Puzzling Ink Read online

  “Hm. I thought he was following me,” Quinn said.

  “Now why would he do that?” Dan asked.

  “I guess he wouldn’t,” Quinn said quickly.

  Dan pulled up a chair and bit into another. “Ah, peanut butter and pickle. Just what the doctor ordered, eh, sunshine?”

  The three of them polished off the rest of the snacks, while Dan and Georgeanne regaled Quinn with anecdotes and snippets of what went on at the diner today.

  Quinn half-listened with a smile pasted on her lips, hoping she was nodding in the right places. When she’d finished counting the crumbs on the cookie sheet, she counted the tiny cherry clusters woven into the fabric of the tablecloth. She moved the cookie sheet out of the way to count under there.

  Her dad placed his hand over hers. “I think it’s time for you to get to bed, sunshine. And you too.” He kissed Georgeanne’s head as he stood. “Let’s reconvene this meeting of the Carr Corporation tomorrow.”

  “Will we be able to entertain motions from the board?” Georgeanne asked as she stood. “I’m wondering why I don’t have a new company car, maybe a Cadillac. But I’d settle for a new stand mixer. Saw a Dolce and Gabbana one I think was hand-painted. A steal at fifteen-hundred dollars.”

  “Did you submit agenda items in triplicate?” Dan said with a grin.

  “Sorry, Mom. I have to open the diner in the morning. You won’t have me for a tiebreaker.”

  Dan feigned outrage. “You already know you’d vote with her?”

  “She made me comfort squares.”

  “You got me there.”

  After saying good night and getting into bed, Quinn thought her exhaustion would send her immediately into a deep sleep, but she was wide awake. Her exhaustion, she decided, wasn’t physical.

  She couldn’t keep this up, not any of it.

  After lying awake for an hour, she swung her feet out of bed and to the floor. She sat in the dark, listening to the tick-tick-tick of the clock in the kitchen and the soft rhythmic snores coming from her parents’ room; for how long, she wasn’t sure.

  She held up Fang’s bowl to the window to show him the stars and moon. After a few minutes, she returned him to the nightstand, wondering if she just blew his tiny mind. She counted out three flakes of food and dropped one in his bowl.

  “Midnight snack, dude?”

  Fang let it drift to the gravel.

  Quinn watched him swim slowly around the bowl, long, fluttery fins and tail moving languidly through the water. She dropped the other two flakes in, one at a time. He ignored them both. Either she really had blown his mind or he wasn’t a snacker.

  Hypnotized by Fang’s calming movements in the moonlight, she became aware again of the ticking clock.

  Finally, she padded out to the kitchen. The moonlight streamed in the window so brightly she didn’t need to turn on the light to find what she needed.

  She stared at the therapist’s business card, tacked exactly where her dad had put it when they’d returned from the hospital. Name, address, phone. Such a simple thing to print and hand out to potential clients. Specializing in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Quinn aligned the card with the other business cards around it. If she really specialized in OCD, Quinn thought, she wouldn’t have left-justified her contact information instead of centering it. But maybe this was a test, a way to get clients to call her, or maybe a way to weed out those who were just persnickety. Quinn shook her head to clear it. “It’s just three a.m. talking to me,” she whispered to herself. But why did three a.m. have to shout so much of the time?

  She reached a shaky hand toward the push pin and pinched it between two fingers. She rubbed them back and forth on the cool molded plastic. She knew she needed to pluck out the pin and make the call, but what she really wanted to do was switch this red pushpin with that yellow one holding Abe the handyman’s card. And then the blue one with that white one. The colors were so random, no pattern to them at all.

  Before she realized what was happening, her fingers flew over the corkboard. Reds with red, blues with blues, yellows with yellow, whites with white. Business cards marching down the left side in two columns, alphabetized by business name, or last name in the event of none. Flyers and other odd-sized bits arranged with a quarter-inch margin separation from everything.

