Tribute

Hormones, I guess. I got sick again, and I remember how Tom was at his wit’s end trying to figure out how to deal with me and the baby. It was an awful day. I’m sorry.” She shook herself. “I don’t know why I started on that.”
    “The house stirs it up,” Patty decided. “Go on, Cilla, get cleaned up and come with us. This rain and gloom’s going to make us sad. We’re just not taking no for an answer.”
    She supposed she went along as it was three against one, and because Cathy’s memory had made her sad. It surprised her that she enjoyed herself, poking around a mall, sitting through a weepy chick flick, drinking margaritas and eating grilled chicken Caesar salad.
    In the restaurant ladies’ room, Angie joined her to fuss with her hair and lip gloss. “It’s no Rodeo Drive, premiere and dinner at the latest hot spot, but it was a pretty good day, huh?”
    “I had fun. And Rodeo Drive wasn’t my usual stomping grounds.”
    “It would be mine, if I lived out there. Even if I could only window-shop and fantasize. You really don’t miss it?”
    “I really don’t miss it. I— Sorry,” she said when her phone rang. Drawing it out, Cilla saw her mother’s number on the readout, put it away without answering.
    “You can take it. I’ll step out.”
    “No. It’s the kind of call that’s guaranteed to spoil my nice, subtle margarita buzz. Do you do this a lot? Hang out with your mother on a rainy Saturday?”
    “I guess. She’s fun to be around. We always tried to have a day together, and since I went to college, we try harder when I’m home on break. Sometimes we have friends along, sometimes just the two of us.”
    “You’re lucky.”
    Angie laid a hand on Cilla’s arm. “I know she’s not your mother, but I know, too, she’d really like to be your friend.”
    “She is my friend. We just don’t know each other very well.”
    “Yet?”
    “Yet,” Cilla agreed, and made Angie smile.
    WHEN SHE GOT HOME, Cilla checked her voice mail. Two from Ford, she noted—probably when she’d turned off her phone in the movie— and one from her mother.
    She got her mother’s over with. It ran long, as expected, covering the gamut from cold disdain to angry resentment, with a short stint of teary tremor between.
    Cilla deleted it, played Ford’s first.
    “Hey. My mother decided to cook up spaghetti and meatballs, and told me to come over to pig out and bring a friend. You didn’t answer the door, and you’re not answering this. So now I’m wondering if I should worry, mind my own business or be insanely jealous because you ran off with some piece of beefcake named Antonio. Anyway, give me a call so I know.”
    She played the second. “Ignore that message. My father ran into your father, so have fun with the girls. Ah, that was your father’s term. The girls. You’re going to miss some seriously awesome meatballs.”
    “God, you’re so cute,” Cilla murmured. “And if I wasn’t so tired, I’d walk right over there and jump your bones.”
    Yawning, she climbed the steps with two shopping bags. A real bed waited upstairs, she remembered. She could curl up on an actual mattress with actual sheets. Snuggle right in, sleep as late as she liked. The idea shimmered like heaven in her mind as she turned into the guest bath.
    It was like being struck in the heart. The lovely floor lay broken—tiles chipped, shattered, heaved up from long cracks. The bowl of the new sink lay scattered over it in pieces. Shocked, she staggered back, the bags dropping out of her hands. The contents spilled out as she turned, with a fist twisting in her belly, to run to the newly tiled master.
    The same senseless destruction met her.
    A sledgehammer, she thought, maybe a pick. Someone had pounded, chipped, gashed the tiles, the glass block, the walls. Hours and hours of work, destroyed.
    With ice coating that fist in her belly, she walked downstairs and outside into the rain to make the now familiar call to the police.
    “CAME IN THROUGH the back door,” Wilson told her. “Broke the glass, reached in, turned the lock. It appears he used your tools—that short-handled sledgehammer, the pickax—to do the damage. Who knew you’d be out for the evening?”
    “Nobody. I didn’t know I’d be out. It was spur of the moment.”
    “And your car remained here, in full view from the road?”
    “Yes. I left the veranda light on, and two lights on inside—one up, one down.”
    “And you left here about two