Софи Келли - Cat Trick

Before I could answer Rebecca’s question, Maggie called across the circle to me, “Kathleen, bend your knees.”

I gave a melodramatic sigh and everyone laughed. It was a running joke in the class. I thought I was bending my knees. I was trying to bend my knees. It just seemed that my knees didn’t know that.

I got down a little lower to the ground and Rebecca gave me a sympathetic smile, the way she always did. “To answer your questions, yes and no,” I said, keeping my voice low.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not the slightest bit out of breath even though she was twice my age. “I’m not following you.”

I was already a tiny bit winded. I made a mental resolution to leave the truck at home more often and walk to the library. “I got the rocking chair all together okay, but it had a decided list to one side,” I said.

“Oh, dear,” Rebecca said, two frown lines appearing between her blue eyes. “Maybe Oren could help you.”

Oren Kenyon was a jack-of-all-trades. He’d duplicated the old trim for the library restoration and created the beautiful carved wooden sun that was over the entrance. If Marcus couldn’t fix the chair, maybe I would ask Oren.

“Marcus is going to try to put it together for me,” I said.

Rebecca beamed at me. “He’s a very nice young man,” she said, with a gleam in her eye that even with her gray hair made her look about as old as Taylor King. “I’m glad the two of you have become friends.”

“You’re as bad as Maggie,” I said.

Rebecca gave me a look that was all innocence. She was much better at it than either Owen or Hercules.

Marcus had figured out that Maggie had been trying to get the two of us together. I wondered if he knew that it seemed as though everyone else in town was trying to do the same thing.

Maggie worked us hard. By the time we did the entire form at the end of class, the neck of my T-shirt was wet with sweat. Some of my movements still needed more practice, especially Cloud Hands, but I could go all the way through all one hundred and eight movements of the form.

I walked over to Roma and Taylor, who were standing by the table while Roma made herself a cup of tea that smelled like cranberries and cinnamon. “I’m never going to be able to do that,” Taylor was saying as she shook her hair out of its ponytail.

“If you mean the entire form, yes, you will,” Maggie said, joining us. She’d peeled off her T-shirt to uncover the red and purple tie-dye tank she had on underneath. I was pretty sure Ruby had made it. “Everyone was where you are when they first started. You just take it a movement at a time.”

Taylor shook her head. She didn’t look convinced.

“It’s just like eating an elephant,” Ruby said, walking over to us as she pulled the elastics off her pigtails.

Roma frowned at her over the top of her teacup. “I don’t get what you mean,” she said. “How do you eat an elephant?”

Ruby grinned. “A bite at a time.”

Everyone groaned, and Ruby made a face at us. Then she turned to Taylor. “If you keep at it and you practice, you’ll get it all. Anytime you want to come over to my studio and practice with me, you can.”

“Really?” Taylor said. “Because I know my right hand isn’t, well, right when I do White Crane Spreads Wings.”

“Show me,” Ruby said, draping the towel around her neck. She looked at Maggie. “You don’t mind?”

Mags made a sweeping movement with one hand. “Go ahead.”

Taylor followed Ruby over to a spot near the middle of the studio.

Roma took another sip of her tea and turned to Maggie. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen with the food tasting and the art show now that Mike Glazer is dead?”

Maggie shook her head. “I was telling Kathleen earlier that Liam was having a meeting with the others on the committee while we were doing class.” She glanced over at the clock above the door. “They’ve probably decided what to do by now.”

“You think they’ll go ahead?” Roma asked.

“With the show and the tasting?” Maggie said, grabbing a cup to make herself some tea. “I think they might as well. We were only a few days from it all coming together. I hate to see everyone’s hard work go to waste. As far as the pitch to the tour company, I think that’s done.” She reached for the box of chocolate-spice tea bags. “I don’t think it was going to work anyway, even if Mike hadn’t had a heart attack or whatever it was.”

For a moment I could almost feel the man’s cold skin under my fingers. I swallowed as my stomach tightened. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

Maggie dropped a tea bag into her cup and added hot water. The tea smelled delicious—like cloves and chocolate. “I hope Mike was welcomed by the light,” she said, “and I don’t like to be critical of someone who isn’t here to defend himself anymore, but most of the time, he acted like he thought we were all a bunch of small-town hicks.”

I thought about Burtis fingering the sledgehammer while Mike ranted at him and about Mary saying she was going to kick Mike’s backside between two light posts like a placekicker going for three points. Given what I suspected about how Mike Glazer had died, I didn’t like knowing how many people had disliked working with the man.

“I noticed that last night,” I said carefully.

“But maybe it was just that he knew what kinds of things his customers were looking for in a getaway,” Roma offered.

Maggie shook her head. “It was more than having high standards. I don’t have a problem with that. I have very high standards for how my art is displayed.” She sighed. “I got the feeling Mike thought we didn’t know how to do things properly, let alone well.”

Roma drank the last of her tea and set the cup on the table. “It sounds as though he’d forgotten where he came from.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to remember,” I said quietly.

Maggie and Roma both looked at me. “What do you mean?” Maggie asked.

“Wren Magnusson came into the library looking for Mary,” I said. “Susan told me about Mike’s brother.”

Maggie laced her fingers around her cup of tea. “I’d forgotten about that,” she said. She turned to Roma. “You were gone when Gavin Glazer was killed in that car accident, weren’t you?”

Roma nodded. “But I remember reading about it. His car went off the road. It was up on the bluff, wasn’t it?”

Maggie sighed again. “He was on his way into town. Celia”—she looked at me—“that was Wren’s mother—was a different person after the accident, colder, closed off. She . . . she didn’t want to have anything to do with Gavin’s family.”

“I can’t fault her for that,” Roma said, twisting the silver ring she wore around her index finger. “When Luke died, it was hard for me to be around his family at first; all I saw was reminders of what I’d lost. We’d been married such a short time. More than once I’d catch sight of his brother—at the counter in the kitchen, or coming down the stairs—and I’d think, ‘Here’s Luke,’ and for a split second it was as though the accident hadn’t happened. And then I’d remember that it had.” She exhaled slowly. “But they were Olivia’s family—her grandparents, her aunts and uncle. Over time it got”—she shrugged— “not exactly easier, just not so raw. I’m sorry Celia was never able to get to that place.”

“Mary said that Mike left Mayville Heights not long after his brother died,” I said.

Maggie nodded. “This was literally his first visit back.”

“And his last,” Roma added softly.

I wondered what it had been like for Mike to come back to the place where he’d grown up after almost ten years, to see people he hadn’t seen in all that time. I’d had an aching attack of homesickness when my plane had landed in Boston, and I’d been away for only a little more than a year. When I caught sight of my mother and father and Ethan and Sara waiting for me, I’d almost burst into tears.