  She stepped back and inspected her work, relieved to have fixed everything, but horrified once again she couldn’t control the need. She saw the therapist’s card smack-dab in the center of the column. She knew a normal person would just pluck it off, but she chose to take a picture of it with her phone.

  Then she dialed the number.

  A bored voice answered. “Mary-Louise Lovely’s office. What is the nature of your emergency?”

  Hearing the therapist’s name out loud made Quinn’s pleasure center buzz. That hyphen. Those matching syllables. The alliteration, but not too much. Laura Louise Lovely would be too much. And Lovely was so…lovely. It all added up to the perfect name.

  “I…don’t have an emergency. I don’t think so anyway.” Quinn kept her voice low.

  “Then I can have Mary-Louise Lovely return your call. This is Mary-Louise Lovely’s after-hours answering service.” Quinn heard shuffling of papers and then the voice returned, still bored, but clearly reading from a script. “If you are having an immediate crisis, please call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. Mary-Louise Lovely will be in touch within four hours at the phone number you leave. If you need help sooner than that, please call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. Otherwise, leave a message.” Quinn heard the papers shuffling again. “Your name and number for Mary-Louise Lovely to contact you?”

  Quinn gave all the required information, then wondered what she was going to do for the next four hours while waiting for Mary-Louise Lovely to call. Probably regret calling Mary-Louise Lovely.

  She wasn’t sleepy, so she set up her laptop on the kitchen table to work on her next crossword puzzle. She was contemplating mental health as a theme when her phone rang. She dived for it so it wouldn’t disturb her parents’ slumber. That’s what she told herself, anyway.

  “Is this Quinn Carr?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Mary-Louise Lovely.”

  “I’m Quinn Carr.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Quinn covered her face with her hand. “Of course you do. I called you. And then you asked if it was me and—”

  “Quinn, I want you to take a deep breath and then tell me why you called me in the middle of the night.”

  Quinn filled her lungs, then released the air slowly. When she finished, words gushed out of her, a burst dam of jabber. She explained all about the police academy interview, the end and the beginning of everything. How she felt like she was floating away from the three men and their questions until she anchored herself by counting the decorative holes in the ceiling tiles. When they tried to make her stop, how she floated away again and again until the next thing she knew she was in the emergency room with her father, medicated and confused.

  “That’s where I met you,” Mary-Louise Lovely said.

  “We’ve already met?” Quinn shook her head, as if to return her memories to the appropriate places. “I don’t remember.”

  “You were given something to help you relax. I spoke with your father and gave him my card. I told him you’d call when you were ready. I hope you’ve been taking your meds?” She asked what Quinn had been taking and Quinn listed them for her. Softly she asked, “Has something happened for you to call me tonight, Quinn?”

  Quinn took another deep breath and another torrent of words gushed out. She told Mary-Louise Lovely about having to move back home and take the diner job, how it was really hard learning everything, but she thought she was doing a good job, but didn’t really know if Jake thought so or not. “But then this guy came in the diner when I was alone on
e night and he died right there in the back booth and at first I thought I poisoned him—well, everyone in town probably thought that—but then Jake was arrested for it and I’ve had to run the diner all by myself except for Mom and Dad yesterday and—and—”

  “And you’re overwhelmed?”

  “Yes. Overwhelmed is a good word.”

  “Even after everything you’ve told me, I still suspect there’s a lot you haven’t told me—”

  “So much!”

  “—it makes sense that you’re overwhelmed. I’m a little overwhelmed just hearing about it.” She paused a moment, perhaps to catch her breath or let Quinn catch hers, or both. “How have you been coping?”

  “I haven’t. I thought I made that clear.”

  Mary-Louise Lovely laughed. “Let me be more precise: How have you been trying to cope?”

  Quinn glanced at the rubber band she’d been snapping without realizing. She felt like she was in a confessional. The kitchen was dark and quiet. She kept her voice low and Mary-Louise Lovely did too. Must be a three a.m. thing. “A…friend told me to wear rubber bands on my wrists and snap them to remind myself not to do stuff.”

