Looking for Laura, page 23
He should be ecstatic.
But Sally…Sally was going to be his mother’s boss.
“You’ll see,” she said, her smile losing its acerbic edge. “It’s going to work out perfectly. I like your mother. She’s great with kids, too.”
“Kids? What, are you opening a child care center on the side?”
Sally shook her head. “I had Rosie and a friend in here yesterday and your mother was terrific with them. She must have been a fantastic mother. It makes me wonder why you turned out the way you did.”
Fresh indignation welled within him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean—” her smile softened “—that you left your sense of humor behind when you left home this morning. Would you like a cup of coffee? It might help.”
He longed to say no, just because he didn’t want her to be right. But it was Wednesday morning, he’d been in her company for all of ten minutes, and she’d been right about everything else, so she might as well be right about this, too. “Yeah,” he grunted. “I’d like a cup of coffee.”
“The Irish créme is very good,” Tina remarked.
It sounded alcoholic—which might be exactly what he needed, but not this early in the morning. “I’ll take the most normal coffee you’ve got. And one of those muffins,” he added, remembering how enticing they’d smelled when Tina had brought them in from the kitchen. Remembering how they’d made him think of Sally, warm and soft inside and spicy.
Sally pulled a waxed tissue from a box and used it to grip a muffin. She started to place it on a plate, but he halted her. “To go,” he said. He couldn’t bear to spend any more time here, seated at one of those charming round tables beneath an incoherent painting, with Bronowski on one side and on the other some crazed guy dressed for a funeral, penning a manifesto in a spiral-bound notebook. He couldn’t bear to spend another minute in Sally’s presence, when she’d soundly defeated him on every level and yet lacked the arrogance to look smug about it.
Instead, he took his bag and his lidded cardboard cup, handed Sally a five-dollar bill, pocketed his change and headed for the door, resisting the urge to drop the coins into the tip jar near the cash register. Just the thought of his mother pocketing coins from that jar, an extra few nickels and quarters to supplement her wages, made him queasy.
Had everything fallen into place? It had fallen, all right, but he wasn’t sure where or how far. All he knew was that he wasn’t the least bit pleased.
She hadn’t expected him to show up at her front door at six o’clock that evening, but she wasn’t really surprised to see him standing on the porch when she answered the doorbell. At the café that morning he’d been fueled by a righteous anger that was totally unjustified. Now he looked weary and haggard, his fuel-gauge needle aiming at empty. The jacket he’d had on at the New Day was gone, and he stood before her in wrinkled khakis and an even more wrinkled white shirt, the collar open and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair was a tangle of black waves, and his expression was contrite.
“I’m an asshole,” he said.
She grinned. “Now, there’s something we agree on.”
“Can I come in?”
Her Crock-Pot was going to buzz in a couple of minutes. She’d abandoned Rosie in the kitchen, assigning her the task of adding olives to the salad. If she remained on the porch with Todd, Rosie was going to add twenty olives to the salad and eat another dozen while she worked. Sally ought to start buying the kind with pits in them, so she could keep track of Rosie’s olive consumption.
Even if she didn’t have to check on her daughter and the stew, she would have invited him in. He’d apologized, after all, sort of. “Sure,” she said, gesturing him into the hall. “Would you like something to drink?”
“As long as it isn’t coffee.”
She beckoned him to follow her down the hall to the kitchen, where she caught Rosie flagrantly stuffing a fistful of olives into her mouth. “That’s enough,” she said, pulling the jar away from her. “How many did you eat?”
“Hi, Daddy’s Friend!” Rosie greeted Todd before justifying her gluttony. “I was starving.”
“We’re eating in—” she glanced at the Crock-Pot “—two minutes.”
“Good, ’cuz I’m starving. Are you gonna have dinner with us, Daddy’s Friend?”
“Could you call me Todd, please?” he asked, then lifted his gaze to Sally, as if searching for approval.
“Are you gonna have dinner with us?” she echoed Rosie.
“Um…sure. I guess. Actually, I was thinking about that drink you offered.”
“There’s beer in the fridge.”
The Crock-Pot buzzed. Todd opened the refrigerator, pulled a bottle of beer from the door shelf and twisted off the cap. Sally emptied the stew into a serving dish and carried it to the table. Rosie brought over the salad, which appeared to be three parts olives to two parts everything else. Sally got the bread, a crusty, floury loaf she’d picked up at the bakery on her way home from the café, and Rosie got the butter. Todd sipped his beer, then took the chair Sally pointed out to him.
He peered through the glass lid of the serving dish. “What is it?” he asked delicately.
“Lentil stew.”
“Lentil stew,” he echoed, his upper lip flexing as if it wanted to curl in disgust.
