Tell Me More. Janet Mullany

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СКАЧАТЬ to make a major gift.” Kimberly reached for her Rolodex, flipped it over and began typing. “I’m emailing you his number. And his cell. He’ll be a change from those bearded intellectual bores you usually date—”

      “Hugh did not have a—”

      “Or those muscle-bound rock-climbing types—”

      “One, four years ago before I met Hugh—”

      “Or those pretty dancers who couldn’t decide whether they were bisexual or not—”

      “I couldn’t help hanging out with other dance majors and that was a long time ago, and only one was—”

      “So now you can date an adult,” Kimberly said with an air of finality. “And if you give me the Leprechaun’s email I’ll invite him to Bill’s party.”

      I scribbled his email address on a Post-it. “I don’t know why I’m agreeing to let you pimp me for the station or corrupt my tenant.”

      “I’m sure both of us will behave with the utmost professionalism.” She handed me a paper napkin as I spluttered coffee over her desk.

      After six months of housesitting, friends’ sofas and occasional returns to Elise’s bed in a house that no longer felt like home, Patrick thought he should feel relieved to be in his own place. If only. He felt he didn’t belong in this small space, him and the half-dozen humming computers, the clean quiet of it all. Jo was a remarkably silent neighbor—he guessed she slept most of the day. He met her one gloriously sunny afternoon planting bulbs in the front yard.

      “Daffodils,” she said. “The squirrels eat everything else.”

      “Right,” he said.

      “Are you coming to Bill’s party?”

      He hesitated. “Maybe.”

      “It’ll be fun,” she said, stripping off her gardening gloves. “Liz Ferrar’s coming, probably some other people you know. Everything okay in the apartment?”

      “Yeah, it’s great, thanks.” He sounded wildly enthusiastic—he really needed to get out more—as though he were commenting on an orgy.

      She usually left for work in the late afternoon and out of curiosity, and by the need to deal with his laundry, he entered the house later that day. The doorway to the apartment opened into the upstairs of the house—polished wood floors, white walls, all very ascetic, like a nunnery.

      Except for the bathroom. The half-open door revealed a rack across the bathtub, with expensive underwear laid out to dry. Christ. Was she wearing something like that under her gardening outfit? Classy stuff, too. Sexy and silky and … stockings, too. A far cry from the faded Santa Claus panties, all that exotic lace and silk and satin. Underwear made to be displayed, slowly removed (or not at all), brushed over a guy’s face so he could catch her scent.

      Grimly Patrick held on to his laundry basket. There was no way he was going to touch her underwear. Absolutely not. Just because he’d seen her naked once and admired her legs and liked her voice on the radio didn’t mean he had to … No point in touching anything, he argued with himself. They were just scraps of fabric. Now if she, or someone, was wearing them, that would be far more interesting—a nipple poking against taut silk, or a crisp of hair against dampened satin, or. He tried to summon up some good Irish Catholic guilt, and failed.

      Something brushed against his leg and he almost dropped the basket. The damn cat, of course, looking at him with solemn, reproachful eyes.

      “I get it.” Patrick hefted the basket. “Don’t tell her.”

      A bloodcurdling scream came from downstairs. What the fuck. He dropped the basket and ran down the stairs and into the basement.

      At first he didn’t recognize her and gave a yell of fear at the faceless stranger who stood screaming in the dim light. She wore a pair of Wellington boots with her jeans tucked into them, a long-sleeved sweater with rubber gloves and something over her face that he recognized, with incredulity, as a fencing mask. In one hand she held a pair of barbecue tongs.

      “What the hell?” he shouted, in relief that it was only Jo.

      “Get it off my foot!”

      “What?”

      “It moved!”

      “Why are you here in the dark?”

      “I don’t like to see their eyes.”

      He snapped on the light. “Whose eyes?”

      She pointed at her feet. The cat strolled forward and sniffed at her toe.

      Patrick squatted to take a better look at the small scrap of fur that lay on her foot. “It’s okay. It’s dead.” He now saw the discarded mousetrap on the floor. “Why not just throw the whole thing out?”

      “It’s wasteful.” She said it with a reproachful air. Then she screamed at him. “Don’t use your hand! You get could sick!”

      He took the tongs and retrieved the mouse. “What day does the city recycling pick up dead rodents?”

      “I throw them in the backyard.”

      “Okay.” He unlocked the back door and threw the day’s catch out. “Jo, if it freaks you out so much, I could catch mice for you.”

      She removed her fencing mask. “You would?”

      “Sure. But why doesn’t the cat catch them?”

      “Sometimes he does. I don’t think he’s much of a hunter. That’s real nice of you, Patrick, but you can’t use glue traps and they have their own peanut butter—”

      “Consider it a term of my rental. Why do you wear a fencing mask?”

      “One time a mouse wasn’t dead and when Hugh found it he let it go and it ran up his leg and bit his knee.”

      “Inside his pants?”

      “No, he wasn’t wearing … I mean, it was summer. Shorts.” She smiled. “I’m very grateful. Really. I have another trap over there. You’ll need the flashlight. It’s dark in that corner. I just hope they enjoy the peanut butter. It’s not organic, but it’s quite good.”

      “Of course.” He found another small corpse with an expression of surprise on its face, or what looked like it. Under her cringing supervision he smeared more peanut butter onto the traps and reset them.

      All the while he wondered what she was wearing beneath her jeans and sweater.

      “Thank you for the flowers,” I said to Willis.

      “I’d hoped you might call me.” He snatched two glasses of wine deftly from a circulating waiter and handed one to me. Around us the party was in full swing, held in the large open space in the middle of the radio station. Once the building had been a small parochial school and this had been the assembly room. I’d lost sight of Patrick, who’d been appropriated by Liz Ferrar.

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