  “Is that working for you?”

  “No.”

  “How ’bout you take them off your wrists now. Go ahead. I’ll wait.”

  Quinn put the phone down and extracted her hands from the elastic. “Okay.”

  “How does that feel?”

  Quinn held her wrists to the bit of moonlight streaming in the window. It was probably magnified in the low light, but her wrists looked dark and angry, especially the one she’d been snapping tonight. She massaged it. “Better.”

  “Good. Now I want you to try to keep them off.” When Quinn agreed, she continued. “Now, what other things do you do to cope?”

  “I organize things, color-code them and line them up. And…and I still count things.”

  “You make it sound like it’s a moral failing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, of course not. There’s no reason you can’t still count things if you find comfort in it. Counting, organizing, color-coding are all part of you. You needn’t remove them any more than you’d need to remove an entire fingernail because it breaks, or extract a tooth that gets a tiny cavity.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Have you done any research into OCD?”

  “No. I’ve been meaning to, but—I should be more—I’m sorry.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing to be sorry about, Quinn. Just like everything, there’s a lot of information out there, some good, some bad. But let me just tell you this to start with: OCD has many forms. It manifests in many different ways and people have varying degrees of trouble with it. There’s no one, single way to have OCD. But it’s been my experience that it all stems from the same underlying problem, and that’s fear.”

  “But doesn’t everyone have something they’re afraid of?”

  “Absolutely. In people without OCD, fear still leads to stress. If you have OCD, that fear and stress grows into something overwhelming that robs you of joy and can wreck your daily life in many different ways. But OCD is only a problem when you don’t take care of it, like that tooth with a cavity, and it begins to hurt you. Which is what it sounds like it’s doing now. Do you want to work on some coping skills?”

  “Yes, please.” Quinn used her red, raw wrist to wipe her suddenly swimming eyes.

  Chapter 15

  Quinn talked to Mary-Louise Lovely for more than two hours and was so energized when the sun came up, she sang with noisy abandon to her car radio on the way to open the diner. She considered walking—or skipping or dancing—to work, but knew that she’d probably crash by midafternoon due to lack of sleep. But right now, she realized she felt better than she had in months. Happier. Lighter. Peppier.

  Jethro was sleeping in front of the door and seemed grateful to see her. Quinn realized she hadn’t told her mom and dad about poor Jethro and his recon trips through the diner or about his payment. She reached down and rubbed the side of his blocky head. “Sorry, dude. Let me make it up to you.”

  When he finished his rounds, Jethro padded over to her to tell her he expected his paycheck. She tipped her head toward the kitchen and he followed. As she reached to fire up the grill, she spied half a dozen slices of crisp bacon on a cookie sheet. Her mom was brilliant! Cook the bacon in the oven in a big batch. Genius. I would have put the leftovers in the fridge, but whatever. She broke a piece of bacon in half and carefully offered both pieces to Jethro, who waited with slobbery patience. He gobbled them up and she avoided getting her hand covered in drool. They did the same dance with another piece. Jethro stared at her and finally raised his eyes to the cookie sheet with the remaining strips on it. He couldn’t see it, but it was clear he knew it wasn’t empty.

  “What the heck.” Quinn bit into a piece of bacon, relishing the salty, hickory flavor before plating the rest of the bacon and placing it on the floor in front of Jethro.

  He snarfed them up almost before she’d let go of the plate.

  Quinn filled a bowl with cold water and exchanged it for the empty plate. Jethro lapped up almost all of it, leaving droplets spread in a three-foot fan in front of him. When he finished, he plodded out of the kitchen. After a few seconds, Quinn heard the jingle of the bell as he let himself out and went about the rest of his day.

  While she filled the saltshakers, she thought about her therapist advising her that when she began to feel her thoughts ramping out of control, she should stop herself with a verbal clue. Most people chose some affirmation like success! or good enough! but Quinn chose baba ghanoush! It was fun to say and didn’t make her feel so New Agey.