“It’s good,” Rosie assured him, kneeling on her chair and passing her plate to Sally for a portion. “It tastes like glue.”
“It does not,” Sally refuted her. “And how would you happen to know what glue tastes like?”
“Well, it’s gloppy like glue,” Rosie explained. “It tastes like beans.”
Sally could live with that. She spooned a portion onto Rosie’s plate, helped herself and then passed the spoon to Todd, who dabbed a modest amount on his plate and stared at it dubiously.
“So,” Sally said. She liked having Todd in an apologetic mood. She liked having him greet the food she’d served—food she knew damn well was delicious—with apprehension.
Mostly, though, she just liked having him in her house. The realization shaved a layer off her cheerfulness.
“So?”
“So, why did you call yourself that thing on my porch?”
“What did he call himself, Mommy?”
“A thing.”
“An ass,” Todd told her, editing lightly.
“Eeew. Yuck!” Rosie erupted in laughter. “Trevor says an ass is a donkey, but I know it’s really a butt.”
“That’ll do it for the anatomy lesson,” Sally cut her off. “So, Todd—I guess my real question is, what brings you here? Surely it can’t be my wonderful lentil stew.”
“It’s not bad,” he said manfully after taking a tentative bite of the concoction. He helped himself to several thick slabs of bread, sipped his beer and said, “If my mother wants to work at your café, who am I to say no? If you make her happy, Sally, I’ll be happy.”
“I can’t promise I’ll make her happy. But I think she’ll enjoy the job.”
“I don’t know what my dad’s going to do about Hilton Head, though.”
“Perhaps you ought to let your parents figure that out.”
He gave her a long look, as if she’d just delivered Solomonic wisdom. “You’re right. I love them both, but I don’t like them dragging me into their situations.”
“Then don’t let them.”
He nodded. “I also…used my resources today.”
In other words, he’d learned something about Laura Ryershank. She rolled her eyes toward Rosie, who was mining olives from the salad bowl, and rolled them back to him.
He nodded again, obviously comprehending her silent message. “So, Rosie, how was your day?” he asked.
“It was stupid,” she said, then launched into a detailed description. A boy in her class had taught several of the other boys how to suck a straw half-full of milk, then aim it and exhale through the straw, squirting the milk at a chosen target. Milk had spewed back and forth long enough to cause a significant mess, and the school’s head teacher had come to lecture Rosie’s whole class even though the girls hadn’t done anything wrong because they weren’t stupid like the boys. Instead of recess, everyone had to stay indoors and clean the milk. It was utterly stupid.
And that wasn’t all. Her teacher was also stupid, because she’d tried to teach the class the lyrics to a song she didn’t know, and so she’d made up new words for the second verse, but her words didn’t rhyme and they made the song sound stupid.
But wait—there was more. Ashleigh Cortez was stupid because she was wearing gold nail polish and bragging about it, like it was real gold, fourteen karat, she’d said, but it was just nail polish, not jewelry, and Ashleigh Cortez was stuck-up because her father was the chairman of the biology department at Winfield College and if it wasn’t for him, no one from Winfield would ever get into medical school. At least that was what Ashleigh said.
Amazingly, Rosie was able to eat while she recited this soliloquy. She even chewed with her mouth closed most of the time.
Sally was grateful—and not just that Rosie chewed with her mouth closed. With her daughter monopolizing the conversation, she could sort her thoughts while she ate.
Todd had been an asshole that morning. But a man who could apologize was a rarity. Paul never used to apologize. When he’d made a mistake, he would rationalize it, explain why it really hadn’t been his fault, or, if necessary, shift the blame onto Sally. If he came home late from work to an overcooked dinner, he would never say he was sorry; he’d say he had told Sally he was going to be home late, and her forgetfulness had led to the overcooked meal. If he broke a stained-glass ornament, responsibility lay not with him but with her, for having so damn many ornaments stuck to the window that a man couldn’t make a sweeping gesture without knocking one off its suction cup hook. If he acted like an asshole—and as she reminisced about it, she realized that he did quite often—he always had a rationale for his behavior.
But Todd had acknowledged his own assholeness, which paradoxically made him seem like the exact opposite of an asshole to her.
And he was eating her lentil stew, eating it without complaining about how much he loved red meat. And he was listening to Rosie without yawning or glancing at his watch.
And he’d come to share the information he’d gathered about Laura Ryershank.
And his hands were…big. Large and manly as he wielded a fork, as he lifted a chunk of bread to his lips, as he took a swig of beer from the bottle. Sally hadn’t had a man eating at her table since the day Paul had died.
She liked this. She liked feeding Todd.
“I’m done,” Rosie announced, apparently referring both to her saga of school stupidity and her dinner. “Can I be excused?”
