Unfinished Muse (21 page)

Had I been a different kind of person, I
might have had pictures of old friends in my wallet. Pictures would
have looked nice. But I didn’t have any old friends. I had a few
new friends, but no pictures of them.

In desperation, I opened the single drawer
they’d given me and found pens and sticky notes. I scrawled
Pick
up dry cleaning on Thursday
on the bright yellow pad, then
stuck the note to my monitor.

I didn’t have anything to pick up at the dry
cleaners, but nobody needed to know that.

I took a step back. The desk was still
pretty bare, but at least it didn’t look like it was waiting to be
assigned to somebody.

When did you start to care what the hell
people thought, Wynter?
I shook my head and wobbled out of the
office in my inappropriately high heels.

Whatever failure I might be at the office,
at least I was doing well with my clients. At least, I had been
before the weekend.

First, I checked in to see how Alex was
coming along with his toothpick house. He was right where he should
be—in the basement, surrounded by piles of toothpicks and bottles
of glue.

He was not, however, hard at work building
his dream project like he should have been. He was reading a
book.

I scooted around the basket of sleeping
wiener dog and read the cover of the book Alex was reading:
Beekeeping—Save the Queen, Save the Planet
.

I shook my head. “Dude. What the hell? I
left you alone for three days. You were doing great.”

At the sound of my voice, Oscar’s head
popped up from the basket. He slapped his tail against the wicker a
few times, then went back to sleep.

Alex’s unfinished toothpick house had grown
by maybe half a wall since I’d last been there. A separate section
that looked like it might be the detached garage sat nearby without
a roof or fourth wall. From the time I’d spent watching him build,
I estimated he’d stopped working sometime Friday afternoon.

“Let’s get you back on track, my friend.” I
unclipped my bubbles, dipped the wand in the liquid, and blew
through the hole. “Time to get back to work, Alex. Works of art
don’t build themselves. You can do it.”

The bubbles flew in a straight, steady line
toward the side of his face and popped on his cheekbone and in his
ear. Perfect.

Alex shifted on his stool and looked up,
frowning, with his finger keeping his place in the bee book. He
glanced around the basement and let out a heavy sigh. “I’d better
get some work done, Oscar.”

Oscar whined in response and wagged his
tail. Alex bent and patted the dog on the head before heading
toward the stairs.

I hadn’t intended that. “Hey. Where are you
going? Work’s down here.” I dipped my wand and blew at him.

He was a moving target, upping the
difficulty level, but I managed to pop a few off his elbow.

“You have work to do. Inspiration awaits. I
know you want to get this project done. Come back and work on it.
It’s fun!”

He scuttled up the steps, leaving me behind
with a dripping wand and no client. I heard footsteps above me, a
chair scraping, and he was on his way back down. Relieved, I took a
seat on a box and waited for him.

When Alex reappeared at the bottom of the
steps, he carried two kitchen chairs. I watched with growing
trepidation as he spread a tarp on the floor, then set to work
sanding the paint off the first chair.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no.” I crouched close
to him and blew bubbles at him until I felt light headed. “This is
not your project. You’re building a house out of toothpicks for the
competition in a few weeks. You’re not fixing kitchen chairs. Go
back to the toothpicks, Alex. Come on, man. Help me out here.” He
kept sanding, and I kept blowing until little stars sparkled around
my head, reminding me that oxygen was important to staying upright.
I stopped and caught my breath.

After what felt like forever, Alex stopped
and wiped he forehead with the back of his hand. He glanced at the
table where his toothpick creation sat untouched, then looked away
with a pained expression.

He picked up a new piece of sandpaper,
wrapped it around the wooden block he was using, and started on the
back of the chair.

I threw my arms in the air. “Gah! Really?
Okay. You do what you’ve got to do. I have other clients, you know.
I can’t sit here all day holding your hand when you’re not even
listening.” I tightened the cap on my half-empty bubbles. “I’ll be
back tomorrow. Hopefully you’ll have this out of your system by
then.”

