cursed as he realized it was the doorbell. Too many years of being a salesman had him jumping from the shower and reaching for a towel before he had even registered that he was doing it. He spared a glance out the side window that gave a view of the driveway, but all he saw was a small purple truck that he didn’t recognize. The bell rang again, and he rolled his eyes.
“I’m coming!” He made sure his towel was secured around his waist and yanked open the front door. It took him a moment to realize that the person on the other side was Precocious. She didn’t seem to notice that he was, essentially, wet and naked.
“Morning.” She held up a small stack of files. “Zachary said that you were willing to look over some production numbers for him. He wanted me to explain the system to you. I reorganized it after Mrs. Slate left. Her system was…let’s just go with ‘unique’.” She smiled at Tyler and gave him a quick once-over. “This a bad time?”
Tyler wasn’t sure if she was smirking or not. If he were pressed for an answer, he’d say that she was. “I was in the shower,” he was tempted to kick himself for such a stupid answer, “obviously.” He stepped away from the door and gestured her in. “There’s coffee brewing in the kitchen. Help yourself. I’ll get finished up.”
“Want me to pour you a cup?”
“Please.” Tyler hurried back to the bathroom to dry off and get dressed. He wasn’t overly surprised to see himself flushed in the mirror. ~Zachary, I shall kill you dead.~ He had agreed to look over the production numbers as a favor and a way to burn some time, but he’d told Zachary that he’d handle it at the office with him. The idea of Precocious coming out to the farm hadn’t even been brought into the conversation. ~Should have known better than to take him at face value. Never trust a businessman. There's always a second face or a third face or a fourth face.~ Tyler threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and walked back to his kitchen. He gave a quick smile to Precocious. "Sorry about that."
"I've always had rotten timing." Precocious was busy pouring a great deal of milk into her coffee. She opened the drawer closest to her and closed it again. "Spoons?"
"Behind you." Tyler walked across the kitchen and retrieved a spoon from the silverware drawer. He handed it to Precocious and grabbed a mug from the drying rack to pour his own coffee. "I thought, when Zachary talked about my going over the numbers, that I'd be helping him at the office."
"We had a herd of inspectors from OSHA drop in this morning. You wouldn't even get to *see* Zachary, let alone sit in his office going over files. I know the system, I know the numbers we need to look at, so I offered to come out and run them by you."
Tyler gave Precocious a quick look. "How do you know so much about the company?"
"I'm the receptionist. I have to know everything on the off-chance some irate bastard calls and demands information from me. If I can't give it, I look like the weak link in the chain, and receptionists get a hard enough rap as it is." Precocious rolled her eyes. "Half the time I think people who come into the office expect me to have a beehive and a sweater set. I'd rather eat Napalm."
"Wow." Tyler walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. "That's harsh."
"It's true."
"Why not call yourself an 'administrative assistant'?"
"It gets the same reaction. Changing the name doesn't change the lack of respect for the job. It's why 'sanitation workers' still get shit. If it drives a big truck, hauls trash, and makes an obscene amount of money, it's a garbage man." Precocious sat next to Tyler and reached for the first file in the stack. "You want to get started?"
"Yeah."
Precocious opened the file and started explaining her system of organization to Tyler. That segued into the explanation on the numbers that Zachary was looking for, which turned into a conversation about which customers could be trusted to keep their orders at steady levels. Tyler was impressed with the sheer amount of knowledge that Precocious had for his questions. She had brought along a thick folder of customer information, but she did not consult for the entire session.
"Do you have a business degree?"
"Nope. No degree whatsoever."
Tyler watched her stand up and stretch, then pour another cup of coffee. "Did you go to college?"
"Briefly, but it wasn't for me. I'm not a particularly good student; I don’t have the patience to be taught how to do something in a classroom when I could learn it and have it be useful in the workplace."
"What about advancement?"
Precocious shrugged. "What about it?" She looked very unimpressed. "I like my life. I like my job. I like my boss. I've been assured by Zachary that not only will I be allowed to maintain my job for as long as possible, but that if I want advancement, he's willing to consider it. It sure as hell beats having a job that I'd get the shaft at because I'm not a formal education type person."
"Get that from your hippie mother?" Tyler grinned a little to show that he was joking.
"You'd think so. It's very anti-establishment to not go into formal education. No, Mom's all about education in any sense. She's got her masters, and she's working on her doctorate.”
“In what?”
“Political Science,” Precocious smiled. “She figures the best way to save the world is to understand when it all went horribly wrong.” She sat down at the table again. “She understands that sometimes you need classroom learning to back up what you already know, and that sometimes you just need to go out and see if you can swim.”
“And you jumped in.”
“More or less.”
Tyler took a sip of his coffee and considered getting the conversation back onto a professional track. The files looked wholly uninviting when compared to actual conversation. “What’d you do before you worked for Zachary?”
“I was a temp, mostly. I worked some pointless jobs in between, but mostly I just did office work.” Precocious closed the last file that they had been looking at and put it on top of the stack in the middle of the table. “How’d you meet Zachary?”
“It’s the classic tale of two men, one beer bong, and a stupid college frat party. We rushed the same frat. We got stumbling drunk, searched for earthworms on the front lawn, and that pretty much cemented our friendship. It’s hard to not feel a bond with a guy when you’re splitting a bottle of aspirin because of the same stupid stunt.”
”When’d you start up ‘Ransack’?”
Tyler was a little surprised that he actually had to stop and count backwards before giving an answer. He used to be able to rattle off the exact date and time without a second thought. “It was eleven years ago in March, I think.” He drummed his fingertips on the table top as he considered the timeline. “We got the idea about three years before that. We’d worked in factory settings since we’d left college, doing sales and purchasing. We knew we just had to find something that people needed.”
“How’d you end up in textiles?” Precocious looked like she couldn’t quite understand why two men with a plan for their own business had decided on a factory for textiles.
“Dumb luck. It’s what was getting big at the time. We figured we could slide in on the ground floor and work our company up to something important. We got the loan for the first building just as the place down the street went under. We managed to buy out their stock and get their customer base.”
“Lucky.”
Tyler shrugged. “We like to consider it good business intuition.” He grinned when Precocious chuckled. “Or maybe really dumb luck.”
“Yeah.”
They fell into silence, and it was comfortable for about the first minute. Tyler wondered where he could lead the conversation without sounding desperate, but before he could pick a safe, neutral topic, Precocious bowled him over. “Would you like to go to Linda’s exhibition with me next Friday?”
