Cookie shrugged a brow.
“She’s right,” Uncle Bob said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “I’m actually from Pluto.”
Gemma put her bag down and came over for a hug, a tradition we’d only recently started partaking in. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks. After the torture thing, she was coming over every day. But between work and her pretending she had a social life, her visits had dwindled to a slow trickle.
“I see you took our last talk to heart.” She offered me her stern face, the one that used to make me giggle. Now it just made me appreciate her lopsided sense of reality. Like I took anything she said to heart. We’d been related way too long for that. “Do you think you have enough small kitchen appliances?”
“We’re working on that,” Cookie said as Uncle Bob gave Gemma one of his big bear hugs.
“Yes, we are,” he concurred.
“Well, good,” Gemma said, stepping into the kitchen to see what Cookie was up to. “I just came to check on things, see how you were doing.”
“Okay, well, thanks.”
“How are you sleeping?”
“Alone, sadly.”
“No, I meant are you sleeping?”
I figured I could tell her about how I roam my apartment all night like a paranoid drug addict, checking and rechecking the locks, making sure the windows were shut and the door was soundly bolted. I could explain how I would then go to bed only to lie there conjuring images of burglars and serial killers with every creak and groan the old building had to offer. But then she’d only insist on medicating me. A prospect I refused to consider.
“Of course I’m sleeping. What else would I be doing at night?”
“Not sleeping.” She appraised me with a knowing gaze, probing, measuring my reaction. Freaking psychiatrists.
I let a carefree smile part my lips and said, “I’m sleeping just fine.”
“Good. Because you look a little sleep deprived.”
“Is that your years of training talking?”
“No, that’s the dark circles under your eyes talking.”
“I’m not sleep deprived.”
“Wonderful. I’m glad.”
She wasn’t glad. I could feel suspicion on her every suspicious breath.
So, Cookie was here to check out my new appliances that I would never use. Amber was here to use my computer, of which they had two in their apartment across the hall. Uncle Bob came all this way just to give me a file. And Gemma came over to check on me. I hadn’t had this much company since I had my apartment-warming party and invited the UNM Lobo football team. Only about twelve of those guys would actually fit inside, so the party spilled out into the hall. Mrs. Allen, the elderly woman in apartment 2C, has never stopped thanking me. And every time she did, her voice got this husky tone to it and she would wriggle her brows. I always wondered just what happened that night to make her so appreciative. Maybe she got a little on the side. Or copped a few feels. Good for her either way.
But with this many people in my apartment, and with all of us surrounded by a jungle of boxes, I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. And wary. Especially when Cookie kept throwing secretive glances at Ubie. I should have known she was too dismissive of him when she came in. She usually grinned like a schoolgirl at a boy band concert. They were totally up to something.
I faced my well-meaning but garishly obnoxious group of friends and/or family members, trying to decide, if this were a video game and they’d all been turned into zombies, which one I’d take out first. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“What?” Gemma asked, her expression the picture of innocence.
Her.
Uncle Bob rubbed his five o’clock shadow. Amber peeked over a stack of boxes, her huge blue eyes watching warily from afar. Or, well, a few feet away. Cookie was looking at me from behind a set of instructions for the electric pressure cooker, fooling absolutely no one. Unless she could read instructions in French. And upside down. And Gemma propped onto a barstool to examine her nails.
“We’ve been worried about you,” Uncle Bob said, shrugging one shoulder.
Gemma nodded. “Right, so we thought we’d come over and make sure everything was okay.”
“All of you?” I asked.
She nodded again, a little too enthusiastically.
My brows slid together, and I regarded Uncle Bob, my expression a mask of bitter disappointment, knowing he’d cave before anyone else, the old softy.
He held up a hand. “Now, Charley, you have to admit, your behavior has been a little erratic lately.”
I crossed my arms. “When is my behavior not erratic?”
“She has a point,” he said to Gemma.
“No,” she replied, mimicking me by crossing her arms as well, “she doesn’t.”
I sighed in utter annoyance and strode around the breakfast bar to get to Mr. Coffee.
“Did the stain come out?”
“What stain?” I asked, pouring a cup of Heaven on Earth.
She pointed to a section of my living room I referred to as Area 51, where a huge pile of boxes cleverly disguised as a mountain sat. It served a purpose: to conceal that area of the room. That particular section. That black hole of turmoil and disorder. I’d shoved box after box over it as they came in so I didn’t have to look at it, so I didn’t accidently get sucked in by the gravitational force of millions of solar masses. I knew how crazy it sounded, but burying the place where I was once cut to pieces, shoving it under a mountain of shiny new products, seemed like a good idea at the time.