Permanent Ink (Something to Celebrate #1) (3 page)

Chapter Three

“So. You’re going to give up and live in the basement like a loser?” Kaley asked as she buckled her seat belt and leaned her head back against the tall passenger seat in the rental van.

Blair looked in the rearview mirror and pulled onto the narrow highway. “No. In a guest room, but maybe I’ll behave like I’ve given up. Maybe I’ll stop shaving my legs and brushing my teeth. What do you think?”

“Eww. Thanks for the visual, Blair. Like my stomach isn’t already upset.” Kaley groaned and closed her eyes.

“And whose fault is that?” Blair asked. She braked the van carefully at a crossroads.

Kaley opened her eyes long enough to give Blair a death stare. “I’d tell you not to be so superior, but I know it wouldn’t do any good.” She wrapped her hoodie around the bodice of her tight, strapless gown and sighed. “If this had happened in the city, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. Here? No matter where I go, there’s always somebody bugging me.”

Blair smiled. “Like how?”

“Like—hey, Kaley, what are you doing? Where are you going? Nice day, isn’t it?” she mimicked in a high-pitched tone. “Drives me nuts. And like, there’s nowhere to shop, unless you want to go to the mall in Syracuse, which my friends make into an all-day, epic thing. Exhausting.” She let her head flop back.

As Blair turned down a couple of residential streets, she looked at the sagging Victorian houses. None of them were postcard perfect, but everything about them was big, especially the decorations on the front doors and porches.

“You can’t hate it
too
much, if you’re popular enough to be voted a pageant queen.” Blair chuckled.

“Yeah, but I didn’t get to wear the crown because I was an idiot.” Kaley let her head roll to the side, and she stared at Blair with puppy-dog eyes. “Didn’t you
ever
get drunk in high school?” Her tone begged for empathy.

“Sure.” Blair gave her a quick smile. “But it wasn’t spur-of-the-moment. I had every base covered and Lola was never the wiser.”

Kaley rolled her eyes. “Why am I not surprised?” She flicked a finger toward the window. “There’s the house.”

Blair eased the giant van to the side of the curb and hunched her shoulders to peer across Kaley and out the window at the big two-story house. Her jaw dropped, because sitting in the middle of the weather beaten porch was a life-sized Easter bunny decoration. It was holding a massive carrot and standing in a positively pornographic position.

“Um…Kaley?”

Kaley glanced out the window and then sat up straight. “Oh. My. God. I’m gonna kill him!”

“Who?” Blair unbuckled her seat belt. She got out and stepped onto the walk leading up to the slate-gray house.

But Kaley was already teetering across the lawn in satin heels. She bounded onto the porch and punched the bunny, which fell over on its side. Her chest heaving, she turned around with a pleading expression on her face. Her flat-ironed red hair was a mess, and her face was pinched and pale. Blair’s annoyance with her little cousin slipped a notch. Yeah, Kaley was hungover, but she was a good kid at heart. Correction—not a really a kid anymore. A teenage girl who’d had a really bad day.

“It’ll be okay, hon,” she said, watching as Lola pulled into the driveway.

Kaley nodded, but looked as if she might burst into tears. “I’m going to kill him anyway,” she muttered. “If Lola doesn’t kill me first.”

“Who are you going to kill?” she asked quickly, but Lola was already stepping out of the car with a bag of groceries in her arms and a grim smile on her face.

“Little Miss Happy Hour usually threatens to kill her boyfriend, Brandon,” Lola answered.

Kaley shook her head. “He’s not my boyfriend anymore.” She whipped a phone out of her hoodie pocket, and her fingers flew over the screen. “There. I broke up with him.” Turning to Lola, she trained a practiced look of anguish her way. “What’s my punishment?”

Lola waved a hand. “Grounded on weekends. A month. No Facebook.”

Kaley’s mouth dropped open. “But that’s not fair.” Lola raised an eyebrow and Kaley’s shoulders dropped. “Fine.” She turned and opened the door before disappearing inside the house.

Blair turned to Lola, ready to hug her, but saw the forbidding look on her aunt’s face and her stomach dropped with guilt. Of course Lola was angry—Blair hadn’t bothered to call since Lola and Kaley had moved to Celebration. She’d been too busy wallowing in the anxiety of being unemployed for the past six months. How did she think Lola was going to act—as if nothing had happened?