Tyler’s mouth had been half-open in preparation to speak. He managed to snap it shut before he ended up gaping like a dumbass. “Exhibition?”
“Yeah. She’s got a whole new set of pieces that are going up for viewing and buying. I’m not sure how your artistic tastes run, but if nothing else, you’d get to look at a lot of bright colors.”
Had it not been for the absolute faintest blush on her cheeks by her ears, Tyler would have thought that she was completely calm in her question. “Did Zachary ask you to invite me along so that I wouldn’t waste away out here all alone?” He wasn’t overly surprised at his own mildly annoyed tone. He was a little surprised at the flash of anger that lit up Percocious’s cheeks.
“No, but thanks for the compliment.” Precocious’s tone was sarcastic. “I’m not my boss’s errand girl, nor am I prone to take directions about asking his old friends to art exhibitions. His request was that I come out here and explain the numbers to you. The invitation to Linda’s exhibition is of my own free will.”
“I…uh…” ~Can you send flowers to apologize before you’ve even had a *date* with someone?~ “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” Tyler held up his hands in a placating gesture and watched as Precocious seemed to deflate.
“It’s not totally your fault. I’ve got some issues involving men and their ideas about my motivations.” Precocious pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and shook her head sharply. “Anyway,” she dropped her hands and looked a little less hostile than a few moments before, “if you’d like to go the exhibition with me, or meet me there, I’d enjoy the company. Linda’s going to be sucking up and pimping her art for the night, so someone to talk to would be nice.”
“Zachary doesn’t go to these things?”
“Imagine Zachary in a room full of actual artists, wannabe artists, Linda, and at least one sculpture that will be shaped like either a penis or a pierced clit.”
Tyler tried to imagine it and all he could see was Zachary standing all alone in a corner trying to avoid conversations about the political ramifications of giving federal funding to people who pissed on canvas and called it art. He couldn’t help but laugh. “I see your point.”
“We dragged him to one when I first started working for him, but he managed to duck behind a sculpture of tongue performing cunnilingus, and escape right after the unveiling.” Precocious’s grin was dangerous amused. “Linda knows the artist and got a smaller version of that sculpture for Zachary for his birthday. The last time I saw it, it was half hidden behind some manuals on his bookshelf.”
“Why wouldn’t he take it home?”
“Would you want a prospective girlfriend to see a sexually explicit sculpture in *your* house?”
Tyler looked behind him into the living room and studied the layout. “I don’t think it’d go with the couch.”
“The boxes go nicely, though.”
“Thanks for noticing.” Tyler wasn’t sure what to make about the small smile Precocious gave him. He decided to change the subject. “What do I wear to this thing? I don’t think I’ve ever been to an art exhibition that had *new* pieces. The last one I went to was Monet.”
“He’s okay.” Precocious waved the name away like he wasn’t considered a particularly important painter to know. “Slacks and a button down shirt are fine. If you really want to fit in, feel free to throw on jeans and a few dozen safety pins. I’d say paint your nails, but I don’t think you can pull it off. No offense.”
“None taken.” Tyler looked down at his nails. “Although, I got them manicured when I lived in San Francisco.”
“You’re kidding?” Precocious looked somewhat shocked. “You don’t strike me as the meterosexual type.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Please, pretend you didn’t just hear me drop the ‘m’ word.”
Tyler laughed. “It’s a volatile word where you come from?”
“We’re in Southwestern Kansas. Also, I have a standing agreement with myself to never use word invented by fashion magazines. Linda will kill me.”
“Well, sure, if I’d heard anything remotely incriminating.”
“You are a good man.”
“Thank you.” Tyler smiled at her as a sudden thought went through his head. ~I’m flirting. I can’t be flirting. But I’m *flirting*.~ He blinked a few times, not noticing that Precocious was watching him with an odd expression on her face. “Um…”
“You okay?” She looked worried that he was going to keel over.
“I…” ~Come on, think of something! You’re usually quicker on your feet than this!~ Tyler stood up suddenly, he couldn’t sit any longer. “I’ve got errands to run. I should probably get started if we’re finished.”
“Yeah, we’re covered. I’ve got your notes. I’ll pass them to Zachary.” If Precocious thought the suddenness of being more or less kicked out was weird, she didn’t say anything. She gathered the files into a quick, neat pile, stuck them under her arm, and took a moment to rinse out her coffee cup in the sink. “I’ll see you-oh, wait!” She grabbed the pen off the kitchen table and scrawled a number onto the post-it pad that was stuck to the door of the fridge. “There’s my number. I can’t remember what time the exhibition starts, but call me when you get the chance, and I’ll let you know.”
“Sure. Thanks.” Tyler waved goodbye as Precocious let herself out. He didn’t move from his spot by the table until he heard her truck start up and start down the driveway. He looked around the kitchen at the signs that someone who wasn’t him had been around. Precocious’s mug was in the sink, there was a small ring of coffee on the plastic tablecloth. There was a phone number on the fridge. Tyler walked over to the fridge and looked at the number.
555-8135-Precocious
Her handwriting was somehow messy and precise at the same time. There was a flourish to her ‘p’ and a small loop at the end of her ‘s’, but it wasn’t anything that made reading it hard. It was the handwriting of someone who made sure that their handwriting could always be read. It was the handwriting of a woman who had asked Tyler on a date.
Tyler looked around the room again like he was going to get some divine sign. He was mildly disappointed when the kitchen light didn’t suddenly turn unbearably bright and bring the voice of James Earl Jones.
~I have a date.~ Tyler walked from the kitchen to the bathroom and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. ~I have a date with a woman half my age.~ He looked at his mildly receding hairline, at the way his stomach was a little soft right above his belt, at the laugh lines around his eyes, and it all suddenly seemed magnified. ~Maybe I should have been a metrosexual.~
*
When Precocious parked in her spot in the apartment complex parking lot, she was a little surprised to see Linda’s spot being taken over by a very shiny and cherry red BMW convertible. She stepped out of her truck, locked the doors, and walked around the BMW to get a better look at it. The back license plate read ‘MAG’. She grinned and hurried into the apartment. “Dad!
Morris Grant, Precocious’s father, stood up from the armchair by the window and opened his arms to accept her hug. “Hey, you.”
