“Everything okay?” he asked, trying to seem like a normal houseguest and not a weird, silent, giant cat that slept on cabinets.
“Huh?” She paused to glance at him before returning to her phone. “Oh, yeah. Everything is fine. Just reworking my schedule. All my time with Dani and those dogs made me miss a ton of appointments today.”
Shay cringed a little. “Sorry about that.” Not about his daughter—she was worth anyone’s time as far as he was concerned—but the dogs. He had no excuse for the dogs.
“She’s not talking about doctor appointments or anything like that,” Max announced, dropping into another nearby chair.
“Tock is talking about her thirty-minute blocks of time,” Nelle explained.
Streep sat down on the floor, resting her arms on the big coffee table. “She books all those little blocks of time with stuff to do. Sometimes weeks in advance. And then moves them around as she deems necessary.”
“But only she can move them,” Max said, whose neck-length purple hair was suddenly in two ponytails. Shay hadn’t seen her do that. When she first sat down, her hair was just hanging down, free. “Tock gets really pissed when anyone else fucks with her schedule.”
“Because all of you keep fucking with it,” Tock replied. “If you guys just used the app I created and my time management method . . . your lives would be so much more—”
“Sad and desperate?”
“Uptight?”
“Riddled with despair?”
“I was actually going to say ‘functional,’ but whatever.”
“Do you enjoy time management, Shay?” Streep asked him with a sweet smile.
“Uh . . . what? Are your eyes okay? They’re blinking a lot.”
Tock snorted a laugh and dropped her head.
“My eyes are fine,” Streep replied, her smile now a little strained. “I just mean, how do you manage your time? With apps? Or an old-fashioned datebook? A big wall calendar? Post-it notes? Writing notes on your hand?”
Not knowing what to say, Shay said nothing.
“So, are we not going to talk about your grandmother?” Max asked while staring at her phone. Now her hair was in one high ponytail. Again, Shay hadn’t seen her change it.
Tock briefly closed her eyes and took in a deep breath before answering. “Sure, we can talk about her.” She lowered her phone and looked at Max. “What would you like to say?”
“She was great!”
Tock’s face tightened. Shay saw it. Like she was gritting her teeth or something. He just didn’t know why. “Uh-huh.”
“Friendly,” Streep added. “Charming.”
“Nothing like you,” Nelle joked.
Tock nodded. “All very true.”
“Still, we were surprised you never told us,” Mads said as she entered the room with Finn and dropped onto his lap once he’d sat in the love seat across from the others.
Tock lifted her hands and immediately dropped them. “Never told you what?”
Mads leaned forward, hands clasped in front of her, and replied, “How much that woman fucking hates us.”
*
Tock studied her teammates.
“What? No,” she argued. “My . . . my grandmother doesn’t hate you.”
“You don’t think I know when someone hates me?” Mads asked. “I lived with someone who hated me. Actually,” she self-corrected, “two someones. My mother and my grandmother. Every day, I looked into their cold, dead eyes and saw hatred. And I saw the same thing from your grandmother.”
Tock refused to believe any of this. “Why would my grandmother hate you? You’re all honey badgers. You’re all good at what you do. You’ve always had my back. And she’s a big believer in loyalty. I’ve only been keeping her away from you guys because I didn’t want her recruiting you.”
“She would have recruited us,” Max noted, “just so she could be sure we were dead by the time we were eighteen.”
“No way!”
“As you know, Tock, I feed on the hatred others have of me. It gives me life. It gives me motivation. It’s like Popeye’s spinach. And I left that conversation quite satiated. Almost overfull.”
Tock took another look around the room, studying each of her fellow badgers. They were being serious with her. They all felt this way. “Did she say something to you guys? Was she rude?”
“No,” Mads said. “She was wonderful. Couldn’t say enough nice things about us.”
“Just so we’re clear,” Nelle said, “she has no problem with you.”
“She adores you,” Streep said.
“I think you’re her favorite.” Max glanced at her phone. “Which is impressive since you seem to have so many cousins, and she seems to be the grandmother of them all.”
“Yes, but as for us . . . ?” Nelle spread her hands out, glancing around the room. “Pure hatred.”
“And you know what that means,” Mads said before looking at Max.
Grinning, Max promised, “That means I’m going to have so much fun fucking with her.”
*
“What are you doing?”
Shay, now sitting on the stoop at the back of Mads’s house, overlooking a surprisingly large yard, pointed. “Watching.”
Tock sat down beside him. “Watching what?”
“Wait. You’ll see.”
They did, sitting there in silence, staring at an empty backyard. It didn’t feel awkward or strange, though. Just quiet.
Finally, the silent waiting paid off.
“Is that your dog?” Tock asked.
Shay turned his head to look at her. “That’s a coyote.”
“Oh.” She leaned against him and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone, but all dogs look alike to me.”
“I see that. But this is actually interesting.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. Mads’s coyote has moved his girlfriend in. And their kids!”
For the last thirty minutes, before Tock had come out here, Shay had been watching a female coyote carrying pup after pup to the den the male had created under Mads’s house.
“How many puppies does he have?” Tock asked.
“So far . . . ? Five, I think.”
“Wow. What a whore he is.”
“Huh?”
“After everything Mads has done for him, he knocks up another woman and then moves her and their kids into the home Mads has paid for. It’s like a Maury Povich episode.”
Shay laughed. Hard.
“Finn’s going to be pissed when he finds out there are more coyotes,” Shay said when he could finally speak.
“He does not seem like a fan.”
“He’s not.” Shay glanced at Tock. “Um . . . hey. Listen . . . thanks. For today. Dani really enjoyed her time with you. And helping with the dogs and her math. All that was really . . . cool.”
“Sure. We need more women in STEM.” When he just gazed at her, she explained, “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. When we find girls who really love math and science, we need to support them because insecure boys will try to push them out. And I can’t have that. So, if she needs any more help with her work or whatever . . . just let me know.”