Waltz This Way (v1.1) Page 3

  “You’re work.” Mel blew a lock of her hair out of her face with a tired breath and fought a smile. Stern. She must not feed the beast in Myriam. If she let Myriam know her razor-sharp tongue and lightning-fast wit made Mel chuckle herself to sleep at night— she was doomed.

  Myriam cackled, slapping her on her arm. “I like that you’re a ‘take no horseshit’ gal.”

  “Good. Then you won’t mind giving me no horseshit. You know, sort of as a gift for all the prior horseshit you’ve given me?” Mel teased.

  “C’mon,” Myriam cajoled. “Who was it?”

  “Who do you think it was?”

  Myriam shrugged with indifference, hoisting her prim shoulder bag with the butterflies on it to the front of her body in a defensive stance. “I don’t know. There’re at least a dozen stoolies in this place. Bunch of namby-pambies, they are. Could have been anyone who ratted me out.”

  Mel hid a smile, one of the first genuine smiles she’d experienced since she’d come to Leisure Village. “So, what you’re saying is, you didn’t tell just one available male senior, but a dozen, they had wilted winkies and couldn’t handle the likes of all your womanliness?”

  Her bottom lip curled with indignation. “I did not say ‘womanliness.’ I said ‘my feminine curves,’ and I’d bet my Celebrex it was that sissy Norm Peterson. He’s always talkin’ like it’s the size of a blue whale’ s— those are the biggest winkies on record, by the way”—she made a wide gesture with two hands—“but Mildred Stein says different.”

  Mel sighed. She just wanted to go home and sit with her dad and Weezer and watch Yard Crashers. “So why do you antagonize? If you keep being so cantankerous, I’ve heard talk about a petition to ban you from all social activities. Tonight it’s senior speed dating— last week it was sunset shuffleboard. You can’t just whack someone over the head with your shuffleboard stick and expect to get away with it. Do you know how many complaints I got in the suggestion box after that? In fact, it’s not even a suggestion box anymore— it’s the ‘What Myriam Did to Me Today’ box.”

  “Bet no one put their name on the suggestions,” she sneered, cracking a sinister smile like she was head gangster senior and the resident seniors were all her gangster minions.

  Which wasn’t totally off the mark. Myriam Hernandez struck fear in the hearts of all Leisure Village seniors. Mel was responsible for policing all of Elder-Landia, and Myriam didn’t make walking this beat easy.

  “That’s because they’re all afraid of you.” Mel shook her finger under her most difficult senior’s nose. “Now, this can’t go on, Myriam. I have people to answer to if I have any hope of keeping this job, a job I can’t afford to lose.” She winced, fighting a tone of desperation.

  Trying to keep her private life private was virtually impossible, not just in the Village, but in town— at the Krispy Kreme, at the diner, in the Stop & Shop. The list went on and on.

  “Because you’re married to a crusty wiener.”

  Her stomach turned. “Well, technically, I’m not married to him and his crusty wiener anymore.” It just felt like she was still married to him because the press wouldn’t let her not be married to him since he’d informed her they were getting divorced.

  On television.

  In an exclusive interview.

  After he’d been caught in a picture taken by a random fan, kissing the fabulously rock-hard Yelena with no last name.

  At a cheese fest.

  “Shoulda taken a cue from me and hit him with the shuffleboard stick. Woulda served him and his Ring Dings right.”

  Heat flushed Mel’s face. Yeah. His Ring Dings definitely needed checking. She’d spent many nights watching reruns of CSI in the hopes she’d find the perfect way to kill Stan without getting caught.

  “Violence isn’t the answer, Myriam.”

  “It is if you want to win at checkers.”

  “Yeah. Speaking of checkers— what’s this about you taking all of the red checkers from the rec center, anyway?”

  “Nobody would let me play.”

  Mel gave Myriam’s arm a squeeze to soften the blow. “Nobody lets you play because you get angry and throw things. Now, enough’s enough. No more hijinks— no more hitting people with that suitcase you call a purse and absolutely no more mocking some man’s”—she leaned in to Myriam and whispered—“penis. Okay? How about we make a deal. You play nice for the next month— not a peep—and I’ll pretend I never saw the zillion suggestions to boot you to my boss lady Max. I’ll throw them all away.” She stuck her hand out, likely making a deal with the devil herself. “Deal?”