“How are you?” Precocious stood on her toes for the hug, but even that didn’t put her even with his shoulder. “You got a new car.”
“I’m doing fine, and yes, I did. Do you think it’s obvious?”
“It’s a cherry red convertible, Dad.”
Morris waved off her comment. “I’m aware of *that*. I was asking in regards to it being obvious that I bought it in the midst of the beginning stages of my mid-life crisis.”
“Maybe a little, but even if you hadn’t, that’s what everyone would assume, anyway.” Precocious smiled at her father and led the way to the kitchen. “Where’s Linda?”
She was leaving just as I got here. She offered up her space and opened the door for me. I think she was muttering about needing more red paint.”
“Makes sense. She nearly ran out the other night.” Precocious pulled a soda from the fridge and offered it over. She grabbed a second one with Morris took the first. “How’s the soul-sucking business going?”
Morris smiled at the old joke. “I swear you sound more and more like your mother when you say that.”
“Thank you.”
Morris shook his head in amusement. “The soul-sucking is going just fine. I got three souls this week and traded them in for the poisoned apple Snow White took a bite of.”
“Must have been some high-priced souls if you got the apple for three of them.”
“Well, they say crooked lawyers make the best clients for honest ones.” Morris sat back in the armchair and watched Precocious tuck herself into a corner of the couch. “I know you can’t grow, but I swear you have.”
“I’m as short as I’ve always been. You just think you don’t see me enough, so you get it into your head that I must have changed somehow.”
“You’ve changed your phone number.”
“Not to avoid you.” Precocious made a face of disgust. “Chad won’t back off.”
“That’s what your mother said.” Morris cracked open his soda and took a drink. “She also said that you’ve already talked to the police.”
“They can’t do anything right now. It’s a big fucking waiting game.”
Morris had to bite back the automatic ‘language, young lady’, response that he felt trying to escape. This was his fully-grown daughter, and he’d never been the type of father to admonish for language, anyway. “Don’t let him win.”
“I don’t plan to.” Precocious stuck her chin out and set her jaw. “I’m a Grant. We don’t lose.”
“Don’t let your mother hear you say that, she’ll go on about how you’re not saying that in the proper competitive spirit.” Morris smiled as Precocious laughed. “She sounds like she’s doing well.”
“I think she is. I haven’t seen her in a couple of months. I wanted to meet her for an anti-Patriot Act rally, but I got caught up with some stuff at work and couldn’t make it.” Precocious shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll see her for Anti-Thanksgiving in a few months, if not before then.”
“I think she’s planning on it. She invited me for it.”
“Excellent.” Precocious’s smile was the type reserved solely for the fathers of doting daughters. “You can help me mount the campaign for a real turkey.”
“Gladly. Your mother and I divorced twenty years ago, and I’m still not sure how she talks me into tofurkey.”
“I have no idea,” Precocious said, then her eyes lit up. “Oh, it’s coming up on your twentieth divorce anniversary, isn’t it?”
Morris nodded. “Unbelievably so. I haven’t found the right gift for her, yet.”
“Oh! I know!” Precocious jumped up from the couch and ran down the hall into the studio/office. She dug around on her desk for a few seconds and found the catalog she had been looking for. She hurried back down the hall with the catalog held out like a shield. “Page nineteen.” Precocious handed the catalog over and waited for Morris to flip to the page.
“*Yarn*?” Morris looked up at Precocious with suspicion. “You want me to buy your mother *yarn* for our twentieth divorce anniversary?”
“You’re missing the point. And the price. Look at the price.” Precocious pointed to the tiny print that was half-unreadable in the picture.
“You have *got* to be kidding me. You know what I could buy for the price?”
“For any other woman, very nice jewelry. For mom, it’s perfect. Plus, it’s cashmere, and you’ll get a sweater out of it, I bet.”
Morris looked at the pictures of the yarn again. “Is she going to be knitting or crocheting with this stuff?”
“Both, probably.” Precocious grinned. “They sell it in bulk. She’ll want the brightest colors they have.”
“I’m not going to wear a pumpkin orange sweater.”
“So throw some navy or dark green in there. Mom will take the hint.”
Morris shook his head and handed the catalog to Precocious so he could pull his personal data organizer from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. “Have I mentioned lately what an odd family we have?”
“Not since I last saw you.” Precocious saw Morris twitch at that. “Don’t start in about how sorry you are you never see him enough. We’ve had this conversation since I was six, and I’m just as okay with it now as I was then. I never lacked for a strong male presence in my life, and I’ve never really needed one. There were always the guys at the communes, and if I ever really, *really* needed you, you were right there, or you got there as quickly as you could. You’re the only one who’s bitter about my upbringing, you know.”
"I'm not bitter." Morris finished entering the yarn information into his personal data organizer and put it back in his pocket. "It's just…I wanted to be more than I have been, but it was either make sure that I could always provide for you, or be a very hands-on father. I could travel around with you and your mother, or I could find a job where I could advance and make a very good living."
"I don’t think you made the wrong decision. You never had to buy my love, you know."
"Like your mother would have let me." Morris chuckled. "I'm always going to feel bad about it."
Precocious shrugged. "I really don't understand why, but feel bad if you need to." She tossed the catalog onto the coffee table and took her seat back on the couch. "Other than inappropriate guilt, what's been going on with you?"
"Just the usual, really. I did a favor for one of your mother's old friends and went after a paper mill that was polluting the ground water in the middle of nowhere."
"Good for you."
Morris smiled a little and sipped his soda. "I have to do something to make up for all the companies I defend who do horrible things."
"I didn't know you could buy back your soul. I thought those contracts with the devil were final and unbreakable."
"I'm a lawyer. I know a few loopholes."
Precocious grinned. "Surprise, surprise."
The front door opened suddenly, and Linda tumbled in with as many bags as she’d had a couple of nights before. “Help.” She nearly lost her footing trying to step off the foyer rug.
Morris was up before Precocious and easily took three bags from Linda. “What is all this, Ms. Sexton?”
“Paints. New canvases. I think I have a few new brushes in here somewhere.” Linda caught the knowing sigh from Precocious. “I did *not* go into the art supply store in a fugue state.”
“Uh-huh. That’s what you said the last time you went and came back with colors from the bargain bin.” Precocious maneuvered around her dad and took a couple of bags from Linda’s right side, more or less evening out the weight distribution. “Have you *ever* used that kelly green?”
