Chapter 2
When Rita finally woke up the next morning, the sun was in her eyes and her clock read eighteen minutes past nine o' clock. The smell of pancakes filled the air, but it was an old smell. As she yawned and stretched, she resigned herself to a breakfast of cold cereal, which wasn't all that bad, except that they probably didn't have her favorites anymore. She stretched, luxuriating in the warmth of the morning and the happy afterglow of getting her ashes hauled. The imprint of the wolf in her rear had faded, making her regret that they hadn't tied, because she would feel that longer.
Thoughts of Brian and her cousin crossed her mind, but she didn't worry about them too much. Brian didn't have to know. Her cousin could take care of herself. She lay in bed, grinning, thinking about the night, rubbing a paw up and down her stomach and hips. This had turned out to be a pretty good trip home after all. She couldn't wait to see if she ran into some of her friends downtown, so she could tell them about what she and Mark Winter had done the previous night.
Of course, she thought, getting up finally, she couldn't tell them in front of Brian, because Brian would want to know how she could be so sure. Rita wasn't about to screw up what she had going with Brian just to notch herself one up on Winter. And come to think of it, she didn't really need to do anything like that outside the house anyway.
And she didn't really have any friends she was looking forward to seeing.
It had been a nice idea while it lasted, though.
She showered, dried her fur off, and walked downstairs in loose strides and a black shirt.
Nobody was in the living room or the rec room. She poked her muzzle into the kitchen and smelled the pancakes, more strongly. Following the scent to the oven, she found a small plate inside, still warm, and assumed it was hers, since everyone else appeared to be gone. The syrup and butter were in the usual place, and so, when she got out to the dining room, was her uncle.
"Morning," the older member grunted, engrossed in his newspaper.
"Hi," Rita said, tucking into the pancakes with gusto. She had gotten halfway through her pancakes before her uncle said anything else.
"You have a nice shirt and slacks?"
"Mm-mmm," Rita said around a mouthful. "I didn't bring any. Maybe in the closet."
"You'll dress up nice tonight for the party. And then your aunt wants to go to church tonight."
Rita swallowed. "I don't want to go to the Andersons' party. I thought maybe Brian and I would just stay home."
"You will. We're having the party here."
"But, Uncle Hal . . ."
Her uncle picked up the paper and started reading again. "I don't ask much of you anymore. All I want is for us to show up at this party as a family."
"Some family," Rita muttered under her breath. Fortunately, her uncle pretended not to have heard, though she saw the older fox's eyes twitch and knew he had. "Where is Brian, anyway? And Aunt Peggy?"
"They went out shopping."
"Oh." Rita finished her pancakes in silence and got up. She heard the rustling of the newspaper behind her.
"If you want to be helpful, you could get out the vacuum and sweep the living room and rec room. There're needles all over the floor again."
"You shouldn't have real trees anyway," Rita retorted from the doorway. "Why kill a tree when you could have a nice-looking fake one?"
"Those trees are raised to be Christmas trees. If we didn't buy them, someone else would, or else they'd be chopped up at the end of the season. So why shouldn't we enjoy them?"
"Yeah, but by buying them, you're creating a market that encourages more people to harvest them."
Her uncle looked at her with a piercing glare. "Don't talk back. Just vacuum the floor."
"I'm on vacation," Rita turned to go into the kitchen.
"So is your friend. but he was pitching in this morning before you were even up."
"Well, he likes shopping; I don't."
"He was cleaning, too. Scrubbed down the back porch. It looks great. I was thinking of serving drinks out there."
So Brian had probably seen the stain on the porch. Rita sighed, feeling a flush of embarrassment and shame. She'd have some talking to do when he got home. But the idea of having drinks out on the porch, and standing on the spot where she'd gotten a nice humping, appealed to her. "I think that's a great idea. Where are Gillian and Mark?"
"Gillian went out shopping, too."
"What about Mark?"
Either her uncle hadn't heard her or was ignoring her. She rinsed her dishes and left them in the sink, then went to stick her nose in the rec room.
The couch and air mattress were both empty, but if she put her nose down to the couch, she could smell the wolf through the thick scents of her and her siblings. Mark must have gone out somewhere else. He had family in the area, too, so he likely wouldn't stick around for the whole holiday. Rita grinned to herself. Better that way. Why taint a nice meaningless encounter with awkward after-sex conversation?
She ran the vacuum lackadaisically around the living room and rec room, then retreated upstairs to check in with her online friends, who all seemed to be having a great deal more fun than she was. She lamented being stuck in the middle of nowhere, got a couple of offers to spend next year's holidays, and told one of her closest friends what had happened the previous night. They discussed how she should handle it with Brian, then moved on to talk about the latest download by their favorite band, leaving Rita in a considerably better mood by the time she heard activity downstairs.
