“It’s okay, buddy,” she said. “We’re just helping the canine out until her person gets better.”
Jack rose on his hind feet and used his full body weight to rub his head into her hand. Mel picked him up and snuggled him for a bit until he was his usual purring feline self.
“Maybe this will work out,” Joe said. He glanced from the dog to the cat and shrugged.
Peanut finished her food and turned to lap up some water. She let loose a big belch and sat down. As if she’d forgotten there was a cat in the house, she blinked up at Jack in Mel’s arms and then started barking again.
Startled, Captain Jack leapt out of Mel’s arms and landed on the counter with a reproachful hiss. He turned his back to them and strode the length of the counter. Peanut followed him from the ground, still barking.
Jack hopped from the counter to the back of the couch to the back of a chair and then bolted down the hall to go hide in the bedroom. Peanut scrambled to follow, barking all the way.
Mel and Joe exchanged a look and Mel asked, “Dog or cat?”
“Cat,” Joe said. “At least I know he likes me.”
“Fine,” Mel said.
Together they followed the ruckus into their bedroom. Captain Jack was up on the bed while Peanut circled the bed, barking at the cat like he’d treed a lion.
Mel reached down and scooped up Peanut. “I think she just wants to meet him.”
“Meet him or eat him?” Joe asked. He was scratching Captain Jack behind the ears, soothing his ruffled fur.
“Meet, I’m pretty sure,” Mel said. “Should I put her on the bed?”
“Could be a bloodbath. We don’t want her to do to Jack what she did to that couch cushion.”
“Good point,” Mel said.
She sat on the bed and held Peanut in her lap. Ecstatic to be up on the bed, Peanut stopped barking and sat, panting with her tongue hanging out.
“I think she just wants to be a part of the pack,” Mel said.
Captain Jack gave Peanut a disgusted look. She may have wanted in but Jack clearly wasn’t there yet. When Peanut rolled out of Mel’s arms and onto the bed with her belly in the air, Jack turned his back on her and hopped off the bed, trotting out of the room with a swish of his tail.
Peanut then turned her gaze on Mel. She looked so desperate to please that Mel couldn’t resist giving her a belly rub.
“It’s okay, Peanut,” she said. “He’ll come around, you’ll see.”
Eleven
Mel snuggled deep into her bed with Peanut sacked out between her and Joe’s feet. Joe had passed out while reading through a deposition and Mel noted the even sound of his breathing, indicating he was fast asleep.
Reassured that her bedside lamp wouldn’t disturb him, Mel finished a recipe text to Oz and then plugged in her cell phone and opened the copy of The Palms that she’d snagged from Elise’s apartment. The book began with a scene from a backyard barbecue when Elise was new to the neighborhood. Everything was very suburban until the host of the party, a person Elise referred to as Beer Gut, circulated through the party collecting everyone’s house keys.
Of course, everyone threw their keys in thinking it was to keep people from driving drunk. It wasn’t. Instead, at the end of the party the wives were to fish a set of keys out of the bowl and that was the man they were to go home with. Elise had been shocked.
Mel was right there with her. She tried to picture a party where that happened and Joe’s reaction. She glanced at her man. While she’d been reading, Peanut had wedged herself in beside Joe, who was still dead asleep and hadn’t noticed. Now they both had their heads on Joe’s pillow and were snoring softly. It was ridiculously adorable.
It didn’t take Mel much imagination to know that Joe would lose his cool at a party like the one Elise described. Not only that, they wouldn’t be returning to any of the neighborhood parties anytime soon or ever.
Elise’s husband, or rather her alter-ego/protagonist Ellen’s husband, known only as Hair Plugs, had a different reaction. He wanted her to go along with the party game. He felt that it would help them network with their neighbors and get to know people. Elise . . . er . . . Ellen was unhappy with his reaction. She felt he should protect her and get her out of there, not think about his career. Mel was with her on that one.
Hair Plugs put the pressure on, however, and Ellen soon found herself going home with a man who wasn’t her husband, a man she called Turtle. Mel could not put the book down. She felt like she was watching a slow-motion train wreck and yet she couldn’t look away or stop reading.
Ellen’s night was awful. She couldn’t go through with sleeping with the man so she got him roaring drunk and snuck out when he passed out. She walked home by herself as the sun rose, wondering what had happened to her husband and what would happen to their marriage now that they lived here in this neighborhood called the Palms.
Mel was riveted. She only closed the book when it landed on her face with a splat when she started to doze out of sheer exhaustion. From the opening chapter Elise penned a story about the seedy underbelly of the wealthy suburb and its sleazy inhabitants. Mel wondered if Elise would have written the book if her husband hadn’t divorced her so he could marry Mallory, known as the Child Bride in the book, who it turned out was on the prowl for husband number two.
As the novel told it, Hair Plugs was so determined to have his new wife accepted by his peers that he had