“I *will*. I always do.” Linda led the way to the kitchen table and dropped the bags she was still holding. She started pulling items out and organizing them by piece. She had purchased a half-dozen small canvases, two medium-sized canvases, four more tubes of dark red paint, a large selection of brushes, and four bags worth of new paints from the bargain bin.
Precocious started reading labels and held up a tube the color of Nickeloden slime accusingly. “You will *not* use this.”
“I *could*!”
“But you *won’t*. You don’t use *neon* in your paintings.”
Linda sniffed like the proper haughty artist. “I may be going in a new direction.”
“What? Your new statement is to *blind* people?”
Linda turned away from Precocious and looked at Morris pleadingly. “Help.”
“No way. No how.” Morris took a step away from the table and kept backing into the kitchen. “I don’t get into aesthetic arguments with the great artist and my daughter. I protect my sanity.”
“And the sixteen hundred dollar suit that you think we’ll cover in paint.” Precocious grinned and waved the slime green paint at her dad.
“Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.” Morris hoped frantically for a change in conversation that would distract the both of them. He wondered if an all-out bribe would get their attention. “How about we put the paints down and go to dinner? I’ll buy.”
“He’s trying to distract us.” Linda eyed Morris critically, then looked over at Precocious. “Think we should let him?”
Precocious thought about if for a moment, shrugged, and tossed the slime green paint onto the table. “It’s free food. We can always get him later.”
For the moment, Morris breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t trust either of them with a tube of paint, especially not Precocious, who cared a bit less about its use than Linda, but if they were putting the paint down, he was safe for the time being. “Where should we go?”
“Nowhere where I have to change.” Linda glanced down at her paint-spattered white T-shirt and old jeans. “I have to come back and paint.”
“All right, but I’m vetoing Heart Attack Burger before Precocious offers it as a suggestion. My heart can’t take that kind of strain.”
“And Mom would kill you.”
Morris stepped forward and started herding the women towards the door. “How is it possible that I divorced that woman twenty years ago, and she can *still* razz me about my health?”
“Because you still talk to her. You could have gone the easy route and insisted on never speaking to her again, but you had to be an upstanding guy and decide to stay friends.” Precocious grabbed Morris into a one-armed hug. “It’s what you get for divorcing her before you became a hard-bitten attorney.”
“I supposed.” Morris dug his keys out of his pocket and jangled them. “Shall I drive?”
Linda’s face brightened at the sight of the keys. “Yes! And speed! A lot!” She cocked her head when Morris’s BMW came into view and walked forward with a determined look in her eyes. She walked around the car once, then placed a finger just above the left rear wheel well. “This would look *great* with a streak of that green you hated, Precocious.”
Before Precocious could agree or disagree, Morris jumped in. “Don’t *even* fucking think about it. I do *not* want to explain to my mechanic how I got slime green paint on my car. And I don’t want to get *mocked* for it for the rest of my natural life.”
“You’re no fun.” Linda stuck out her tongue and jumped into the tiny backseat of the car without opening the door.
“Is she a drag racer on the weekends?”
Precocious shrugged. “Maybe. I sleep at night. I couldn’t tell you where she goes.” She hugged Morris again. “It’s really great to see you, you know. I miss you when you’re gone.”
“I miss you, too, kid.” He kissed her on the top of her head and held himself back from opening her car door. Sally had turned her into exactly the kind of woman he admired-strong, independent, and deadly if you opened her car door when you weren’t on her side of the car. He still couldn’t believe that the fully grown woman who was grinning and laying on the horn to see if it played a song could be his daughter. He still remembered her running nude at one of the communes that he and Sally had stayed at when she was a toddler. He missed those days. The only pressure then was to come up with a fairy tale with enough twists and turns to keep Precocious occupied.
“Hey, Dad, you getting in?” Precocious leaned on the horn one more time for kicks.
“Yeah, yeah, give an old man a minute.” Morris opened his car door and slid into the seat.
“You’re not old, you know.”
“Sure, I’m not.”
“She’s right, you’re not.” Linda leaned forward and pressed the button on the radio to change the station. “You still have your teeth. And perfect vision. And all your hair.” She messed up Morris’s hair, deciding not to mention that she’d just streaked it with a light blue that looked very nice in his blonde hair. “And you still drive the speed limit.”
Morris grinned. “At least.” He pulled out of the parking lot and nudged Linda to get her to sit back. “Seat belts, Ladies. We’re going to see what this car can do.” He shifted into second as the light changed to green and slammed his foot down on the gas.
Word Count to Date: 17592
Tyler woke up in the wee hours of the morning to the phone ringing insistently by his bed. He threw out a hand, knocked his alarm clock to the floor, and managed to slam his knuckles against the lamp. He cursed, opened his eyes, and finally located the phone. Only years of being a salesperson kept him from sounding exceedingly cranky when he managed to get out, “hello?”
“Tyler?”
Julia’s voice cut through Tyler’s head like nothing else could. He jerked upright in bed and had to silently remind himself to breathe. “Julia. What are you calling for?”
“I found a few of your things when I was unpacking in my apartment.” Julia sounded like she would have preferred to find Ebola in her boxes. “I need your address so that I can ship them to you.”
Tyler stared across the room at the blank white wall and tried to remember his address. “I-um-I don’t know the address off the top of my head. I’m using the mailbox at the end of the road. My parents used to use a post office box.” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and stumbled out of bed. “Give me a second. I have the address in the kitchen somewhere.”
“Fine.” Julia’s voice was icy.
Tyler made it through the library and living room and into the kitchen without tripping over any of the boxes that were still packed up. He squinted at the clock in the kitchen and did a quick bit of subtraction in his head. “Why are you up at six in the morning?”
“I have things to do today.” Julia sounded completely disinterested in the whole conversation. “Shouldn’t you have been up and at an office of some sort by now?”
“I’m taking some time off, as you well know.” Tyler couldn’t help dropping every last ounce of concern or curiosity from his own voice. The best way to deal with Julia, he had discovered, was to stop caring whether or not he pissed her off intentionally. She was going to get mad at him for some inconsequential bit of nothing anyway. “How’s my alimony working out for you?”
“Your last check was late.”
“My accountant sends it off. Talk to him.”
“He’s an ass.”
~Why do you think he’s my accountant?~ Tyler rifled through a stack of papers on the edge of the kitchen table and cursed silently when he couldn’t find the paper where he’d scrawled the box address of the house. He took three steps to the counter and started digging through the papers there. “It’s here somewhere.”