Her ears caught female voices and Brian's light male voice. Brian would come upstairs, she knew, because he would want to talk about what had gone on the previous night. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Rita's door creaked open.
"Hey," Brian said.
"Nice shopping?" Rita asked.
"Yeah!" Brian shut the door and went to sit on the bed. "We got the stuff for the mocho and your aunt's gonna let me help make it. You have a cool family."
Rita shrugged. "If you don't have to live with 'em."
Brian's tail had been wagging against the bed, then it slowed and stopped and his ears went down. "So . . . I, uh, I'm sorry I didn't come up last night. I was just real tired and I fell asleep."
This took Rita by surprise. "Oh, that's okay . . ."
Brian didn't respond, but he was looking down and his ears remained down.
Rita took the initiative. "I heard you cleaned up the porch."
"Yeah." He sighed. "I went out there in the morning just to get some fresh air and . . . it looked like it needed some cleaning."
"Listen, I went downstairs to find you and Mark was awake . . . well, I woke him up to tell him to come upstairs to my cousin's room. He just grabbed me . . . it all happened really fast."
Miraculously, Brian appeared satisfied with this explanation. "I guess it's partly my fault. If I'd come upstairs when I said I would, it wouldn't have happened."
"Well, yeah." Rita then added magnanimously, "But I could have woken you up first. He was just nearer the door. I really didn't expect it to happen."
"So did he, uh . . ." Brian looked down at the floor. "I guess I don't need to know. He's a teenager, so you can't catch anything from him. All right. I won't think about it again. But you should have cleaned up. What if your aunt and uncle had found it first?"
"Yeah." Rita nodded, thinking, That's what I wanted, but only said, "I was just so tired."
"Must have been going around." Brian gave her a hesitant smile. "Oh, your aunt has a surprise for you."
Rita rolled her eyes. "Did she get pistachio ice cream again?"
"No, no. I won't tell you what it is." Brian reached out and took Rita's paw.
Rita got up slowly. "I hate surprises."
"It's nothing bad, I promise," Brian said.
"You don't know my aunt." She followed her boyfriend into the hall and down the stairs. Rounding the bottom of the stairs, she could hear her aunt in the kitchen, talking to someone she assumed was her cousin until she caught the scent in the air. "Oh, no." She stopped and groaned. "She brought home Alice."
Brian paused. "Yeah. She's really nice. Your aunt said you were friends."
"Were. We dated in tenth grade. She's my ex-girlfriend."
"So, that's nice. You must have been really close. Was it a bad breakup?"
"No, not really." Rita kept her voice down. "We broke up because I decided I liked boys."
The boy she currently liked wagged his tail. "Good! So there's no problem."
"Don't you see what my aunt is doing?"
Brian looked back at the kitchen and then at Rita. "Um . . . trying to fill her house with friends on Christmas?"
"She's trying to get me and Alice back together, to get me to go back to her."
"Huh? No." Brian waved a paw. "She just . . . we ran into Alice completely by accident."
"I'm sure. She didn't make any calls on her cell phone before you left? Or while you were shopping?"
Now Brian looked less sure. "Well . . . she might have. Gillian and I had our own list to shop for."
"There you go." Rita shook her head. "I guess Alice probably doesn't have much interest in getting back together, at least." She headed for the kitchen, but now it was Brian who hesitated.
"Oh . . . she did say something about . . ."
"Oh, no. What?"
"About . . . missing the old days . . . I thought it was just, you know, friendship, I didn't know. I'm sorry, Rita."
Rita shook her head. "Might as well let her down gently." She squared her shoulders, curled her tail down against one leg, and marched into the kitchen. On her way there, she passed Gillian.
Gillian was walking quickly with her head held high and a very satisfied smirk on her face. "Have fun," she said to Rita, flicking her hair as she passed the red fox and marched up the stairs.
Brian stared after her. "What do you think she did?"
"I don't know," Rita said, "but I bet my aunt's in the liquor cabinet now."
Peggy wasn't, not quite, but her eyes kept flicking over towards it. Rita figured the only reason she wasn't going there immediately was because of the other female in the kitchen. Alice was much as she remembered her, a brown-headed girl with glasses and slightly matted hair that wasn't particularly remarkable. She'd gone out with her more for her shared love of books and words than for her looks or for the frankly unmemorable sex. They liked the same books at first, until she got into romance novels. When she discovered that they shared more taste in men than books, she'd called it quits.
Alice was holding a knife, hovering over a cutting board where a garlic clove had been half-chopped. When Rita came in, she gave the red fox a quick look and a strange smile, a distracted greeting. Rita's aunt barely seemed to see her at all.
"Aunt Peggy?" Rita walked over to her. "What did Gillian say?"
