The Widower's Two-Step (Tres Navarre #2)(9)

"Tres, honey." Mother got up, squashed my cheeks together with both hands, and kissed me. "I hope tortilla soup is all right."

Mother was dressed for Zimbabwe. She had on a multicoloured caftan and a long black shawl. Her ebony earrings were shaped like the stone heads on Easter Island and her forearms had so many silver bangles on them they looked like Slinkys. She was around fiftyfive and looked thirtyfive, tops.

Jess told me howdy and went back to watching the Oilers game. Jess graduated from Heights a couple of years before I did. We played varsity together. I think he was Young Boyfriend number three or four since my mom had gotten her divorce, burned her pot roast recipes, and reinvented herself as a New Age artiste.

"I expect a full report," Mother was saying. "How is Carolaine? We never miss the KSAT news anymore. You should tell her to wear that green dress more often, Tres.

It's very flattering."

I told her Carolaine was fine and no we were not living together yet and no I didn't know when or if we would be. Mother didn't like the "if" part very much. She looked disappointed that I wasn't living in sin yet. She told me she recommended it highly.

"Huh," Jess said. He kept his eyes on the ball game.

Mother went to stir the soup. She added a bowl of boiled chicken and stewed tomatoes to the broth. I came over to the counter and started chopping cilantro for her.

"And work?" Mother looked sideways at me, intently.

"Maybe not so great. I've got one job to finish. After that..."

She nodded, satisfied, then pushed a strand of black hair back over her ear.

Out of habit I tried to spot any sign of gray. There wasn't any. God knows I'd snuck plenty of looks into her medicine cabinet for Miss Clairol and never found anything more incriminating than vitamin E, rosemary essence, and a few healing crystals.

Mother looked at me again and smiled, like she knew what I was thinking and enjoyed it. It was a game she'd been winning for a good fifteen years.

"Well," she said, "I happened to talk with Professor Mitchell at UTSA."

I chopped the cilantro a little harder. "Mother—"

"Please, dear, we were just touching base."

"Touching base."

"Of course. It must've been ten years since I did that art show with his wife."

In the other room one of the young rednecks broke a setup and the other one whistled appreciatively. Jess tossed his beer can toward the trash and made it. The Oilers were winning.

"So you just happened to run across Mitchell's phone number in your book."

"That's right."

I slid the cilantro off the knife blade and into the pot. The cebollas were already grilled and the sour cream was ready. Strips of fried corn tortilla were in a bowl to the side, ready to be stirred in.

I wiped off my hands.

"And while you were on the phone—" I prompted.

Mother shrugged. "All right. I did ask if there were any openings in the English department."

I looked down longingly at the big knife I'd been using.

"Well, really, Jackson. He was very helpful."

Only my mother calls me by my first name and lives. She likes to put me in my place next to the first two Jackson Navarres—my father and my grandfather. The third in a long line of hopeless males.

The phone rang. My mother tried to look surprised and failed miserably.

"Good Lord, who could that be?"

I bowed to the inevitable and said I'd get it. Mother smiled.

I took the phone out onto the deck next to the hot tub, picked up the receiver, and said,

"Professor Mitchell?"

A moment of surprised silence on the other end, then a fatherly voice said, "Now this isn't Tres, is it?"

I told him it was. He laughed and gave me the standard kneehightoagrasshopper reminiscences about how long it had been and how glad he was I'd gotten out of puberty. I said I was too.

"Your mother told me you were job hunting," he said.

The Widower's Two it Step 31

"Yeah, about that—"

I wanted to apologize for my mother thinking that college teaching jobs grew on trees and fell when ripe as soon as one's parents made phone calls to old friends.

Before I could, Professor Mitchell said, "I made your appointment for eleven o'clock Saturday. It's the only day we're all available to interview."

I hesitated, then closed the glass door to the kitchen to shut out the pool game and the TV.

"Pardon?"

"Your mother's timing was perfect as usual," Mitchell said. "Big stirup in the department, the hiring committee just forming. So happens I'm on it. Eleven o'clock.

Will that time work for you?"

A polite no would've done just fine. Sorry, my mother's just meddling in my life again and I have a very bright future in private investigations. I kept waiting to hear myself say no. I watched through the glass door as Carolaine came on the television again, this time for a newsbreak.

Maybe what made me weaken was Carolaine's face. Maybe it was a week with almost no sleep, doing surveillance, minding a fouryearold. Or the fact that whenever I closed my eyes now I saw Julie Kearnes in her '68 blue Cougar, people with white rubber gloves picking fragments out of her hair with tweezers. When I finally responded to Professor Mitchell I didn't say no. I said, "Eleven o'clock Saturday. What the hell."