“You never could keep track of anything.”
“Especially you.” Tyler has a quick memory flash of finding Julia at a restaurant where he was having a business dinner. She had been in the most basic idea of a dress and very tall shoes. The man she had been with had had watery eyes and looked overly frightened at the sight of Tyler stalking over to the table. There had been a very loud argument, and Tyler had gotten slapped. He’d retaliated by punching the watery-eyed coward in the nose. He’d been banned from the restaurant.
“Would you just find your address already?” Julia sounded like she was ready to crawl through the fiber optics of the phone and throttle Tyler. “I do have things to do today.”
“Congratulations.” Tyler finally saw the scrap of paper he was looking for and pumped his fist in the air before yanking it out from under a stack of bank records. “I’m at Box 248. Hugoton, Kansas.”
“Thank you.” Julia hung up the phone.
Tyler made a disgusted face and clicked off the cordless. “Why the hell did I ever marry you?” He dropped the phone onto the counter and decided, since he was up anyway, to start the day. He clicked on the coffee pot and walked back through the house to the bathroom. The pipes creaked when he went to crank on the hot water, and he made a mental note to get a plumber to the house to check things over. He’d moved into the house rather quickly, not really concerned with the pipes or the lights or heat as much as he was concerned with getting the hell away from Julia and San Francisco and the watery-eyed man that Julia had decided was a better match for her than Tyler.
The water finally warmed up, and Tyler got under the spray, making another mental note to buy a showerhead with some water pressure when he went into town that day. He stood under the spray for a few minutes and just let his head clear. He tried to remember when talking to Julia hadn’t left him feeling like he’d been beaten with a sock full of quarters, but he couldn’t honestly remember. A sudden, long note interrupted Tyler’s thoughts, and he cursed as he realized it was the doorbell. Too many years of being a salesman had him jumping from the shower and reaching for a towel before he had even registered that he was doing it. He spared a glance out the side window that gave a view of the driveway, but all he saw was a small purple truck that he didn’t recognize. The bell rang again, and he rolled his eyes.
“I’m coming!” He made sure his towel was secured around his waist and yanked open the front door. It took him a moment to realize that the person on the other side was Precocious. She didn’t seem to notice that he was, essentially, wet and naked.
“Morning.” She held up a small stack of files. “Zachary said that you were willing to look over some production numbers for him. He wanted me to explain the system to you. I reorganized it after Mrs. Slate left. Her system was…let’s just go with ‘unique’.” She smiled at Tyler and gave him a quick once-over. “This a bad time?”
Tyler wasn’t sure if she was smirking or not. If he were pressed for an answer, he’d say that she was. “I was in the shower,” he was tempted to kick himself for such a stupid answer, “obviously.” He stepped away from the door and gestured her in. “There’s coffee brewing in the kitchen. Help yourself. I’ll get finished up.”
“Want me to pour you a cup?”
“Please.” Tyler hurried back to the bathroom to dry off and get dressed. He wasn’t overly surprised to see himself flushed in the mirror. ~Zachary, I shall kill you dead.~ He had agreed to look over the production numbers as a favor and a way to burn some time, but he’d told Zachary that he’d handle it at the office with him. The idea of Precocious coming out to the farm hadn’t even been brought into the conversation. ~Should have known better than to take him at face value. Never trust a businessman. There's always a second face or a third face or a fourth face.~ Tyler threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and walked back to his kitchen. He gave a quick smile to Precocious. "Sorry about that."
"I've always had rotten timing." Precocious was busy pouring a great deal of milk into her coffee. She opened the drawer closest to her and closed it again. "Spoons?"
"Behind you." Tyler walked across the kitchen and retrieved a spoon from the silverware drawer. He handed it to Precocious and grabbed a mug from the drying rack to pour his own coffee. "I thought, when Zachary talked about my going over the numbers, that I'd be helping him at the office."
"We had a herd of inspectors from OSHA drop in this morning. You wouldn't even get to *see* Zachary, let alone sit in his office going over files. I know the system, I know the numbers we need to look at, so I offered to come out and run them by you."
Tyler gave Precocious a quick look. "How do you know so much about the company?"
"I'm the receptionist. I have to know everything on the off-chance some irate bastard calls and demands information from me. If I can't give it, I look like the weak link in the chain, and receptionists get a hard enough rap as it is." Precocious rolled her eyes. "Half the time I think people who come into the office expect me to have a beehive and a sweater set. I'd rather eat Napalm."
"Wow." Tyler walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. "That's harsh."
"It's true."
"Why not call yourself an 'administrative assistant'?"
"It gets the same reaction. Changing the name doesn't change the lack of respect for the job. It's why 'sanitation workers' still get shit. If it drives a big truck, hauls trash, and makes an obscene amount of money, it's a garbage man." Precocious sat next to Tyler and reached for the first file in the stack. "You want to get started?"
"Yeah."
Precocious opened the file and started explaining her system of organization to Tyler. That segued into the explanation on the numbers that Zachary was looking for, which turned into a conversation about which customers could be trusted to keep their orders at steady levels. Tyler was impressed with the sheer amount of knowledge that Precocious had for his questions. She had brought along a thick folder of customer information, but she did not consult for the entire session.
"Do you have a business degree?"
"Nope. No degree whatsoever."
Tyler watched her stand up and stretch, then pour another cup of coffee. "Did you go to college?"
"Briefly, but it wasn't for me. I'm not a particularly good student; I don’t have the patience to be taught how to do something in a classroom when I could learn it and have it be useful in the workplace."
"What about advancement?"
Precocious shrugged. "What about it?" She looked very unimpressed. "I like my life. I like my job. I like my boss. I've been assured by Zachary that not only will I be allowed to maintain my job for as long as possible, but that if I want advancement, he's willing to consider it. It sure as hell beats having a job that I'd get the shaft at because I'm not a formal education type person."
"Get that from your hippie mother?" Tyler grinned a little to show that he was joking.
"You'd think so. It's very anti-establishment to not go into formal education. No, Mom's all about education in any sense. She's got her masters, and she's working on her doctorate.”
“In what?”
“Political Science,” Precocious smiled. “She figures the best way to save the world is to understand when it all went horribly wrong.” She sat down at the table again. “She understands that sometimes you need classroom learning to back up what you already know, and that sometimes you just need to go out and see if you can swim.”