"I always wanted to have one, of course, but this is so sudden . . ." Peggy was , continuing some conversation she'd been having with Alice, looking at Alice and or the vodka bottle.
Rita looked at Alice. She glanced from her aunt to her. "A grandchild. Your cousin just announced that she's, um, expecting."
"She's pregnant?" Man, she thought. I can't top that one.
"I'm going to be a grandmother," her aunt said.
"Who's the father?" Rita asked.
"Oh, my, I didn't even ask," her aunt said faintly. "It must be Mark, or else . . . well . . ."
"Wasn't she dating that Jake guy for a few months?"
"Who's Mark?" Alice asked.
"You know him," Rita said. "Mark Winter."
"The wolf? So it'd be a . . ."
Mixed race cub, Rita thought She hadn't paid much attention in health class, but now she remembered some lecture from Mrs. Cartwright about how most mixed-species pairings couldn't have kids ("without issues," she added), but canines could, some of them. All the foxes could interbreed. Coyotes and wolves could too. There weren't any coyotes or wolves in their school, so she'd forgotten the lecture as soon as it happened. The wolves stayed with the wolves and the coyotes stayed with the coyotes. Why would anyone have a mixed-race cub anyway, when they wouldn't belong to either group? Unless that person was deliberately trying to piss off her family. But that was crazy. She wouldn't get pregnant just for that. would she?
Her aunt had put a paw to her muzzle at the mention of Mark's species and was now drifting towards the dining room. Rita figured her aunt would let her go get her drink and let Alice down at the same time. "Good to see you again," she said to Alice, urging her out into the foyer. "Come 'ere, there's someone I want you to meet."
"It's really good to see you too," Alice said, following Rita out to the base of the stairs. "I guess I showed up at the wrong time, huh?"
"This is Brian," Rita said. "Brian, this is Alice." As they were shaking hands, she said, "Brian is my boyfriend."
"Oh, that's sweet," Alice said. "How cute."
"We've been going out for three months now." She took Brian's paw and held it. Brian squeezed her paw back after a moment.
"That's just darling," Alice said, not looking at Brian at all. She reached out and touched his arm, the one that wasn't next to his girlfriend. "Wow, you've been working out."
"Just a little," Brian replied.
"So how did you end up coming back with my aunt?" Rita demanded.
"She'd already invited me for the party," Alice said. "I happened to be at the grocery store this morning and ran into her and she asked if I'd come along."
"She didn't call you?"
Alice looked away and grinned. "I'm a terrible liar. Yeah, she called me. She asked me not to tell you."
"Told you," Rita said to Brian, gesturing to Alice. "She wants us to get back together."
"Well, yeah," Alice said. "She only mentions it every time she sees me."
"I'm sorry," Rita said sincerely.
"Don't worry about it. I like your aunt. I like your whole family."
"Me too," Brian put in.
Rita rolled her eyes. "Great. You two can go help with dinner." She looked at the stairs. "I'm going to go find out what's going on with Gillian." She added to the puzzled-looking Brian, "She's pregnant."
Brian's mouth dropped open. "Pregnant?" he asked Alice as they walked back to the kitchen."
She mounted the stairs slowly, pushing open the door to Gillian's room. She leaned against the doorframe.
Gillian was placing clothes in a suitcase. "I'm sure I won't be able to come to the party tonight once Dad hears the news. Give my best to the Andersons."
"Are you really pregnant, or did you just say you are?"
Gillian grinned. "Oh, Rita, I wouldn't lie about something like that." She threw another sweater into her bag.
Rita leaned against the doorframe. "Who's the father?"
Gillian's eyes flashed darkly at her. "It was going to be Mark until you ruined that last night. Maybe I don't need a father."
"You're not immaculate."
"Thanks for the reminder, Ms. Pure and Clean. Don't you have something to stick in your muzzle other than my business?"
"Hey, I'm just curious. I mean, you are my cousin."
"Oh, you remember that, do you, since last night, I mean?" She'd filled her bag now. She zipped it closed.
"Look, it's not like that meant anything." Rita shook her head. "Anyway, I didn't start it."
"Oh, can it, slut. I heard you at dinner. Just because Mom and Dad don't know flirting when they hear it doesn't mean I don't."
"Fine, whatever." If Gillian was going to blame her harmless teasing for her boyfriend being attracted to her, she wouldn't be able to argue with that. "Where are you going?"
"Going to Mark's for the night. After that, I don't know."
"Don't be so sure about that. Uncle Hal was pretty insistent about me going to this party. And you're not showing enough to embarrass him yet."
"That's why I'm leaving now." Gillian lifted the bag and walked toward Rita. "If you'll get out of my way, that is."
Rita stepped aside and waved her graciously into the hallway. "Be my guest."
"Thank you."
Watching her flounce down the stairs, Rita thought, well, this is certainly the most eventful Christmas I can remember.
