Jared blew out a sigh. “What other issue? We have to make up a list of people we know who have mothers before you can focus? What is that all about?”
“Available mothers. Big difference.” Nate drummed his desktop with his fingers. “For my dad. Ever since Mom died, he’s been making me crazy.”
Jared snorted. “So what else is new? Your mom’s been dead for two years. You should be used to it by now.”
Nate raked a hand through his blond hair. “No. Lately it’s been getting worse. I can’t concentrate because I keep expecting him to come bursting in here with some other bizarre way we can improve the business.”
“Giving away Fourth of July fireworks with the company logo on the package wasn’t that bizarre.”
“Please. Nobody who saw them blow would realize that blue and green are the company colors and the first person who loses a hand would sue our butts off. You can bet dear old Dad wouldn’t offer to pay the lawyer’s bill, either. He can’t. He doesn’t have that kind of money.”
Jared rattled the papers on the table. “About this contract,” he began determinedly.
Nate flattened his palm over the rustling papers. “Not until I have my list.”
Throwing up his hands, Jared relented. “All right, all right. I’m almost afraid to ask. What do you plan to do with this list of people with mothers. Available mothers,” Jared immediately corrected before Nate could. “Marry the old guy off?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You’re not serious, are you?” Jared pointed an accusing finger at his buddy. “You are serious.” He threw himself back in his chair. “Aw, man, I don’t believe this. What are we, a dating service now? We’ve got a business here, Nate. We don’t have time to run a lonely hearts club, too.”
“Well, we can’t take care of business with my father breathing down our necks, now can we? The man is lost without Mom, lost. The way I see it, the only solution we’ve got is to find him some other interest in life besides me, his only son.” Nate sat up, his irritation with his partner’s obtuseness obvious.
“A wife, for example?” Jared asked.
“Exactly. Look. It’s obvious.” Nate picked up a marker and leaned to the side, writing on a large sheet of paper clipped to a tripod. “Look, we’ll flowchart it. Try and follow along.” He wrote the word father in large block type at the top of the paper and pointed to it. “My father.”
Jared rolled his eyes and nodded. “Your father.”
“Has been sticking his nose in where it doesn’t belong, making us crazy on a daily basis since my mom passed away.” Nate drew a dash down from the word father and wrote Nate and Jared.
“I still don’t think the fireworks were that bad an idea.”
“Shut up. Dad needs something to distract him from us, right?”
Jared nodded. “Okay. Distractions can be good. That would probably work.”
“He needs a woman in his life. He never bugged me like this when Mom was around. She kept him occupied.”
“I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully of the dead, but your mom was nuts,” Jared pointed out, stating what he thought to be the obvious. “Keeping her out of trouble was a full-time occupation for your father.”
Nate shrugged. It was the truth. “Mom distracted him, see?”
“Uh-huh. So we make this list of available women and this helps us…how? Exactly how do we get them together?” Jared waggled a finger admonishingly. “And no force allowed. Shotgun weddings went out a long time ago.”
Nate waggled the marker right back at his partner. “We’ll worry about that part when we get that far. Think about it. This makes perfect sense. Somebody we know is bound to have an unattached female relative of the right age somewhere in their family tree. We just have to find her. Once we accomplish that, we sic her on Pop. Women are supposed to be naturally nurturing, right? She’ll be all over him, cooking him wholesome dinners and stuff like that. He won’t be able to resist. She distracts him, see? Then he leaves us alone. Easy.”
Openly snickering at his buddy’s logic, Jared asked, “Naturally nurturing, huh? I don’t know about that. I’ve been out with one or two that would probably eat their own young.” But he gave it some thought. “You, um, really think this will work?”
Nate reached for the coffeepot that sat on a warmer on one side of the table. “Damn straight.”
Jared held out his coffee cup. “Okay, if you say so. Now, who goes on the list? And don’t say my mother. I don’t want her tangled in your nutty schemes. Then she’d start driving me crazy.”
Nate took a cautious sip of hot coffee. “No, your mother’s out. I’ll admit I thought about her, but I don’t think she’d put up with my father’s antics. Doesn’t she have any unmarried sisters or anything?”
“No.”
“Not even one?”
“No. God broke the mold after creating my mother.” Jared folded his hands together and raised his eyes piously. “Thank you, God.”
Nate slumped in his chair. “Okay, all right. Who do we know who does?”
The two men sat, marking the highly polished conference tabletop with fingerprints as they drummed their fingers and thought.
Tentatively Jared offered out loud, “Anne Reid brought in brownies the other day. She must have a mother.”
Nate snorted. “They were awful. Her mother probably taught her everything she doesn’t know about baking and Dad’s an old-fashioned kind of guy. He’d never go for a woman who couldn’t bake.”
“All right, I tried. This is your problem, you think of somebody.”
“Our problem,” Nate corrected. “Remember the contract? I can’t concentrate until we take care of this.” Nate gave Jared a mean little smile. “And just so you know, Dad’s signed up for a computer class over at the high school’s adult education program. He’s decided to help us with our books.”
Jared unstacked his feet and sat up straight, suddenly far more serious. “Fine. Mitzi Malone.”
“She was hatched, not born. Try again.”
The phone rang. Both men looked at it, then at each other. “You get it. If it’s my father, I’m not here.”
“You get it. It’s probably my mother.”
“Could be Sue Ann calling to tell you she can’t live without you. What if it’s a client?”
“They’ll leave a message.”
The machine did, in fact, pick up. Nate and Jared’s argument was broken into by a vivacious female voice. “Mr. Parker, this is Allison MacLord. I live in the condo just below yours? Please call me as soon as you get this message. There’s something leaking from your place down into mine. You’ve got a broken pipe or something. My bed’s soaked. I think you may have ruined my ceiling. Oh, ick, the carpet’s all squishy. You have insurance, right? My number’s 27…”
Nate snatched up the phone, and yelled into it, “What are you talking about Miss…whatever you said your name was? What’s leaking?”
Allison Marie MacLord held the phone away from her ear and blinked at it. One minute she’d been talking to a machine and the next a very vital, very vibrant, very forceful male voice. “Well, um, I don’t exactly know, Mr. Parker. I mean I just got home. My ceiling’s dripping, some paint’s already peeled and fallen, my mattress may never dry out and water’s welling up every