“And you jumped in.”
“More or less.”
Tyler took a sip of his coffee and considered getting the conversation back onto a professional track. The files looked wholly uninviting when compared to actual conversation. “What’d you do before you worked for Zachary?”
“I was a temp, mostly. I worked some pointless jobs in between, but mostly I just did office work.” Precocious closed the last file that they had been looking at and put it on top of the stack in the middle of the table. “How’d you meet Zachary?”
“It’s the classic tale of two men, one beer bong, and a stupid college frat party. We rushed the same frat. We got stumbling drunk, searched for earthworms on the front lawn, and that pretty much cemented our friendship. It’s hard to not feel a bond with a guy when you’re splitting a bottle of aspirin because of the same stupid stunt.”
”When’d you start up ‘Ransack’?”
Tyler was a little surprised that he actually had to stop and count backwards before giving an answer. He used to be able to rattle off the exact date and time without a second thought. “It was eleven years ago in March, I think.” He drummed his fingertips on the table top as he considered the timeline. “We got the idea about three years before that. We’d worked in factory settings since we’d left college, doing sales and purchasing. We knew we just had to find something that people needed.”
“How’d you end up in textiles?” Precocious looked like she couldn’t quite understand why two men with a plan for their own business had decided on a factory for textiles.
“Dumb luck. It’s what was getting big at the time. We figured we could slide in on the ground floor and work our company up to something important. We got the loan for the first building just as the place down the street went under. We managed to buy out their stock and get their customer base.”
“Lucky.”
Tyler shrugged. “We like to consider it good business intuition.” He grinned when Precocious chuckled. “Or maybe really dumb luck.”
“Yeah.”
They fell into silence, and it was comfortable for about the first minute. Tyler wondered where he could lead the conversation without sounding desperate, but before he could pick a safe, neutral topic, Precocious bowled him over. “Would you like to go to Linda’s exhibition with me next Friday?”
Tyler’s mouth had been half-open in preparation to speak. He managed to snap it shut before he ended up gaping like a dumbass. “Exhibition?”
“Yeah. She’s got a whole new set of pieces that are going up for viewing and buying. I’m not sure how your artistic tastes run, but if nothing else, you’d get to look at a lot of bright colors.”
Had it not been for the absolute faintest blush on her cheeks by her ears, Tyler would have thought that she was completely calm in her question. “Did Zachary ask you to invite me along so that I wouldn’t waste away out here all alone?” He wasn’t overly surprised at his own mildly annoyed tone. He was a little surprised at the flash of anger that lit up Percocious’s cheeks.
“No, but thanks for the compliment.” Precocious’s tone was sarcastic. “I’m not my boss’s errand girl, nor am I prone to take directions about asking his old friends to art exhibitions. His request was that I come out here and explain the numbers to you. The invitation to Linda’s exhibition is of my own free will.”
“I…uh…” ~Can you send flowers to apologize before you’ve even had a *date* with someone?~ “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” Tyler held up his hands in a placating gesture and watched as Precocious seemed to deflate.
“It’s not totally your fault. I’ve got some issues involving men and their ideas about my motivations.” Precocious pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and shook her head sharply. “Anyway,” she dropped her hands and looked a little less hostile than a few moments before, “if you’d like to go the exhibition with me, or meet me there, I’d enjoy the company. Linda’s going to be sucking up and pimping her art for the night, so someone to talk to would be nice.”
“Zachary doesn’t go to these things?”
“Imagine Zachary in a room full of actual artists, wannabe artists, Linda, and at least one sculpture that will be shaped like either a penis or a pierced clit.”
Tyler tried to imagine it and all he could see was Zachary standing all alone in a corner trying to avoid conversations about the political ramifications of giving federal funding to people who pissed on canvas and called it art. He couldn’t help but laugh. “I see your point.”
“We dragged him to one when I first started working for him, but he managed to duck behind a sculpture of tongue performing cunnilingus, and escape right after the unveiling.” Precocious’s grin was dangerous amused. “Linda knows the artist and got a smaller version of that sculpture for Zachary for his birthday. The last time I saw it, it was half hidden behind some manuals on his bookshelf.”
“Why wouldn’t he take it home?”
“Would you want a prospective girlfriend to see a sexually explicit sculpture in *your* house?”
Tyler looked behind him into the living room and studied the layout. “I don’t think it’d go with the couch.”
“The boxes go nicely, though.”
“Thanks for noticing.” Tyler wasn’t sure what to make about the small smile Precocious gave him. He decided to change the subject. “What do I wear to this thing? I don’t think I’ve ever been to an art exhibition that had *new* pieces. The last one I went to was Monet.”
“He’s okay.” Precocious waved the name away like he wasn’t considered a particularly important painter to know. “Slacks and a button down shirt are fine. If you really want to fit in, feel free to throw on jeans and a few dozen safety pins. I’d say paint your nails, but I don’t think you can pull it off. No offense.”
“None taken.” Tyler looked down at his nails. “Although, I got them manicured when I lived in San Francisco.”
“You’re kidding?” Precocious looked somewhat shocked. “You don’t strike me as the meterosexual type.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Please, pretend you didn’t just hear me drop the ‘m’ word.”
Tyler laughed. “It’s a volatile word where you come from?”
“We’re in Southwestern Kansas. Also, I have a standing agreement with myself to never use word invented by fashion magazines. Linda will kill me.”
“Well, sure, if I’d heard anything remotely incriminating.”
“You are a good man.”
“Thank you.” Tyler smiled at her as a sudden thought went through his head. ~I’m flirting. I can’t be flirting. But I’m *flirting*.~ He blinked a few times, not noticing that Precocious was watching him with an odd expression on her face. “Um…”
“You okay?” She looked worried that he was going to keel over.
“I…” ~Come on, think of something! You’re usually quicker on your feet than this!~ Tyler stood up suddenly, he couldn’t sit any longer. “I’ve got errands to run. I should probably get started if we’re finished.”
“Yeah, we’re covered. I’ve got your notes. I’ll pass them to Zachary.” If Precocious thought the suddenness of being more or less kicked out was weird, she didn’t say anything. She gathered the files into a quick, neat pile, stuck them under her arm, and took a moment to rinse out her coffee cup in the sink. “I’ll see you-oh, wait!” She grabbed the pen off the kitchen table and scrawled a number onto the post-it pad that was stuck to the door of the fridge. “There’s my number. I can’t remember what time the exhibition starts, but call me when you get the chance, and I’ll let you know.”
