“Give me that phone right now.”
He took the phone from her:Nvm last text. See you tomorrow!
He picked up his tail, walked over the threshold into her house, and with major attitude, announced, “You’re welcome.” Not a beat later and in a casual tone, he asked, “Where do you want to keep this cat?”
“I don’t want to keep it, Justin. What if Shelly comes over?”
He shrugged and set the cat down. “It’ll do for tonight, right? We can figure something else out soon.”
She nodded. What was one more thing to gloss over with a half-truth? “No, Shelly, I haven’t seen Tarragon.” “No, I’m not a spy. I have a normal office job. All I do is make coffee.”
Gabby was going to be a pro at lying in no time, at least if she was going to succeed. “It’ll be fine,” she said, looking at her cluttered dining room, where she was now displaying the neighbor’s dead cat and piles of unopened mail, her main support standing nearby dressed as a cat. She said it again, “It’s fine, right?”
“Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be fine?” Justin twirled his tail.
So many reasons, none of which she could say.
Early Saturday morning, Greene household
Gabby woke up to a text from Phil, who was supposed to have the kids:Busy today. Tell kids I love them. Normally, she’d be perfectly content to keep the kids on a Saturday, but not today. With a groan of despair, she buried her face in her pillow. Even though she’d behaved like a seventeen-year-old last night, this morning she was going to be thirty-eight like her driver’s license said. Thirty-eight-year-old Gabby needed to get her ass to EOD HQ.
For her first day of spy training, Gabby was hungover, without childcare, and unsure whether she had broken up with the EOD via text or not after that second cocktail.
She had three choices:
1. Drive the kids to Phil’s anyway—but what if he wasn’t there?
2. Bring the kids to work. They could just play with iPads in the corner while she learned how to take down the Russian mob. EOD would know what it was getting that way.
3.See just how serious Justin was about his babysitting offer.
She went with door number three, and praise Leslie Knope and RuPaul (the gods of her universe), Justin was at her front door with two lattes within fifteen minutes. He breezed into the house and handed her a coffee. “Auntie Justin is here to save the day! Lucky girl, you caught me in the Starbucks drive-through.”
While Gabby swigged some coffee, Justin went to the medicine cabinet. “Ibuprofen? You look like roadkill, Gabs.”
True statement. Her hair was partially plastered to her head like she’d been run over. Tufts of frizz that hadn’t been crushed by tires were free to blow in the breeze of passing semis. She was something you would pass and think, “Poor thing, I wonder what that was?”
Gabby gestured to Tarragon, still on the dining room table. “Maybe your taxidermist could do something for me. She seems to be really talented.”
Justin flashed her the same annoyed look Kyle used and said, “Kyle, brush your mother’s hair. We can’t send her to work like this. It’s an emergency.”
Kyle stood like a deer in the headlights. It had probably never occurred to her that Gabby needed help. Her children were growing up like they were Melissa Joan Hart, except without a gig as Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Like a NASCAR pit crew member, Justin hit Gabby’s cheeks with some blush and handed her a lipstick. “At least you don’t look freshly dead now. Go get ’em, tiger!”
Forty-five minutes later, Gabby found off-street parking outside the EOD and pulled her mom-mobile in. Her Dodge GrandCaravan screamed, “My vagina is exit only!” and the bumper sticker on the back included a stick figure of everyone who had entered the world through said vagina, plus Mr. Bubbles, and Phil. The bumper sticker was worse than a wedding ring, but she hadn’t taken the time to scrape it off the van.
That was a problem for Future Gabby. She took a deep breath and walked into HQ looking more confident than she felt, at least she hoped. Markus, who had probably never driven a minivan, was waiting inside the entrance. She and her exit-only vagina were going to be training with someone who looked like he might make it through to the next round onAmerican Ninja Warrior. There wasn’t a single TV show that Markus wouldn’t be great on. He was handsome enough for a soap opera and a shoo-in on any dating show, except that he’d have to pretend to be a marketing executive or a tech guy.
Gabby sputtered, “I’m sorry about the weird text last night. I was—”
He raised one eyebrow. “Gabby, if you wanna break up with me, you have to do it to my face.”
She laughed with relief. “Text breakups are the lamest,” she said, as if she were wheeling and dealing relationships via text all the time. Last time she dated, smartphones didn’t exist. Did anyone break up via text on a flip phone? She hadn’t.
On the way to the gym, he explained the day’s agenda. “We’re going to do some basic hand-to-hand combat and maybe some fighting with improvised weapons. Most fights aren’t planned.”
True. She and Phil had always gotten into it over appetizers on a “date” or while furniture shopping. They might still be married if not for that Härlanda love seat episode at IKEA.