  Myriam took it and gave it a firm shake. “Fine. But if Norm brags one more time, I’m gonna give it to him but good.”

  Mel pushed open the door, ushering Myriam out into the warm August air. “No. You’re going to ignore him and smile secretly to yourself because you know he really doesn’t have a penis the size of a blue whale.”

  “Really, who does have a penis the size of a blue whale these days? I hear it’s rare,” a man’s voice remarked with a hint of laughter in it from behind Myriam. “Aunt Myriam?”

  Mel’s eyes moved from Myriam’s small frame upward to the larger one blocking out the floodlights of the rec center.

  “Ah! There’s my boy!” Myriam, usually sour of face unless she was in the height of a prank, softened until she was almost unrecogniz-able. She introduced him like he was visiting royalty, there was such pride in her voice. “Mel, this is my nephew. Honey, meet Mel with the stupid last name and our part-time social director here at the Village. She’s helping Maxine. You know the lady who married that sweet piece of booty Campbell Barker?”

  Mel covered her mouth with her forearm to keep her snort to herself.

  A tall, broad-chested man with a navy blue T-shirt and faded jeans stuck out his hand after sending his aunt a look of warning.

  “Nice to meet you, Mel with the stupid last name.”

  Myriam snickered, latching on to her nephew’s thickly corded arm.

  She gave him her hand. “Do you have a stupid first name?” she inquired sweetly.

  “I do.” He smiled then— a smile that was dashing. The white of his teeth gleamed, the bronze of his skin glowed. “It’s Drew. Drew McPhee.”

  “A fine Irish name,” she commented, refusing to be awed by his thick, chocolaty hair with sun-kissed gold highlights and his light blue eyes in a shade so unusual they held her mesmerized.

  “He’s only half Irish,” Myriam snorted. “The other half of him’s Puerto Rican— just like his aunt.”

  He let go of Mel’s hand, and she realized her palm had become sweaty when the humid breeze hit it. “Aunt Myriam’s still holding a grudge that my mother married a McPhee instead of a Lopez or a Suarez. Any ez’ll do, right, Aunt Myriam?” he said on an indulgent chuckle, squeezing Myriam’s hand, then giving it an affectionate pat.

  Myriam made a face up at her nephew. Clearly, her discontent with the male population at large extended to family, too. “Selena marrying your father is all-out war as far as I’m concerned. No good Puerto Rican wants to marry an Irishman. None.”

  “A war that’s lasted forty-four years now,” Drew said with a wink.

  “C’mon, Aunt Myriam— Mom’s waiting for you to come over and help beat Dad up. It is Saturday night, the night when all good Irish-men get a beating from their Puerto Rican sisters-in-law. It’s fast becoming a sport.”

  Myriam reached up and pinched his lean cheek. “You were always funny. Hey, you know, why don’t we invite Mel over, too? She’s got nothin’ better to do on a Saturday night, bein’ divorced and all. She might have to wait forever to get a date because she’s so old, and I’m sure she’d love some of your father’s crappy corned beef and ‘fart all night long’ cabbage. Whaddya say, Mel?”

  Mel refused to let slip a horrified gasp and instead lobbed the ball back at the feisty senior. “How do you know I don’t have a date, Myriam? Maybe I have some hot stud just waiting on the e
dge of his seat for me to leave senior speed dating and join him for our secret ren-dezvous.” She fluttered her lashes.

  Myriam guffawed as though Mel had just told her she had a date with Robert Pattison. “You don’t, either. You hole up at your dad’s and lick your wounds every night. You know it. I know it. Every senior from here to eternity in the Village knows it. So instead of crying in your beer, you should just date my Drew,” she decided.

  Mel dragged the door of the rec center shut and chuckled with a shake of her head. “Oh, I don’t think so, Myriam. What if we got married? Then you wouldn’t just have a half-Irish, half– Puerto Rican nephew, but a half-Italian, half-Polish, divorced-from-a-Russian niece. I think the world would collapse under all those countries, foreign and otherwise. Besides, I have a hot date with my dad tonight, and Weezer needs to be walked. No one wants Weezer to potty in the house, especially me.”

