“I’m aware,” Tandy said. His understanding smile was sweet as he continued, “JoJo loves it, which I’ll never understand.”
“Are you and JoJo getting married?” I asked.
Tandy’s cup bobbled in his hands and some of the creamy coffee splashed out onto the table. “What?”
I frowned at him and maybe at my own unexpected and blunt question. “Well. Ummm. You don’t think that it’s a secret you two are practically living together, do you?”
“No. But, married?” The last word squeaked.
I frowned at him. “I’m less and less inclined to find importance in the institution of marriage, but for most people it tends to be the next logical step in a sexual relationship.”
“Nee-e-ell.”Tandy dragged out my name and I thought he might have blushed, but I couldn’t be sure. He stood and mopped up his spill with a roll of paper towels kept on thewindowsill, silent as he worked. I waited, not sure what I had said wrong. “This is a most inappropriate line of discourse,” he said after a too-long silence, and he sounded uncomfortable and snippety, which I found odd.
“Really?” I asked, trying to figure out what was going on. “It’s all anyone in the church ever thinks about: who’s proposing concubinage or marriage to who—whom?—and when.”
Tandy tossed the towel in the garbage and sat back down. “Okay. I guess I understand that.” He met my gaze across the table and dragged his cup closer, fiddling with a spoon and sweetener packets. “Meeting her parents would be the next logical step, and JoJo hasn’t asked me to do that.”
“Why not?” I stirred my coffee, watching from the corner of my eye as he dipped the spoon and stirred his coffee—without adding anything more to it. He blushed harder, the red a certainty now, but he hadn’t walked away, so I went on. “Tandy, why hasn’t she asked you to meet her parents?”
“I’m this white guy with crazy red hair and bizarre red lines on my skin. I’m fine for a roll in the hay but not for taking home to meet her parents.”
“I know for a fact that JoJo would never say something like that.”
Tandy smiled slightly, but didn’t retract his statement.
“You asked her to meet your parents?”
“My father is... not around. And my mother is an unsubtle racist and a bigot. She kicked me out of the house when I was struck by lightning and developed the lines and my gift.” He paused and sipped his coffee again, his expression pained. “She touched me when she threw me out. Her hatred and fear were palpable, so terrible that I—” He stopped. “I haven’t been back and have no intention of ever going back.”
I had nothing helpful to say to that. Sifting through my limited, recently acquired, socially appropriate lines of comfort, I said simply, “Families can suck all the red offa life’s lollipop.”
Tandy burst out laughing, his muscles unclenching. “Yes, they can. Why doyouthink JoJo hasn’t asked me to meet her family? Has she said anything to you?”
“Not a word. But the reasons can be all over the place. You should ask her instead of assuming it’s the color of your skin.”
“And when I read her emotions when I ask that? And I know exactly what she’s feeling about it? That’s a terrible invasion of privacy, Nell.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. “So send her an e-mail. You won’t be there when she reads it. She can think about it for a while before trying to answer.”
“Isn’t that taking the easy way out?”
“No. If you tell her in the first paragraph that you’re doing it this way to give her emotional privacy, then it becomes sweet.” I thought about words normal people might use and added, “Mushy sweet.”
Tandy laughed again, and I remembered the anxiety-ridden man he had been the first time I met him. He had changed a lot. We all had.
“I’ll take it under consideration,” he said. He changed the subject. “You need to examine the soil on the roof. It’s been a while and with so little rain and the winds last week, it might have blown away.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, but I tucked the reminder away for later. I could tell the soil was still up there. I could feel it. Rick and Occam had carted ten five-gallon buckets of dirt from my land and deposited it onto the flat roof, as soon as I was human enough to think of returning to my job. They wanted me to have a safe place to rest should I need Soulwood to rejuvenate. Or heal. Or a place to plant green things. Or anything. I wasn’t planning to use it, but it was nice to know it was there and even nicer to know that my coworkers—my friends—cared enough to do that for me.
He looked up and I heard the door to the stairwell open. T. Laine trudged up the hallway. Tandy asked me, “So what did you find in the dreaded NCIC database?”
“Local sheriff’s deputy reports about witch circles that were not routed to us, going back over three months.”
T. Laine dumped her gobag and laptop on the conference room table. “Yeah. That means I’m not getting any sleep tonight,” she groused.
“Should I have waited till morning to send them to you?” I asked.
Tandy tilted his head as if trying to read our emotional reactions.
