Jennifer Crusie - Maybe This Time

“That was a helluva long phase. I’ll call if there’s anything else. You have a good day.”

She hung up, and he sat there with the phone in his hand for a minute, trying to find his way back to normal, until Kristin came in.

“She needs cable down there,” he told her, hanging up the phone. “Get it for her, please.”

“That’s going to cost you,” Kristin said.

It’s the only thing she’s asked for in the entire time I’ve known her. “Get it for her. Also find a good contractor down there and have him go out to talk to her, not to Mrs. Crumb. And call the phone company and find out why they lose service and if there’s anything we can do about it. Bills to come here.”

Kristin nodded. “And Mrs. Nash in the waiting room?”

“Give me a couple of minutes,” North said, and Kristin nodded again and went out.

Andie had never asked for anything. He’d kept waiting for her to, it was crazy of her not to, to ask for a house instead of his apartment in the attic of the family’s Victorian-he’d heard her bitching at the stove once and sent in people to redo the kitchen for her-for a car instead of public transportation-he’d surprised her with a bright yellow Mustang and she’d loved it-hell, for an engagement ring and a decent wedding ring-he’d tried to give her a good ring once and she’d insisted on keeping that damn green band-but she’d just gone on with her life, tromping around in those crazy skirts and tight tank tops, her hair wild no matter how much she fought it, arguing with him, laughing with him, falling into bed with him…

He closed his eyes and thought, I really was an idiot.

He just wasn’t sure if he’d been an idiot for marrying her or for letting her go.

Not that it mattered anymore. She was gone, and he had a client to interview. He punched a button on the intercom and said, “I’ll see Mrs. Nash now,” and went back to work.

After North hung up, Andie put more coins in the phone and called Flo and told her everything was fine, and then called Will and said the same thing, but he wasn’t as easily put off.

“Have you talked to North?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I asked him to get us cable.”

“I wish you weren’t talking to him.”

“I’d talk to Satan to get cable,” Andie said, and changed the subject, giving him half her attention while she watched Alice lean against Carter’s arm, sitting as close to him as possible. “I have to go,” she said when they’d finished their ice cream, and then realized she’d interrupted him in mid-sentence. “Sorry, the kids… I have to go.” She hung up and went back to collect the kids, taking a phone number tab from a flyer for the Happy Housekeepers cleaning service she found on the Dairy Queen’s bulletin board. She lost the kids again as soon as she stopped the car on the flagstones behind the house, Carter taking the bookstore bags and Alice dragging the bags of clothes and office supplies. Andie took everything else into the kitchen and put the food away, taking a surprised satisfaction in seeing the fridge and cupboards fill up. Then she took the rest of the bags upstairs, dropped Carter’s striped comforter off in his room without getting so much as a glance from him, and took Alice’s blue comforter into the nursery where she set up her sewing machine, tore the sequined chiffon into strips, and sewed the strips all over the comforter.

Then she went to Alice’s room, knocked on the door, and said, “Alice, I have your comforter.”

“Come in,” Alice said, suspicion heavy in her voice, and Andie opened the door and went in.

Alice watched critically as Andie pulled the old pink bedspread off and shook the glittery blue comforter out, snapping it over her bed and making the chiffon strips flutter and gleam as it settled. Alice looked closer at it. “It should have swirls,” she told Andie.

“Swirls.”

“Like dancing. I’ll do it with my marker.” Alice narrowed her eyes. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Andie said. “You do that, and I’ll go make dinner.”

Alice got the blue marker out of her new set, put the headphones to her Walkman back on, and began to draw swirls on the chiffon.

Half an hour later, Andie came back with two bowls of tomato soup, two grilled cheese sandwiches, and two glasses of milk, and put half on Alice’s bedside table. Alice ignored her and kept making swirls. Then Andie took the rest of the tray in to Carter, who ignored her knock and glared when she came in, closing the new sketchbook he’d been drawing in.

“Dinner,” she said, and put the tray on the table beside his bed.

He looked over at it, picked up a wedge of cheese sandwich, bit into it, and opened the sketchbook again, careful to shield it so she couldn’t see what he was doing.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and went back to her bedroom to work on the curriculum since she was going to start beating education into them the next day.

At eight o’clock, she went to collect their dishes and call bedtime. Alice was sitting on her bedspread, her dinner gone, staring at the sequins and the swirls she’d marked all over the chiffon. “It’s bee-you-tee-ful,” she was saying when Andie walked in.

“Yes, it is,” Andie said, and Alice looked up surprised, as if she hadn’t noticed she was there.

“Brush your teeth,” Andie said, prepared for a fight, but Alice went off to the little bathroom on her own. When she came out, changed into her too-big Bad Witch T-shirt, Andie said, “Bedtime,” and Alice picked up her Jessica doll, got into bed, and smoothed the comforter under her hands after Andie pulled it up over her knees. “Let me get the scrunchie out of your hair.”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOO,” Alice began, and Andie said, “We’ll put another one in tomorrow,” and pulled the scrunchie out while Alice was taking a breath to scream again.

Her white-blond hair dropped around her ears, smooth and silky now. Alice scratched the top of her head and said, “Okay,” in a normal voice and slid down under the covers.

So far, so good, Andie thought, blessing her mother for the tip on the sequins.

Now maybe if they started a bedtime ritual, Alice would start talking to her.

“So this bedtime thing,” she told Alice. “Is there anything I should be doing for you?”

Alice looked down at the rocker at the end of the bed.

“Get you a glass of water?” Andie said. “Read you a story?”

“Tell me a story,” Alice said, and Andie thought, Oh, hell, and sat down in the rocker.

Alice froze.

“What’s wrong?” Andie said, looking around.

“Don’t sit there,” Alice said, and Andie moved over to the foot of the bed, and Alice relaxed. “Okay. Tell me the story.”