  Myriam gave her a mocking smile, but her eyes were kind. “That’s fine, dear. You go home to your very exciting life with your dog and your cranky old father, and I’ll go home with my handsome nephew without you. See if I ever impose you on any of my family again.” She threw up a hand to wave a dismissive goodbye before heading off into the darkness toward the parking lot.

  Drew rocked back on his heels, crossing his tanned forearms, which had a thick dusting of hair, over his chest. “So if I said she was a handful and we all try to keep her in line but she’s like corralling greased cats, would that make whatever she’s done tonight better?”

  Drew asked with an amused grin that left deep grooves on either side of his mouth.

  “What makes you think she’s done something?”

  “My Aunt Myriam’s always doing something, and it’s usually not nice.”

  The corner of her mouth lifted. “I like her spirit.”

  “We’d like it more if it didn’t always involve hand-to-hand combat.”

  Mel found herself with her second genuine smile of the night on her face. “Okay, that would probably make my job a lot easier, but even with the shuffleboard showdown and tonight’s wholly embarrassing poke at the size of Norm Peterson’s, ahem, man parts during senior speed dating, she’s pretty funny.”

  “She’s a terror.”

  “That’s a fair adjective,” she responded, forcing a bland expression. His bigness made her uncomfortably aware— of everything.

  The way he smelled. The way his jeans molded against the muscles of his thighs before giving way to long calves. The way his eyes crinkled in the corners when he smiled. The way he towered over her, making her five-foot-two frame feel very small. Mel swept around him, making her way down the rec center’s entryway.

  “Let me walk you to your car.”

  Mel smiled then frowned at the shiver his voice created. That’d be nice. To be walked to her car by someone as deliciously fine-looking as Drew. But you had to have a car to be walked to. “I’m fine, thanks. I walked.”

  “You live here?”

  Among the scent of mothballs and liniment. Oh, yes, at the ripe, old age of forty, she lived at home. In a retirement village. Like the crazy cat lady, sans cats. “For the moment. With my dad,” was her cool reply.

  “And Weezer.”

  “Right. Weezer, too.” His steps echoed hers, moving in heavy clunks toward the parking lot.

  “How about we give you a lift home?”

  “But then you’d be late for corned beef and ‘fart all night long’ cabbage. Really, I’m fine. I could use the exercise.” The moment she said it, she realized she’d given him permission to scan her goodies—which were aplenty— to discover if she really needed crunches.

  “Said who?”

  Her ex-husband. The tabloids. Every show from here to Ellen.

  “My scale,” she remarked dryly.

  His eyebrow, a darker brown than his hair, cocked upward.

  “You’re scale is as stupid as your last name— which I didn’t get, by the way.”

  Mel stopped at the end of the sidewalk and looked up at big, handsome, smiling Drew. “It’s a mouthful.”

  “A mouthful’s plenty, if you ask me.”

  Mel blushed hot red. “Cherkasov.” She waited while he made the connection between her and Stan.

  Yet, he surprised her when he said, “So, Mel Cherkasov, since Myriam can’t convince you to come have some dinner with almost total strangers and I can’t talk you into a lift back home, will I see you around the Village? I do a lot of shuffling back and forth with Aunt Myriam. She’s the driver from hell— so we avoid letting her do it, if we can.”

  He’d see her only if it meant there was money to be had in leaving her father’s house. It was the only thing that could remotely motivate her to breathe outdoor air or, for that matter, get involved in anything other than a can of chocolate frosting with sprinkles and some salt-and-pepper kettle chips. “Anything can happen.”

  “Good to know. I hope anything happens again soon.” He grinned before taking long strides toward his truck.

  Her heart jumped a little only to settle back into her chest with indifference, which was exactly the position it belonged in. “Say good night to Myriam for me,” she called, heading in the opposite direction.

  That direction being without purpose.

  Or meaning.

  Or hope.

  Or a foolproof plan to murder Stan.

  Yet.

  Maybe she was missing a crucial detail in all those reruns she’d been watching. That meant more CSI reruns and definitely more chocolate frosting.

