Unnatural Calamities Read Free

counter-balancing “the place could be worse” viewpoint.
    The great schools. Right, did that already. And at least Margaret Hamilton, a talkative stay-at-home parent of another nerdy girl, was friendly. She provided some companionship and gossip and even better, had an older daughter, a college student, who loved to babysit on the nights Janey worked.
    A car door slammed. Then another car door. Oh damn—no, darn and blast the child, she was not alone.
    Janey rubbed her hands on the stainless steel sink. Someone had told her that got rid of the stench of garlic. She didn’t exactly feel like a toad the few times she met up with the fabulous Cynthia, but she didn’t feel she came across as the right kind of grown-up. The slight narrowing of the well-groomed Cynthia’s blue eyes made Janey wish she had better posture or wore designer clothing or didn’t cut her own hair. Rachel had said that Cynthia’s mother had been a model or something. And Cynthia’s father sounded even worse.
    “He has buckets of money and is a mover and shaker of massive proportions,” Rachel had solemnly told her.
    “Sounds like a sumo wrestler.” Janey had snickered, which had somehow offended Rachel.
    Janey had deftly changed the subject of the two near-perfect Dunham households by asking, “So what do you guess a dance called The Mover and Shaker should look like?”
    The two of them had ended up boogeying, moving and shaking, around the tiny kitchen. Give Rachel a chance to sing or dance and she tended to forget everything else.
    The door flew open. Rachel and Cynthia thumped into the small apartment shrieking with laughter, as usual. They skittered down the hall to Rachel’s room.
    “Hey, you puny, lily-livered, young rapscallion, how many times do I have to tell you to close the door?” Janey called after Rachel. She went to shove the door shut.
    “Excuse me?”
    The man she’d almost slammed the door on smiled. Perhaps the most gorgeous eyes she’d ever beheld stared down into hers. Deep-set brown eyes. Heavy lidded, with the hint of laugh lines at their corners to add character.
    “Is that puny, lily-livered thing a line from a play?” he asked.
    Her examination shifted to the smiling mouth again. The rest of his face had character too. His body was nothing to sneeze at either. Too bad he appeared to be fairly prosperous, unlike the men she’d had the instant hots for. He wore a gray suit and burgundy tie instead of the usual greasy jeans her hormones sang out for.
    “Um. Well. It’s a thing. An insult thing. A Shakespeare insult page on the net. The ah, Internet. We. Um. So.” She held out her hand and smiled brightly. “You must be Mr…ah.” Fabulous? Mover and shaker? She felt fairly moved, and not just because he’d scared the bejeezus out of her. Despite the tie, he was not bad. No, indeed.
    She could almost hear Penny’s whisper. “It’s a TD&H, hon. Go ferrit.” Tall, dark and handsome. Except in Penny and Janey’s past men, the “h” stood for hellish, horny, heavy-metal, Harley or ham-handed. Penny still liked bad boys. Janey had given them up years ago, about the same time she stopped smoking and a few years after she stopped drinking too much.
    The TD&H shook her hand. “Toph Dunham. Cynthia’s father.”
    “I’m Janey Carmody. Nice to meet you. But have we met?” She was certain she’d seen him before. Hard to imagine she’d forget Mr. Dunham.
    “Perhaps the first day of swim practice about a month ago? That’s the one time I gave Cynthia a lift this year.”
    “Ah. I slept through it. I usually do.” She made a face. “Not my favorite time of day.”
    She could not stare at him any longer without giving the impression she was brain damaged, but she didn’t know where else to look.
    Uh oh. Maybe at her burning dinner. She ran to the stove.
    He sniffed and gave a wide, bright smile. “Smells delicious.”
    “Scorched,” she said, staring gloomily at the veggies. “I’ll tell Rachel