“Okay.” Andie thought fast. “Once upon a time, there was a princess named Alice who lived in a big stone castle.”

“Was there a dungeon?”

“No, but there was a moat,” Andie said, thinking of the ugly water that surrounded the place. Their very own mosquito breeding ground.

“Okay,” Alice said.

“She lived there with her brother and her nanny and a cook,” Andie went on, thinking, This story sucks.

“The nanny was a Bad Witch,” Alice said, ignoring the message on her nightgown.

“And everybody,” Andie went on, ignoring Alice, “loved Alice.”

“That’s right.” Alice sat back against her pillows, still clutching Jessica. “Because Alice was very beautiful.”

Andie looked at the plain little girl in front of her, white-blond hair and skin as pale as her pillows. “Yes.”

“What did she look like?”

“She had beautiful blond hair,” Andie said, almost reaching out to smooth the wisps away from Alice’s face, but stopping just in time. Alice would not like it. “And big blue eyes.”

“Blue?” Alice said, frowning again.

“Gray-blue. Like a stormy sky.”

“And did she have lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow?”

Andie looked at Alice’s pale little face. “She had skin as white as snow because she didn’t eat a good breakfast. If she’d had a hot breakfast instead of sugary cereal-”

“Princesses don’t eat hot breakfasts,” Alice said, looking stormy again.

“They do if they want rosy cheeks.”

“This princess doesn’t want rosy cheeks.”

“Fine. She had skin as white as snow.”

“And she wears a beautiful blue gown that flutters when she walks,” Alice said, kicking her comforter so the chiffon fluttered again. “Like wings or cobwebs or butterflies.”

“Sure,” Andie said, losing her place in the story.

“And she is very strong,” Alice went on, “and nobody can make her do anything, not even her Bad Uncle who tries to kidnap her.”

“Hell-o,” Andie said, pulling back a little.

“He does,” Alice said, very sure. “He is tall and he has white hair and he frowns and he says, ‘You must leave!’ but Alice shoves him out the door”-Alice pushed her palms out in front of her-“and he has to let her stay in the castle.”

“Alice met her uncle?” Andie said, taken aback, and then remembered that North had said he’d gone to see the kids right after his cousin had died.

Alice nodded. “Nanny Joy said that Bad Uncle said they had to go away.”

“Nanny Joy, huh?” Rotten bitch of a nanny. Although it was possible North had said that. He wouldn’t have known how upset they’d be since he’d have kept his distance.

“Nanny Joy was a bad fairy,” Alice was saying, warming now to her story. “She wasn’t like the other princess.”

“There was another princess?”

“Yes. A blue princess. And she would dance all the time. Like this.” Alice pushed the Jessica doll away and slipped out of bed before Andie could stop her, her feet hitting the floor with a thunk, and began to dance, a kind of hoochie-coochie Kabuki glide that involved twitching hips and swaying hands, stopping for moments of tai chi. She hummed something as she moved, completely absorbed in herself, and then finished with a twirl, spreading her arms as she turned in a moment of absolute grace. “She was a very good dancer,” Alice said as she climbed back into bed. “Then what happened?”

“Uh,” Andie said, trying to figure out where Bad Uncle and the dancing princess fit with Alice in the castle. “Well. Alice lived in the castle with her brother and the cook and the, uh, dancing princess, and she was very happy except for one thing.”

Alice folded her arms, but it seemed to be more of a concentration thing than resistance.

“She was very lonely,” Andie ventured.

Alice frowned.

“She had her brother and the cook and the dancing princess,” Andie went on hastily, “but she wanted somebody her own age to… dance with.”

Alice frowned harder.

“So she decided to go on a quest.”

“What’s a quest?”

“A trip to find something. Like to school, to find other children to play with. She went out to look for a school-”

“No she didn’t.”

“Okay, what did she do?”

“I don’t know,” Alice said, exasperated. “You’re telling the story.”

“If I’m telling the story, why doesn’t Princess Alice eat her hot breakfast and go on a quest for a school?”

“Because that’s wrong.”

“Okay.” Andie gave up. “I have to think about this story for a while and then tell you more tomorrow.”

Alice sighed. “All right. But there should be more dancing.”

“More dancing. Got it. Anything else?”

Alice grew still, and her eyes seemed sadder suddenly, the shadows underneath them growing darker. “No,” she said, and rolled over, away from Andie, scooting down under the covers as she turned.

“Okay.” Andie got up, picked up the Jessica doll from where it had fallen to the floor, tucked it in beside Alice, and turned off her bedside light. “I’ll be right across the nursery if you need me.”

“I won’t,” Alice said, her voice muffled by the covers.

“Right.” Andie hesitated and then bent and kissed the top of Alice’s head, and Alice batted her away. “Sleep tight, baby,” Andie said, and went across the hall to check on Carter.

He said, “Come in,” when she knocked, which she considered progress, and when she said, “Don’t stay up too late, we have to start schoolwork tomorrow,” he nodded without looking up from his book. Since saying “Stop reading so you can learn something tomorrow” seemed contradictory, Andie picked up his empty tray, said, “Good night,” and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Dancing princess, she thought, and wondered which one of the nannies that had been.

Andie put the dishes in the sink and then used the phone in the kitchen, now complete with dial tone, to call the Happy Housekeepers number she’d found at the Dairy Queen to set up a cleaning crew. Surprisingly, they said they’d come the next day. Something moved behind her as she hung up, and she turned around expecting to see Mrs. Crumb, but she was alone. Weird, she thought, but that was the least of her problems. She was making a difference with the kids, a small difference, but a start, but there was something just out of her reach, something about the place that she couldn’t put her finger on yet. Mrs. Crumb might be up to something, the kids were probably always up to something, but there was something else.