  Drew slid into the truck, turning the key in the ignition and eyeing his aunt in the passenger seat. “So who is she, this Mel?”

  Myriam shifted to set her penetrating gaze on him. “Do I hear the voice of interest there, kiddo?”

  “You hear the voice of a man who wants to know who all your victims are so he can apologize to them when someone knocks you off.”

  Myriam’s cackling filled the interior of the truck. “I like Mel. She doesn’t know I do, but I do. I give her a hard time at every turn, and still, she has a smart aleck answer for everything. That’s gutsy. She’s had a bad time of it lately. Her ex-husband’s some kinda idiot.”

  He kept his comment noncommittal, while massaging the back of his neck. “Interesting.”

  “Wanna know why?”

  “Do I?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question, mister. She’s that Stan Cherkasov’s ex-wife.”

  “Nuthin’ but a hound dog, I take it?” Drew quoted an Elvis song, one of his favorites.

  Myriam scoffed. “In spades. I can’t believe you don’t know who Stan Cherkasov is.”

  “I’m stumped.”

  “Don’t you ever watch TV, boy?”

  “When do I have the time for TV with my job at the school and Nathan running me ragged all the time with his after-school clubs?”

  “He’s a smart one, my Natty.”

  Pride welled in his chest for his son, a genius. Literally. “You’d better not let him hear you call him that. He’s decided now that he’s twelve, he’s Nate or Nathan. Period.”

  She pursed her lips in displeasure, tucking her chubby fingers into her purse. “He’ll be whatever I say he’ll be and like it. Now back to Mel. Poor Mel. Her ex-husband’s a big time choreographer on that show Dude, You Can Dance. A Russian— the swine.”

  “Dude, what?” What kind of a ridiculous name for a show was that?

  “Dude, You Can Dance,” she reiterated with impatience. “The show where they find kids who can dance, and then they throw them on stage and let the viewing audience judge their performances. It’s a big hit in reality TV. Bet if you ask my Natty, he’ll know what it is.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance like he was an idiot for not having a clue what she was talking about.

  Drew sighed in search of patience. His aunt loved gossip, especially Hollywood gossip. He found himself wondering if Myriam had grilled poor Mel and tried not to visibly cringe at the notion. “I
don’t watch much TV, Aunt Myriam. I definitely don’t watch some dance show.”

  “That’s because you’re a buffoon with two left feet and no appreciation for the art,” she said, giving him an affectionate slap on the knee. “Anyways, he got caught doing the dirty with another, much younger choreographer from the show named Yelena. She has no last name. Least ways not when they introduce her. Caught by a fan that took a picture of it and sold it to the highest bidder. Poor Mel found out he was cheating on her from those nasty reporters on the television show Hollywood Scoop when they showed up like vultures at her failing dance studio.”

  He remained silent, unable to identify with a situation resembling some scene in a movie— though, he did experience a twist in his gut for the kind of humiliation that must have stirred up for Mel. Instead, he let his mind wander back to Mel’s mouth, wide and generous, and her hips, supple and round, while his aunt continued to talk.

  “Poor thing. She was all over the TV, her big eyes all wide with surprise when the one reporter asked her how it felt to be left for a younger woman. Even though I just know she tried to hide it, she had no idea. Her husband, that Stan, blindsided her, the jack-off. I don’t know the exact details, but I can get ’em, if you want ’em. The story around these parts says he took everything from her— even her little dance studio—and she had to move back here with her dad, Joe Hodge, because she has no money. She’s workin’ part time in the Village for Maxine. You remember Maxine, don’t you? She’s got that employment agency—”

  “Trophy Jobs Inc., right?” Drew interjected, pulling into his parents’ neighborhood, the familiar street lined with oak trees that would soon change color. He’d seen Maxine here and there when he’d come to pick up his aunt from the rec center, but he didn’t know a whole lot about her other than she organized the events at the Village his aunt attended and often created chaos at.

  “That’s the one. Bunch of the retired seniors who had big, important jobs before they retired donate a lot of their time there to help women who up and get dumped by their old husbands for younger women because their boobies are saggin’.”