Page 61 of Crazy Spooky Love
Maybe he found this morning just as stressful as I did and needs some time to lick his wounds. Or maybe he’s actively avoiding me because he doesn’t want to talk. Either way, there’s little point in hanging around, so I extract Lestat from the sitting room sofa and head back to Babs, frustrated. That really didn’t go to plan at all. As I reach the garden gate, I hear Donovan Scarborough yelling from inside the house.
“Who put a bloody TV in here?”
I break into a run.
Chapter
Seventeen
“Melody, darling, I’m having a dinner party tonight and Rose just canceled at the last minute. You’re not too busy to fill in, are you? You know how much an unbalanced table upsets me.”
“Yes, I absolutely am too busy.” I followed my nose into my mother’s kitchen when I came back from Scarborough House a little while back, and now I remember why she’s cooking up such a storm; she’s having one of her many dinner parties. Pulling her empty mixing bowl toward me when she turns to slide the cake tin into the oven, I run my finger around the rim to scoop up any spare cake batter. I doubt my mother ever even asked Rose, one of her radio colleagues. She’s not catching me out like that again in a hurry. “Ask Gran to do it.”
“I’m already coming.” Gran is head-to-toe in cherry-red yoga gear on the kitchen rug and looks at me upside down from between her knees.
“So ask…I don’t know, somebody else. Anyone else. Just not me.”
“It’s 4:00p.m.on Saturday. Who am I going to be able to ask atsuch short notice?” She looks pained. “I’m making my paella. You said it was marvelous.”
“It was. It is. Save me a doggy bag. Sorry, Mamma, I really do have something on this evening.”
She sighs grumpily. “What’s so important that you can’t cancel it to help your own mother?”
I say the only thing that will possibly keep me out of her bad book. “I have a date.”
“A date?” Her mood instantly brightens. “Tell me more! Who with? Where?”
Oh crap, I should have thought this through. “It’s a blind date,” I say. “At…the movies. Marina set it up.”
Some of the animation leaves my mother’s face.
“Marina set it up?” She loves Marina almost more than she loves me, but that also means she knows my best friend’s limitations as well as I do. Any date Marina sets up should be approached with a good degree of caution. Her romantic history is even more checkered than mine, mostly because she terrifies men senseless.
“A visiting second cousin, I think she said.” I’m a terrible liar. Why did I say that?
My mother looks horrified. “From Sicily? But I don’t want you to up sticks and move to Italy, darling!”
This isn’t going very well; I’d probably have been better off just eating paella and making small talk. I wish I’d never mentioned the movies; I know full well she’ll grill me first thing in the morning on what we saw.
“He’s from Solihull, not Sicily. Calm down, will you? It’s just popcorn at the pictures, not an arranged marriage.”
Gran contorts herself into the lotus position on the rug then smiles at me serenely. “Put the TV on, would you, darling? My show’s about to start.”
Relieved, I pour her a teacup of champagne and leave them to it, heading back to my flat to check the cinema listings.
We’re quite lucky in Chapelwick,we have an old art deco cinema on High Street that’s managed to survive the onslaught of the multiplex at the huge shopping center a few miles away. The Regal has only two screens and the sound system is out of the arc, but it’s kind of cool and kitsch, one of the most beloved and protected features of the town. I’ve decided to hold my imaginary date there, mostly because I can walk to it and take my own wine. They don’t mind at all; in fact, they’ll give you a glass when you buy your ticket as long as you hand it in again afterward.
Inside the foyer, I fold down my soaked brolly and shove it in the special wet-umbrella bucket by the revolving doors to collect at the end. You don’t get that kind of service in the multiplex, do you? As I shrug off my coat and hang it, I study the boards behind the booth attendant’s head to see what my film choices are. An advance screening of the brand-new Scarlett Johansson blockbuster romantic comedy or, what do you know, another romance, only that one looks a bit more serious and stars Anthony Hopkins. Why couldn’t it have been a special showing ofThe Silence of the Lambsinstead? I’d far rather see him threaten to eat someone’s liver with a nice bottle of Chianti than fall awkwardly in love with his nurse and then probably die, slumped in his meals-on-wheels dinner, as the poster seems to suggest. I sigh inwardly. A good old rom-com for one it is, then.
It’s quiet at least; it seems that most of the good people of Chapelwick are as put off by the sheeting rain as I would normally have been.
“On your own, Ghostbuster?”
Oh crapola.Really?I’ve just settled myself in, popcorn on my lap, big glass of wine in my hand. I made zero effort with my appearance for my fake date, and now I sort of wish I’d gone wild with the mascara.
“Of all the cinemas in all the world, you have to choose to come to this one,” I say, surreptitiously checking if Fletch has a date lurking behind him in the aisle. The only thing worse than him being here at all would be to have to endure watching him necking in the front row.
“Work,” he says, flashing his press pass as he drops into the seat next to mine. “Someone has to file the movie reviews.”
