Free 2 Weeks 'Til Eve (2 'Til Series Book 3) by Heather Muzik Page B

could be driving or
showering or on the toilet. She could have her hands in a couple pounds of raw
meatloaf or any number of places that made responding impossible, if she’d even
read the text yet, which Tara couldn’t know either. In other words, she could wait.
    In the past weeks there had been at least seventeen
calls unanswered, two promises to call back that were broken, and forty-two
texts ignored. Any normal person would have already taken that as a sign that
she didn’t want to talk or didn’t have time to talk or that she had skipped the
country and left all her worldly possessions behind, including her phone. But
Tara was relentless.
    Simply put, Catherine didn’t have time for Tara’s
craziness, which inevitably came with any glancing contact she had with her. It
could be the most innocuous thing on earth that started a conversation and the
next thing she would be neck deep in something insane or criminal or both, and
right now she had bigger and more conservative fish to fry. Her parents were
coming! She was about to have a baby! She had a family to think about!
Everything else was fighting it out for last place while she found her way
through the next two weeks. And then there was Christmas on the other side of
that. This was going to be their only “first Christmas” together. The first she
celebrated as a married woman. The first Cara celebrated without her mother.
The first ever for baby Eve. The start of so many lasting traditions for the
Trager household.  
    Maybe next year, Tara. She could even make a
New Year’s resolution to reorganize her friendships and resolve things with
both Tara and Georgia. When things settled down.
    Catherine stepped into the old hardware store that
still eked out a business in spite of The Home Depot that had moved in just on
the other side of town. The soothing spicy scent of bundles of cinnamon sticks
in baskets flanking the door overtook her. Smart marketing, she realized as she
grabbed a bundle for herself.
    The entire store had been overtaken by Christmas, but
with a more discerning taste that was quaint and inviting unlike the bigger
chains. No blow-up decorations to be found in here. No plastic molds of
reindeer or snowmen either. Everything was either made of nature or twisted and
formed to look like nature. And around the perimeter on the uppermost shelves was
a fleet of little metal wagons in every color imaginable, shiny and sleek like
new cars, ready for giving. 
    Along the front windows was a line of pine trees,
fresh and fully ornamented, each decorated by a different grade in the
elementary school. She had been avoiding this display purposefully after being
torpedoed by Sophie Watts, who’d probably snooped around and found out that she
had a prenatal appointment the day that they were making ornaments. Sophie was
probably friends with the nurse practitioner who also hated Catherine and they
were in cahoots to ensure that she couldn’t reschedule for a more convenient
time so she would be free for her room mothering responsibilities. A conspiracy
for sure.
    All the ornaments were made by hand, and the six trees
got progressively better looking as the students decorating them got older. For
the most part, the first grade students were still in remedial art projects of
magazine clipping collages and cut-and-paste construction paper Santas.
    “Can I help you?”
    “Oh, hi, Phil,” Catherine said to the owner as he
approached from the back.
    “Well if it isn’t Mrs. Trager. Aren’t these trees a
delight?”
    “That’s one way to put it,” she said, keeping it
breezy.
    “You know, I get a lot of requests for that ornament
there. They want to know if we sell it.”
    “Which one?” She squinted at the tree in front of
them.
    “That one.”
    There, hanging amid the branches of the first-grade
tree, was a little drum with halved Q-tip drumsticks. Her breath caught for a
moment when she saw it. She had one just like it on the tree at home.