So instead of hugging her aunt, she reached out for the bag of groceries and said the first thing that popped into her head.

“You don’t lock the front door?”

“No need.” Lola stepped onto the porch and kicked the bunny under a porch swing. “I never should have bought a poseable decoration.” She turned around. “Hi, by the way.”

“Hi.” Blair squirmed on the sidewalk. “I…missed you. A lot.”

“I know that, darling. I missed you, too. Now come on in.”

Blair followed her into the house, stopping in a spacious entryway. A carved, curving staircase of dark wood was front and center, a bench built in on the open side. A chandelier hung overhead and on either side of the entryway were parlors, each with fireplaces. Patterned rugs were scattered over the hardwood floor, and the light in the place was softened by two stained-glass windows on the wall hugging the staircase.

“You like?” Lola asked.

“I love,” Blair said, blowing out a breath. “But…how did you afford this?”

Lola threw her keys onto a small marble table by the door. “Well. I was a lawyer for thirty-five years.” She tossed her quilted bag on the built in bench and sat down to unlace tennis shoes.

“But you worked for public aid, Lola.” Blair said. “I mean, I’m not trying to pry into your finances. I’m in awe, I guess.” She wandered around the entryway, noting a huge breakfront cabinet and familiar framed pictures of Hawaii hanging on the cream and tan striped wallpaper.

“Yes, and I earned a good salary.” Lola stood up and walked into the parlor to the right of the stairs. “But I never in a million years would have been able to get a house like this in the city.”

“Especially since you ended up raising your two nieces.”

Lola turned and wagged a finger at her. “It was my pleasure. And your mother and your Aunt Pam sent money when they could. Pam still does, for Kaley, and even includes an allowance,” she said in a bright voice.

So Lola was still defending her sisters, as if it was some kind of major accomplishment for women to take care of their own kids’ basic needs. Or do things like show up for school plays. Or graduation. Or, for that matter,
raise
them…at all. Blair pressed her lips together before the words came out. Now would be a terrible time to dredge up that old ghost. She needed to make up to her aunt.

Lola glanced at Blair and then peered up at the stairway. “I have to keep Kaley from spending her allowance on alcohol.”

“Oh, I think that won’t be a problem,” Blair said. “From what I could gather, this is the first time she’s ever been hungover.”

“I’m not so dumb that I think it will be the last time,” Lola said with a snort. She trundled into the parlor and fussed with magazines on a side table.

Blair followed her and sank down onto an oversize sofa. It was one of three in the room, and all looked new. There was a slab coffee table and two armchairs as well, along with a wide window seat covered with bright pillows behind the sofa. Her entire apartment in Chelsea would have fit into this one room. “Amazing,” she said.

Lola plopped down next to her and gave her arm a squeeze. “I know. It’s five times the square footage of my Brooklyn apartment. And I pay half what I did there.”

Blair stared at her. “Wow. No wonder you moved, then. But don’t you miss the city? You’ve never lived anywhere else.”

“I miss it occasionally. But it was starting to get exhausting.” Lola shifted on the cushion and took Blair’s hands. “Listen to me, Miss Too-Much-Pride-For-Her-Own-Good. I know what happened with
you
in the city.”

Blair’s stomach flipped over. “How?”

“Now you know I’m not one to butt into your business, but enough was enough with you not calling or visiting. So I called New York Specialty Parties last week and your twitchy boss Leon informed me that you no longer worked there. Haven’t for over six months.”

“Jesus.”

“Jesus has nothing to do with this. Care to share the details?” She raised a hand. “Or, rather—tell me the details. You owe me that much.”

“I do. I know,” Blair acknowledged.

She closed her eyes and winced at the stingy, scratchy feeling beneath her lids. Tears started to form, which only made it worse. She rubbed at them and took a deep breath. “Well, I quit.” She shrugged.

“And?” Lola prompted. She reached up and gently wiped a tear from Blair’s cheek.

“And it was because I…I didn’t fit in because I don’t kiss ass.” The words came through stiff lips and hearing them aloud made familiar anger course through her. “My job was easy to the point of being boring. I was the most organized, dependable, pleasant person in that toxic office. Apparently, those qualities didn’t mean squat.”

“Whose ass were you instructed to kiss?” Lola asked.