I was a little nervous going to see Missy
after the disastrous visit with Alex. But the odds of them both
being in trouble were slim. Alex was probably overwhelmed with
nagging from his mother. Missy would be fine.

Or not.

I found Missy stalled on page three of her
scrapbook. She sat curled on the sofa watching
Golden Girls
and painting her nails. The scrapbooking supplies were scattered
across the coffee table. The baby’s car seat wasn’t by the door
like it usually was, and when I checked, she wasn’t in her crib,
either. Someone must have taken her out for the day. I had Missy
all to myself.

Page three of the scrapbook lay in the
center of the table, a half-finished tribute to a trip to New York
City on New Year’s Eve. At least, that’s what I gathered from the
photo of Missy’s parents wearing hats that said 1966 on them. Missy
had glued a silhouette of the New York skyline on the bottom of the
page, and a cutout of an apple sat loose in the upper left-hand
corner. That was as far as she’d gone with it.

A sheet of letters lay on the floor bent in
half. A pile of colored paper collected a wet ring from the glass
that sat on top of it.

Missy had given up.

I unhooked my bubbles and got to work. “I
will not lose both of you today.” I blew a stream of bubbles
directly into her face. “Come on, Missy. You were doing such a
beautiful job. Look at all those fantastic shapes and colors. Your
parents will love it when it’s done.”

Missy paused in her manicure. I thought I’d
made an impression, but she barked a short laugh at something
Sophia said to Blanche, then went back to her nails.

“This is ridiculous. What are you doing?” I
blew another stream at her. “You had this. The New York thing is
inspired. Go back and finish it. It’ll be gorgeous.”

I was grateful she couldn’t actually hear
me. The desperation in my voice was alarming.

After a moment, she tilted her head and held
out her splayed fingers, then blew on the nails to speed the drying
process. To my relief, she leaned toward the coffee table and
grabbed a pair of scissors and a thick piece of paper.

“There you go. Good girl!” I blew a fat
bubble at her for good measure.

She cut something small from the paper, then
set the scissors down with the leftover paper. She held a tiny
scrap cut in the shape of a skyline. The New York skyline.

“Gorgeous. When did you learn to do that?” I
sent a bubble to pop on the bridge of her nose. “It’s so tiny.”

She sprayed the back with adhesive, then, to
my horror, stuck it over the nail of her ring finger, not on the
abandoned scrapbook page.

“Missy, no. What are you doing?” My fingers
tightened around the bubble wand, leaving an indentation in the
skin.

She took out a second color of nail polish
and used the tiny skyline as a stencil. After the polish dried
enough, she peeled off the paper skyline and revealed a sunset over
New York painted on her fingernail.

I held my head in despair. For two hours, I
sat and watched her create an intricate design on each of her
fingers. Shoes. Champagne glasses. Apples. I gave up blowing
bubbles at her a half hour into it. There didn’t seem to be any
point. I was inspiring her to do the wrong thing.

Some Muse I turned out to be.

When she took her socks off and started on
her toenails, I decided to call it a day. I couldn’t watch her do a
pedicure, too. Enough was enough.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. Try to get all this
business out of your system, okay?”

Missy didn’t respond, of course. But the
scowl on her face as she painted the first coat on her toenails
told me, at least at some level, she was listening.

My stomach was in knots by the time I pulled
into a parking space at my apartment complex. Two out of three of
my clients had gone off the rails for no reason I could decipher.
That didn’t mean Mark had done it, too, but my gut said he had. Of
the three of them, Mark seemed to be the most easily distracted. I
braced myself and climbed out of the car.

There was no need to go invisible and sneak
around. Nor did I need to knock on Mark’s door to find out what he
was up to. He was right there in the middle of the courtyard, hard
at work.

Power washing the buildings.

I thought I’d prepared myself for his
inevitable slide into procrastination. The other two had done it.
Why not Mark?

Why not, indeed.

I was fuming. My job depended on three
people completing three tasks. All three were acting like they had
all the time in the world.

“Three weeks, people,” I muttered. “You have
three weeks or I fail.”