“Sure. Thanks.” Tyler waved goodbye as Precocious let herself out. He didn’t move from his spot by the table until he heard her truck start up and start down the driveway. He looked around the kitchen at the signs that someone who wasn’t him had been around. Precocious’s mug was in the sink, there was a small ring of coffee on the plastic tablecloth. There was a phone number on the fridge. Tyler walked over to the fridge and looked at the number.
555-8135-Precocious
Her handwriting was somehow messy and precise at the same time. There was a flourish to her ‘p’ and a small loop at the end of her ‘s’, but it wasn’t anything that made reading it hard. It was the handwriting of someone who made sure that their handwriting could always be read. It was the handwriting of a woman who had asked Tyler on a date.
Tyler looked around the room again like he was going to get some divine sign. He was mildly disappointed when the kitchen light didn’t suddenly turn unbearably bright and bring the voice of James Earl Jones.
~I have a date.~ Tyler walked from the kitchen to the bathroom and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. ~I have a date with a woman half my age.~ He looked at his mildly receding hairline, at the way his stomach was a little soft right above his belt, at the laugh lines around his eyes, and it all suddenly seemed magnified. ~Maybe I should have been a metrosexual.~
*
When Precocious parked in her spot in the apartment complex parking lot, she was a little surprised to see Linda’s spot being taken over by a very shiny and cherry red BMW convertible. She stepped out of her truck, locked the doors, and walked around the BMW to get a better look at it. The back license plate read ‘MAG’. She grinned and hurried into the apartment. “Dad!
Morris Grant, Precocious’s father, stood up from the armchair by the window and opened his arms to accept her hug. “Hey, you.”
“How are you?” Precocious stood on her toes for the hug, but even that didn’t put her even with his shoulder. “You got a new car.”
“I’m doing fine, and yes, I did. Do you think it’s obvious?”
“It’s a cherry red convertible, Dad.”
Morris waved off her comment. “I’m aware of *that*. I was asking in regards to it being obvious that I bought it in the midst of the beginning stages of my mid-life crisis.”
“Maybe a little, but even if you hadn’t, that’s what everyone would assume, anyway.” Precocious smiled at her father and led the way to the kitchen. “Where’s Linda?”
She was leaving just as I got here. She offered up her space and opened the door for me. I think she was muttering about needing more red paint.”
“Makes sense. She nearly ran out the other night.” Precocious pulled a soda from the fridge and offered it over. She grabbed a second one with Morris took the first. “How’s the soul-sucking business going?”
Morris smiled at the old joke. “I swear you sound more and more like your mother when you say that.”
“Thank you.”
Morris shook his head in amusement. “The soul-sucking is going just fine. I got three souls this week and traded them in for the poisoned apple Snow White took a bite of.”
“Must have been some high-priced souls if you got the apple for three of them.”
“Well, they say crooked lawyers make the best clients for honest ones.” Morris sat back in the armchair and watched Precocious tuck herself into a corner of the couch. “I know you can’t grow, but I swear you have.”
“I’m as short as I’ve always been. You just think you don’t see me enough, so you get it into your head that I must have changed somehow.”
“You’ve changed your phone number.”
“Not to avoid you.” Precocious made a face of disgust. “Chad won’t back off.”
“That’s what your mother said.” Morris cracked open his soda and took a drink. “She also said that you’ve already talked to the police.”
“They can’t do anything right now. It’s a big fucking waiting game.”
Morris had to bite back the automatic ‘language, young lady’, response that he felt trying to escape. This was his fully-grown daughter, and he’d never been the type of father to admonish for language, anyway. “Don’t let him win.”
“I don’t plan to.” Precocious stuck her chin out and set her jaw. “I’m a Grant. We don’t lose.”
“Don’t let your mother hear you say that, she’ll go on about how you’re not saying that in the proper competitive spirit.” Morris smiled as Precocious laughed. “She sounds like she’s doing well.”
“I think she is. I haven’t seen her in a couple of months. I wanted to meet her for an anti-Patriot Act rally, but I got caught up with some stuff at work and couldn’t make it.” Precocious shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll see her for Anti-Thanksgiving in a few months, if not before then.”
“I think she’s planning on it. She invited me for it.”
“Excellent.” Precocious’s smile was the type reserved solely for the fathers of doting daughters. “You can help me mount the campaign for a real turkey.”
“Gladly. Your mother and I divorced twenty years ago, and I’m still not sure how she talks me into tofurkey.”
“I have no idea,” Precocious said, then her eyes lit up. “Oh, it’s coming up on your twentieth divorce anniversary, isn’t it?”
Morris nodded. “Unbelievably so. I haven’t found the right gift for her, yet.”
“Oh! I know!” Precocious jumped up from the couch and ran down the hall into the studio/office. She dug around on her desk for a few seconds and found the catalog she had been looking for. She hurried back down the hall with the catalog held out like a shield. “Page nineteen.” Precocious handed the catalog over and waited for Morris to flip to the page.
“*Yarn*?” Morris looked up at Precocious with suspicion. “You want me to buy your mother *yarn* for our twentieth divorce anniversary?”
“You’re missing the point. And the price. Look at the price.” Precocious pointed to the tiny print that was half-unreadable in the picture.
“You have *got* to be kidding me. You know what I could buy for the price?”
“For any other woman, very nice jewelry. For mom, it’s perfect. Plus, it’s cashmere, and you’ll get a sweater out of it, I bet.”
Morris looked at the pictures of the yarn again. “Is she going to be knitting or crocheting with this stuff?”
“Both, probably.” Precocious grinned. “They sell it in bulk. She’ll want the brightest colors they have.”
“I’m not going to wear a pumpkin orange sweater.”
“So throw some navy or dark green in there. Mom will take the hint.”
Morris shook his head and handed the catalog to Precocious so he could pull his personal data organizer from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. “Have I mentioned lately what an odd family we have?”
“Not since I last saw you.” Precocious saw Morris twitch at that. “Don’t start in about how sorry you are you never see him enough. We’ve had this conversation since I was six, and I’m just as okay with it now as I was then. I never lacked for a strong male presence in my life, and I’ve never really needed one. There were always the guys at the communes, and if I ever really, *really* needed you, you were right there, or you got there as quickly as you could. You’re the only one who’s bitter about my upbringing, you know.”