Blair shrugged again, but the words came flooding out.

“I was told to kiss the ass of anyone who could throw the company a bone. We were starting to struggle and it was because Leon was incompetent. He put entry-level employees on accounts because they
looked
the part of high-end party planners, not because they could actually do the jobs. So we started losing clients. He turned to me, Miss Nerdypants. He actually called me that, by the way! And he told me if I couldn’t generate more business, he’d have to let me go for financial reasons since I was the highest paid in the office.”

Lola nodded. “You
were
there a long time, considering.”

“I’d been there for five years, which was about four and half years longer than the little tramps who rotated through the place like it was a turnstile.” She paused. “Anyway, I came up with something that would get the company some positive exposure.
Free
exposure.”

Lola nodded. “And?”

“There’s this annual parade contest sponsored by Macy’s. It’s for upstate towns—to encourage civic pride and I-love-New-York excitement.”

“That’s nice,” Lola commented.

“It is,” Blair agreed. “And the competition to be a volunteer judge is fierce, because the judges’ company logos go on all the advertising. But I signed up the minute they posted on their website, and I got in. Me. A judge for a statewide competition.”

“I sense that was a good thing until…?”

“Until Leon had an absolute fit about it. He was furious that I’d put down my name instead of his.”

“So then you quit?”

Blair held up a thumb and forefinger. “I was this close. But I talked him down and things went back to normal. Kind of. A few days later, I got the judges’ packet in the mail and do you know whose name was listed?”

“Not yours.” Lola frowned.

“No, not mine. It was his. He’d called Macy’s and had them switch it.”

Lola gasped. “Oh no. So then you quit.”

“I was about to, and then my phone dinged with an email from my bank. My paycheck had bounced.”

“Oh, darling.”

“So I took the bottle of water I was holding, dumped it over Leon’s tiny head, and told him to go screw himself.” Blair grinned and wiped at her eyes. “I’m not sure I ever actually said the words ‘I quit,’ though.”

“I wish I’d been a fly on the wall.”

Blair stood up and stretched. “Yeah, well, you know me. Thirty minutes after I walked out, I was on the phone with a headhunter, looking for another job. Six months later? My savings are almost gone.”

“I see,” Lola murmured. She struggled up from the overstuffed sofa and directed Blair through an archway, which led into a sun-filled dining room. “I’m assuming Leon didn’t give you a reference.”

Blair snorted.

Lola walked around the dining room table into a kitchen with tile counters and yellow curtains. “Have a seat.” She ushered Blair onto a stool next to the counter. “I’m also assuming since Leon was your first and only job, you didn’t have other references?” She went to the refrigerator and pulled out a pitcher of iced tea.

“Only from individual clients. But it’s hard to hide the fact that I worked for Leon. All the other event-planning companies know he’s a joke. Since I stayed there so long…well, you can connect the dots.”

Blair took the glass of tea her aunt offered and got up to pace. “Every job I applied for—a big fat ‘no.’ Manhattan’s Best Events. Primary Parties. And the one I
really
wanted a shot at, Expectations, Inc., didn’t even send me a rejection letter. I’ve wanted to work for them since before I graduated!”

“Isn’t Expectations that froufrou baby-shower company?” Lola raised an eyebrow.

“They do that, yeah, but they also manage corporate events, like parties at hotel conventions.” Blair said with a quick sigh. “Talk about a dream job. I’d kill to work for them.”

Lola pushed her back down onto the stool. “I’ll tell you what, niece of mine. You’re not a quitter and if those other companies couldn’t see that, then their loss.”

Blair took a swallow from her glass. “I could have taken a temp job or something. Or moved to another city. But I wanted to land on my feet. On my own terms.”

“You can’t always. Nobody can,” Lola said.

“Well, I’m proof positive since I’m living out of a rental van.”

Lola smacked her arm. “Stop that. Now let’s go get your things, and then you can help me make dinner.” She tapped her chin. “I think we’ll have something easy. Wouldn’t want Kaley to throw up all over my new placemats.” She gestured toward a little round table in the corner. “See?”

Blair’s eyes went wide. “Cows? Since when do you like cow-themed stuff?”

“Since I moooved to the country.”

Blair groaned. “At least tell me you kept your designer bags.”

“Uh-uh. Put those on eBay. And I used the money for a trip deposit.”