Crazy for You Read online

  She looked at him then, and Bill wished she hadn’t. “You just watch me,” she said evenly. “You just watch me go.”

  Bill stopped arguing. It was futile with Quinn in this irrational state. She’d calm down and then she’d see reason. He switched over to thinking about the weight room—who was slacking, who was going to have to add weight, who was bulking up too much for agility—and he was so caught in his own plans that he almost missed the turnoff to Animal Control.

  Once inside, Quinn was worse, practically leaping over the counter to grab the poor woman in the brown uniform by the throat. She was a nice woman, too, a real Tiger fan, she’d told him when he’d brought the dog in. “You’re doing such a fine job, Coach,” she’d said, and he’d thanked her because community support was vital to a good athletic program. Her name was Betty, he remembered now. He felt a little embarrassed when she led them back to the pens and Quinn sank to her knees on the concrete and reached her hand through the bars and called “Katie” as if she’d been parted from the mutt for centuries instead of just hours. The dog came tiptoeing up to her, shaking all over. It was acting, Bill knew. Dogs were manipulative like that, always looking at you with those calculating eyes, especially this sneaky, sly little rat. The pen was huge and the place was warm and there was a bowl of food and a water dispenser right there; clearly this dog was not suffering.

  “Get her out of here,” Quinn said without looking at him. She was stroking the dog through the bars, giving it all of her attention. “Get her out of here now.”

  Something in her voice, something strange and a little frightening, made Bill decide this was not the time to argue. “I brought the dog in this morning,” he told Betty. “I’d like her back.”

  “Sorry, Coach, but that’ll be thirty dollars plus the license fee.” Betty was clearly apologetic. “That’s the law.”

  Bill wanted to protest that since he was the one who’d brought the dog in, surely he should be able to take it back for free, but it was easier to pay the money. No point in annoying a Tiger fan, and besides, the sooner he got Quinn out of there, the sooner he could talk some sense into her and get rid of the dog for good. He’d have to find it a home, though. Animal Control was obviously not going to satisfy Quinn.

  It was unlike her to be this unreasonable. Maybe it was PMS.

  Out in the car, Quinn cuddled the dog to her, not speaking, while it looked over her shoulder at Bill and smirked. Bill ignored it. He might be stuck with the damn thing for a while, but not for long. He and Quinn had a future, and it didn’t have a dog in it, no matter how mad she was right now.

  “So what are your plans for this afternoon?” he said heartily, trying to get them back to normal.

  “I’m moving out,” Quinn said in the same voice she might have used to say, “I’m having pizza with Darla.”

  “Oh, come on, Quinn.” Bill took the turn to the road to the school a little too sharply in his annoyance. “Stop being childish. You are not moving out. We’ll talk about this when I get home.”

  When she didn’t say anything, he knew he’d made his point, and he let his mind go back to the wrestlers. Some bad attitudes there, Corey Mossert’s among them. Too bad Corey wasn’t more like Jason Barnes. Corey and Jason were best friends, though. Maybe a word to Jason.

  Beside him, Quinn rode in silence while the dog watched him over her shoulder.

  “Okay, just for the hell of it, let’s try to be calm,” Nick said from the other side of a Blazer, wondering why it was his day to deal with weirded-out women.

  Quinn glared across at him as if she knew what he was thinking. “This is not the time to be calm.”

  She clutched Katie in her arms, and the dog rested its chin on Quinn’s arm and stared at him reproachfully. They made quite a picture, and Nick decided not to let himself get sucked into pictures. “I can’t help you till I know what’s going on, and I won’t know what’s going on until you tell me.”

  Quinn took a deep breath. “I just need you to help me move my stuff out of the apartment and back to Mom’s while Bill is finishing up at school. That’s all.”

  That’s all. Nick leaned against the car and wished he were someplace else. He liked Bill. He played poker with Bill. “Maybe if you talked to Bill—”

  “He took my dog out to the pound and left her there in that cold cell all day. She could have died.” Quinn clutched Katie closer, looking ill as she spoke. “They kill the ones they think are sick, and she shakes all the time. They could have killed her.”

  Nick shook his head. “Bill’s a good guy. Maybe—”

  “Did you hear a word I just said?” Quinn demanded. “He took Katie to the pound.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Nick tried to think of the right thing to say, the thing that would make Quinn calm down and get him out of the middle of this mess. “But he’s not a mean guy, Quinn. You know that. Before you do something you’ll regret, you have to calm down.”

  “No.” Quinn began to pace up and down the garage bay, still clutching Katie in her arms. “I’m never going to calm down again. That’s been my problem all along. Zoë got to break rules, and my mother got to pretend everything was fine, and my dad got to watch TV until the mess was over, and Darla got to insult people, and you got to be uninvolved, but I was always the calm one, the one who fixed things.”

  “Well, you’re good at that,” Nick said, wishing she’d stop pacing.

  “But I’m not calm. It’s all a lie.” Quinn held Katie closer, breathing faster. “It’s just that when everybody else is screaming, somebody has to be mature and unemotional, so I have these brain-dead moments where I don’t react the way any sane human being would. I stay completely calm and ignore my feelings and compromise and make everything work again. And I’m not going to do that anymore. From now on, I’m going to be Zoë. Screw calm. Somebody else is going to have to do mature because I’m going to be selfish and get what I want.”

  Nick watched her while she talked, making no sense, scaring him a little because of the look in her eye. Quinn saying she wasn’t going to be calm anymore was like Quinn saying she was going to stop breathing. When her mother had missed the turn down by the root beer stand and hit the big oak, Quinn had been the one who’d used her gym sock to stop Meggy’s bleeding while Zoë yelled her head off. When Zoë had freaked halfway down the aisle at their wedding, Quinn had been the one who talked her into going back into the church. When Max had screwed up his history final, Quinn was the one who’d coached him through the retake she’d talked the teacher into giving him so he could graduate. Nick had known Quinn for twenty years, and in all that time, she’d been the one who fixed things, who never got upset, who made everything all right.

  Now that he thought about it, that had to be getting old.

  All she wanted was a dog.

  And Quinn deserved to have anything she wanted.

  Quinn stopped her harangue to take a breath, and Nick said, “Okay.”

  She blinked. “That’s it? Okay?”

  “What are we moving?”

  “You’re going to do it?”

  The disbelief in her voice ticked him off. “When have I ever not done what you needed?”

  “Never.” She answered so promptly he wasn’t mad anymore.

  “I just wanted to make sure this was what you really wanted.”

  Quinn nodded. “It’s what I really want.”

  “I don’t mean the dog. I mean leaving Bill.”

  “It’s what I really want,” Quinn repeated, and her voice was firm.

  “Okay.” Nick moved around the car to the coatrack. “You want to tell me why we have to do this while Bill is at school?”

  “I don’t want to see him again,” Quinn said. “I told him in the car I was leaving, and he just smiled.”

  Nick stopped as he reached for his coat. “He what?”

  “He just smiled.” Quinn shook her head. “He wants to talk about it when he gets home, but he won’t listen, and I don’t want to talk to