  As she moved on to the pepper and sugar containers, she found herself whispering baba ghanoush over and over. It felt good.

  Luckily, the five Retireds came in and distracted her while she fluttered around, catering to their whims.

  “Hi, Herman. Coffee?”

  He looked at her like he’d never heard of coffee. “No, dear. Get me a big glass of buttermilk.”

  Quinn felt her gorge rise, but tamped it down. A full glass of buttermilk? She steeled herself against the inevitable onslaught of phlegm, but consoled herself that it was just one old man. Hopefully, buttermilk hadn’t been included in the delivery yesterday. “Sure thing. How ’bout the rest of you…ready for coffee?”

  “Hm. Buttermilk sounds good. Extra butter,” Silas said.

  “Me too. And make sure it’s fresh.” Bob smoothed his movie star hair, even though it was perfect as always.

  Quinn wondered how much phlegm this joint could handle, then processed what exactly Bob just said to her. “That’s offensive, Bob. Have I ever served you something not fresh?”

  “That tuna salad that one time.”

  “We’ve been over this before,” Quinn scolded. “Just because you don’t like dill doesn’t mean the tuna was bad.”

  “Tasted bad.” Bob jutted out his lower lip.

  “Coffee for me.” Larry patted Quinn on the arm.

  “Me too.” Wilbur turned the mug right side up at his place setting.

  Quinn was grateful not everyone would be phlegmy from excess lactose.

  “Lots of cream,” Wilbur added.

  Quinn sighed, then fetched the Retireds’ dairy-laden beverages and indulged their cravings as they discovered them.

  As she took orders from the customers, she very consciously tried to be less linear. She started some hash browns, she pulled one tray of bacon out of the oven and replaced it with another, she cracked eggs for all different palates—some to fry, some to scramble, some to omeletize—she poured pancakes, she toasted bread. She drew the line at waffles.

  She was practically giddy when she delivered two plates with no food in common to the same table. And they thanked her and said it l
ooked delicious!

  Which wasn’t to say there were no more issues at the Chestnut Diner.

  Quinn continued to be run ragged, correcting orders of toast that were too light, then too dark; exchanging butter for margarine, margarine for strawberry preserves, strawberry preserves for orange marmalade; eggs that were too runny or too hard. She didn’t know whether to be happy or sad the menu was beginning to get back to normal.

  Despite her mini-breakthrough, her nerves were frayed by the end of the breakfast rush.

  Wilbur was her very last straw when he insisted his omelet had the wrong filling, even after she showed him her order pad and brought him exactly what he ordered.

  He pounded a fist on the Formica-topped table, making Quinn jump. “I don’t want your fancy red onion in there. Bring me a normal onion like a normal person can buy down the normal street at the normal market. Are you trying to gentrificate Chestnut Station?”

  She was so taken aback at his outburst she didn’t even correct his word usage. She fled to the kitchen to take four deep breaths and say several baba ghanoushes instead of catastrophizing into a downward spiral.

  When she finished, she delivered Wilbur’s new omelet, really just the old one but now covered in green chili. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Someday they’d catch on to that trick, but today was not that day.

  “Here, Wilbur. Sorry about the confusion. I added that green chili you like, no charge.”

  Wilbur was caught a bit off guard. Normally his complaints didn’t warrant upgrades. “Okay…thanks. But see that it doesn’t happen again!” So much wind had been taken out of his sails, it was uttered with a mildness Quinn hadn’t realized he was capable of.

  The Retireds finally ran out of things to complain about and forgot she was there. She took the opportunity to take some deep breaths while she ran dishes through the dishwasher and cleaned up a bit.

  Quinn ventured out of the kitchen after a while. She stood in the back and checked on table five. Looked like they were ready to go. She reached in her apron pocket, pulling out her pad. As she totaled and delivered the bill to them, she mulled over her idea about disgruntled customers blackmailing Jake.