Running Blind Read online

  Maybe it wasn’t altered DNA. Maybe it wasn’t a form of mental illness. Maybe she was just being competitive. She was okay with being competitive. If she looked at it that way, trying the damn cake again was more admirable than alien.

  But she couldn’t shop effectively with Zeke-the-dragon breathing fire over her shoulder, telling her to hurry. And he would; she could feel the first “hurry it up” coming her way, probably within … say, five minutes, if she wanted to bet with herself.

  Well, he could just breathe fire all he wanted, she thought grimly. She was in charge of this expedition, and if he didn’t like doing it her way then he could just find somewhere to sit and wait until she was finished—

  Uh-oh. Reality abruptly punched her between the eyes. She looked at her list again and almost groaned aloud. The list itself wasn’t extraordinarily long, but she needed a lot of the items on it. She didn’t need five pounds of flour, she needed at least twenty. Ditto for the sugar. She was buying multiples of literally everything, which meant there was no way it would all go into one cart; she’d need at least two, maybe three—and that meant she needed Zeke.

  But along the silver-lining-in-every-cloud line of thought, at least he could do the grunt work.

  She jerked and tugged a cart out of the line, shoved it toward him, then freed another one. “Ground rules,” she said tersely. “Don’t try to hurry me up, or I’ll forget something. Don’t mess with me while I’m thinking, or I’ll forget something—”

  “How can you forget anything? You have a damn list. Just check off each thing as you get it.”

  “And don’t interrupt,” she added. “Any idiot can get what’s on a list. It’s what isn’t on the list that requires creativity.”

  “It’s a shopping list, not a work of art.”

  “But it isn’t a complete list. That’s why I need to think, and why you need to just follow along and be quiet.”

  A thin, elderly white-haired woman wearing jeans, boots, and a denim shirt pushed a cart past them and said, “You tell him, honey.”

  Zeke gave his head a little shake as he watched the elderly woman walk away and, raising his voice, said wryly, “Thanks, Mrs. G.”

  “You’re welcome, darling.” Mrs. G. never looked back, just trundled on into the produce section where she stopped and began examining every offering of lettuce.

  Carlin pursed her lips thoughtfully, then cut her gaze up at him. “Ex-girlfriend?”

  “First-grade teacher.”

  For some reason, imagining him as a gap-toothed six-year-old made her stomach squeeze. As she’d cleaned the house she’d seen a couple of pictures of him—not many, which made her think he’d probably packed most of them away—so she had a good idea of how his adolescent face had morphed into the hard-edged features of the man, but she hadn’t seen any of him as a child. It kind of made sense. What man wanted his baby pictures sitting around? Pictures of his own babies, yeah, but not of himself. Okay, that was another stomach-squeezing moment, thinking of Zeke as a father. No, actually, it was the baby-making part that affected her stomach. Oh, God, instead of getting used to him and building up immunity, she was actually getting worse.

  “You look like you’re about to puke,” he observed, pushing his cart forward.

  With a quick, inner shake she gathered herself and cut him off to take her rightful position as lead cart. “I was trying to imagine you as a kid. It was horrifying.”

  He grunted. “You’re on the right track.” Then he grinned. “But Mrs. G. had my number. She could back me down with a look.”

  “I gotta go talk to her.” Just to get a rise out of him, she actually steered her cart in Mrs. G.’s direction, but he reached out and locked a hand over the cart handle, stopping her in her tracks.

  “I don’t have all day. Let’s get these groceries bought and get out of here.”

  Too bad she hadn’t made that bet with herself on how soon he’d say “hurry up”—or words to that effect—because she’d have just won the jackpot.

  “All right, but—” She shook her finger at him. “Remember the rules: follow me, pick up what I tell you needs picking up, and don’t talk.”

  “Oh, so now I’m supposed to do your manual labor for you?”

  “A smart worker uses whatever tools are available to her,” she said, leaving it to him to decide exactly what she meant by that.

  “A smart worker stops wasting time, and starts working.”

  The only reason she didn’t bother with a comeback was that he was right. She had a ton of groceries to gather, and they wouldn’t hop in the carts by themselves.

  The produce department was easy: none of the men, present company included, were big on things like romaine or celery. Onions, potatoes, some squash, and that was about it. But still, she needed a lot of potatoes, a lot of onions.

  Her brain was humming with the recipes she’d read as she wandered down the aisles, pondering the different types of diced tomatoes, dried soup packages, and whether mac and cheese was still mac and cheese if you used some other kind of noodle. She also pondered on whether or not she could manage mac and cheese; it had always struck her as the type of thing that looked simple, but was in reality a cesspool of culinary disasters just waiting to strike. For God’s sake, it was noodles and cheese; what could go wrong?

  “I don’t know what that Kraft box did to you, but you’ve been scowling at it for five minutes,” Zeke growled. “Either pick it up, or move along.”

  “I’m deciding.”

  “Decide faster.”

  “Do you like mac and cheese?”

  “I’m a man. I pretty much like anything with cheese on it.”

  “I didn’t see any of these in the pantry.”

  “Then I guess Libby didn’t use the boxed kind. Spencer never made mac and cheese, and God knows I never tried. Buy it or don’t, but let’s get moving.” Impatience was beginning to put an edge into his tone. Figuring she could at least give it a shot, Carling grabbed the family-sized box and tossed into her cart.

  “Just one?” he asked. “If you’re going on a mac and cheese binge, you’d better stock up, because it’s too far to drive to town to pick up one or two items.”

  “I’ve never made mac and cheese before,” she replied, a little humiliated by the admission. What kind of cook did that make her, other than an inadequate one? “If it turns out okay, I’ll get some more next time.”

  “I guess we’re all in for an adventure, then,” he muttered.

  Thank God for ungrateful, unsympathetic employers, because annoyance promptly rescued her from humiliation. Humiliation was embarrassing; she could work with annoyance. She curled a lip at him. “You remember the ‘be quiet’ part of the rules? Embrace it.”

  “I’m just a little curious: did you ever have any kind of professional training? Were you absent the day they went over the part about not being a smart-ass to the boss?”

  “I’ll have you know I’m an exemplary employee. This situation is a little different.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “We both know it’s temporary. Therefore I’m under no constraints to kiss your butt—metaphorically speaking, of course. It may be more temporary for me than it is for you, so I’m in the driver’s seat. In fact, given your housekeeping skills and how the house looked the first time I saw it, you should probably be the one watching your mouth, because you don’t want to piss me off. I might leave. And come spring, they’d find your body buried in that house under a pile of your own stinking laundry.”

  They’d been walking along as they shot words at each other; she consulted her list as they walked, and she’d pointed at a couple of items for him to put in his cart—multiples, of course. In his household, there was no such thing as buying one can of diced tomatoes; she needed ten, and she hoped that would be enough to get her through at least a week.

  She turned her cart and headed up the baking aisle, where all good things resided—well, except for the other good things, like ice cr