"I'm not bitter." Morris finished entering the yarn information into his personal data organizer and put it back in his pocket. "It's just…I wanted to be more than I have been, but it was either make sure that I could always provide for you, or be a very hands-on father. I could travel around with you and your mother, or I could find a job where I could advance and make a very good living."
"I don’t think you made the wrong decision. You never had to buy my love, you know."
"Like your mother would have let me." Morris chuckled. "I'm always going to feel bad about it."
Precocious shrugged. "I really don't understand why, but feel bad if you need to." She tossed the catalog onto the coffee table and took her seat back on the couch. "Other than inappropriate guilt, what's been going on with you?"
"Just the usual, really. I did a favor for one of your mother's old friends and went after a paper mill that was polluting the ground water in the middle of nowhere."
"Good for you."
Morris smiled a little and sipped his soda. "I have to do something to make up for all the companies I defend who do horrible things."
"I didn't know you could buy back your soul. I thought those contracts with the devil were final and unbreakable."
"I'm a lawyer. I know a few loopholes."
Precocious grinned. "Surprise, surprise."
The front door opened suddenly, and Linda tumbled in with as many bags as she’d had a couple of nights before. “Help.” She nearly lost her footing trying to step off the foyer rug.
Morris was up before Precocious and easily took three bags from Linda. “What is all this, Ms. Sexton?”
“Paints. New canvases. I think I have a few new brushes in here somewhere.” Linda caught the knowing sigh from Precocious. “I did *not* go into the art supply store in a fugue state.”
“Uh-huh. That’s what you said the last time you went and came back with colors from the bargain bin.” Precocious maneuvered around her dad and took a couple of bags from Linda’s right side, more or less evening out the weight distribution. “Have you *ever* used that kelly green?”
“I *will*. I always do.” Linda led the way to the kitchen table and dropped the bags she was still holding. She started pulling items out and organizing them by piece. She had purchased a half-dozen small canvases, two medium-sized canvases, four more tubes of dark red paint, a large selection of brushes, and four bags worth of new paints from the bargain bin.
Precocious started reading labels and held up a tube the color of Nickeloden slime accusingly. “You will *not* use this.”
“I *could*!”
“But you *won’t*. You don’t use *neon* in your paintings.”
Linda sniffed like the proper haughty artist. “I may be going in a new direction.”
“What? Your new statement is to *blind* people?”
Linda turned away from Precocious and looked at Morris pleadingly. “Help.”
“No way. No how.” Morris took a step away from the table and kept backing into the kitchen. “I don’t get into aesthetic arguments with the great artist and my daughter. I protect my sanity.”
“And the sixteen hundred dollar suit that you think we’ll cover in paint.” Precocious grinned and waved the slime green paint at her dad.
“Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.” Morris hoped frantically for a change in conversation that would distract the both of them. He wondered if an all-out bribe would get their attention. “How about we put the paints down and go to dinner? I’ll buy.”
“He’s trying to distract us.” Linda eyed Morris critically, then looked over at Precocious. “Think we should let him?”
Precocious thought about if for a moment, shrugged, and tossed the slime green paint onto the table. “It’s free food. We can always get him later.”
For the moment, Morris breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t trust either of them with a tube of paint, especially not Precocious, who cared a bit less about its use than Linda, but if they were putting the paint down, he was safe for the time being. “Where should we go?”
“Nowhere where I have to change.” Linda glanced down at her paint-spattered white T-shirt and old jeans. “I have to come back and paint.”
“All right, but I’m vetoing Heart Attack Burger before Precocious offers it as a suggestion. My heart can’t take that kind of strain.”
“And Mom would kill you.”
Morris stepped forward and started herding the women towards the door. “How is it possible that I divorced that woman twenty years ago, and she can *still* razz me about my health?”
“Because you still talk to her. You could have gone the easy route and insisted on never speaking to her again, but you had to be an upstanding guy and decide to stay friends.” Precocious grabbed Morris into a one-armed hug. “It’s what you get for divorcing her before you became a hard-bitten attorney.”
“I supposed.” Morris dug his keys out of his pocket and jangled them. “Shall I drive?”
Linda’s face brightened at the sight of the keys. “Yes! And speed! A lot!” She cocked her head when Morris’s BMW came into view and walked forward with a determined look in her eyes. She walked around the car once, then placed a finger just above the left rear wheel well. “This would look *great* with a streak of that green you hated, Precocious.”
Before Precocious could agree or disagree, Morris jumped in. “Don’t *even* fucking think about it. I do *not* want to explain to my mechanic how I got slime green paint on my car. And I don’t want to get *mocked* for it for the rest of my natural life.”
“You’re no fun.” Linda stuck out her tongue and jumped into the tiny backseat of the car without opening the door.
“Is she a drag racer on the weekends?”
Precocious shrugged. “Maybe. I sleep at night. I couldn’t tell you where she goes.” She hugged Morris again. “It’s really great to see you, you know. I miss you when you’re gone.”
“I miss you, too, kid.” He kissed her on the top of her head and held himself back from opening her car door. Sally had turned her into exactly the kind of woman he admired-strong, independent, and deadly if you opened her car door when you weren’t on her side of the car. He still couldn’t believe that the fully grown woman who was grinning and laying on the horn to see if it played a song could be his daughter. He still remembered her running nude at one of the communes that he and Sally had stayed at when she was a toddler. He missed those days. The only pressure then was to come up with a fairy tale with enough twists and turns to keep Precocious occupied.
“Hey, Dad, you getting in?” Precocious leaned on the horn one more time for kicks.
“Yeah, yeah, give an old man a minute.” Morris opened his car door and slid into the seat.
“You’re not old, you know.”
“Sure, I’m not.”
“She’s right, you’re not.” Linda leaned forward and pressed the button on the radio to change the station. “You still have your teeth. And perfect vision. And all your hair.” She messed up Morris’s hair, deciding not to mention that she’d just streaked it with a light blue that looked very nice in his blonde hair. “And you still drive the speed limit.”
Morris grinned. “At least.” He pulled out of the parking lot and nudged Linda to get her to sit back. “Seat belts, Ladies. We’re going to see what this car can do.” He shifted into second as the light changed to green and slammed his foot down on the gas.
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no subject
on 2004-11-18 04:56 pm (UTC)