I’d have thought failure would come
naturally to me after the life I’d lived. But this was different. I
didn’t want to fail. I wanted to be good at this. Was that so much
to ask?

“Mark!” I trotted across the courtyard and
tapped him on the shoulder.

He shut off the water and turned toward me
in surprise. “Oh, hey, Wynter. You’re home early. Want to get some
dinner?” His eyes flicked over my cleavage and then away. His
cheeks turned a little pink.

He was soaking wet, and his white T-shirt
clung to him like fresh paint. I swallowed and refocused, hoping my
cheeks weren’t pink, too. “What the hell are you doing?”

He blinked and stared at me, as if he didn’t
understand. “Just as friends, if you want.”

“What?” Now I was blinking and staring.

“Dinner. If it’ll upset you, I won’t even
try to pay for yours. Or my treat. I did suggest it. Whatever
you’re comfortable with.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
“Mark, I meant what are you doing out here washing the building?
Why aren’t you working on Carry’s playground?”

His expression changed—one minute hopeful,
the next, completely blank and unreadable. He turned toward the
building and turned the water on again. “I’m just not feeling it
today.”

For some reason, a lump formed in my throat
and my eyes burned from unshed tears. “But Candy Land. It was going
to be epic. What happened?”

Mark didn’t look at me. His shrug looked
less carefree than I imagined he’d intended. “Nothing happened. I’m
not in the mood today. Maybe tomorrow.” He shut off the water. “I
think maybe I’ll take a rain check on dinner, if you don’t mind.
I’m pretty tired.”

He went inside without another word, leaving
me alone in the courtyard wondering what I’d said wrong.

And wondering how the hell I was going to
fix all this with less than three weeks left.

Chapter 18

Tuesday morning I went into the office early.
Somebody was going to help me if I had to camp outside Polly’s door
for the rest of the week.

My concern was unnecessary. For once, the
office was filled with people. Dave and Jeremy stood outside the
prop room, hands in their pockets and heads tilted toward each
other in discussion. A general buzz of conversation came from the
far end of the room. I couldn’t see more than the tops of people’s
heads, since they were gathered in groups in a few cubicles, but
they were there.

I headed for Polly’s office and found Audrey
and Kayla standing across from the door, whispering fiercely back
and forth. A twinge of regret shot through me as I realized I was
wearing sensible office attire again. The one day I tried to fit
in, everybody missed it. Now I was back to sticking out again.

Audrey gave me a hard look, and Kayla
snorted.

“If you’re planning to talk to Polly, you
might want to wait until tomorrow.”

I knocked on the door. “I don’t need her
tomorrow. I need her today.”

The door flung open, seemingly on its own. I
poked my head in and found Polly sitting behind her desk and no one
else inside.

“Yes?” Polly’s melodic voice was icy.
“Wynter, can it wait?”

Butterflies be damned. My stomach felt like
an entire herd of wildebeests were trampling through. “For a few
minutes, I guess. If you’re busy, I can come back in a little
while.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose and
sighed. “No, no. Come in. I’ve been meaning to check up on you for
the last week. Today was bound to happen. I saw it coming. No
reason for you to suffer for it. Close the door behind you.”

Whatever was going on in the office, it
didn’t sound good. I shut the door and took a seat across from her,
hoping I wasn’t the cause of her shitty day. I’d only been working
there less than two weeks. I couldn’t already be in trouble.

Right?

Polly took a swallow of coffee and made a
face. “Cold.” She took another swallow anyway. “So. How are things
going, Wynter? You finding your footing?”

Well, on the bright side, she didn’t appear
to be upset with me. Somebody else must’ve set her off.

I smoothed my skirt over my knees. “Well, I
thought I was doing fine.”

“Uh huh.” A pair of glasses dangled around
her neck from a chain. She placed them on her face and squinted at
her computer monitor. “Toothpick art, scrapbooking, and urban
renewal, yes?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

She slid the glasses from her nose and let
them drop to her chest. “And they’re making adequate progress to
make their deadlines?”

“Well, no. I mean, they were. Everything was
great before the weekend. I checked on them yesterday, and none of
them are working.”