“I’ve got something for you, Rosie,” Todd said, rising to his feet as she did.
Sally opened her mouth to protest that he shouldn’t have brought Rosie anything. She still owed him for the rice necklace; she didn’t want to be even more deeply indebted to him. And just because he’d behaved foolishly at the café that morning didn’t mean he could exonerate himself by showering gifts upon her daughter.
But he was already on his way through the kitchen door. “It’s in my car. I’ll be right back.”
“What did you get me?” Rosie singsonged, chasing him out of the room. “Is it a toy?”
Swallowing her misgivings, Sally cleared the dishes from the table. Todd had cleaned his plate and drained the beer bottle. As troubled as she was by her pleasure in feeding him, she was even more troubled by how naturally he’d fit into their kitchen, their evening meal, how easily he’d made himself at home. Just that morning she’d have been the first to label him with the word he’d used to describe himself.
But now she could almost convince herself she liked him. Which was…well, troubling.
Hearing his voice and Rosie’s, she abandoned the sink and crossed to the doorway. They stood in the hall, Todd handing Rosie a stack of computer diskettes. “These are your dad’s games, remember? DragonKeeper and Dark Thunder, and I don’t know, some other games.”
“Cool!” Rosie’s eyes widened.
“I thought you’d enjoy them more than me. And they were your dad’s, so…”
“Cool!” Rosie took them from Todd’s outstretched hand. “Can I play them now, Mommy? Can I?”
“Um…I don’t—”
Rosie swung back to Todd. “Thank you!” she said, then peered up at her mother hopefully. “Can I play them, Mommy?”
Sally caught Todd’s eye. He nodded slightly. He wanted Rosie to play the games. Sally couldn’t say no. “Sure. But turn the sound down. I don’t want to hear all that booming and banging.”
“Okay! Thanks! Thanks, Daddy’s—I mean, Todd!” Rosie scampered off to the den, the laces in her sneakers glittering in the light from the ceiling fixture.
Todd gazed after Rosie until she was out of sight, then turned to Sally with a smile. “If you offered me another beer, I’d say yes.”
“Help yourself. I’ve got dishes to do.”
He trailed her into the kitchen. “I thought it would be better to talk about Laura Ryershank if Rosie wasn’t around,” he explained, swinging open the refrigerator and pulling another bottle from the door shelf. Wrenching off the cap, he planted himself right by the sink so he could confer with Sally while she filled the basin with soapy water.
She squirted a little extra soap, inhaled the lemon-scented steam rising from the water and shut off the faucet. “What did your resources come up with?” she asked.
He slouched against the counter, beer in hand, hair mussed. A faint shadow of beard darkened his jaw. He had extraordinarily dark, thick eyelashes. She’d never noticed that before. “This Laura has published three books of poetry, and they’re all for sale at the college bookstore. None of them had her photo on the inside of the cover, so I didn’t bother to buy them.”
“Of course not,” Sally said with a chuckle. “Why buy them for the poetry?”
“I don’t like poetry, okay? If my mother quotes ‘The Road Not Taken’ one more time I’m going to muzzle her.”
“That’s a nice poem. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood…’”
“I’ll muzzle you, too,” he threatened.
“Okay.” She smiled sweetly at him. “Is your mother a Robert Frost fan?”
“No. She’s just quoting the poem because she likes watching me destroying four years’ worth of expensive orthodonture by gnashing my teeth.” He put down his bottle, pushed away from the counter and unhooked the dish towel from the cabinet doorknob on which it hung. “How come you don’t have a dishwasher?” he asked, taking the plate she’d just finished rinsing and wiping it with the towel.
“It’s an old house. There was no dishwasher in it when we bought it.”
“You could put a dishwasher in.”
“I suppose.” She scrubbed the tines of a fork until they glinted. “I don’t mind washing dishes. I’ve always found it kind of soothing.”
He took the fork from her and spent more time than warranted drying it off. “So, this Ryershank woman lives in Great Barrington, which would put her less than an hour away from Winfield. Easy for Paul to see her, but far enough away that she might choose to write him letters.”
“I wonder how he would have met her,” Sally said.
“Maybe he attended one of her poetry readings.”
She shot him a telling look. “You knew Paul longer than I did. Do you think he’d ever attend a poetry reading?”
“If he knew the poet was beautiful and charismatic?” He arched one eyebrow.
Sally felt the dishcloth slip from her fingers. “Are you saying he went out of his way to find beautiful, charismatic women?”
“Well…” He realized he’d divulged more than he should have. Then he shrugged. “Every healthy male does.”
“Do you? Do you go to poetry readings just to ogle the poet?”
“If I heard she was beautiful and charismatic?” He shrugged again. “Nah. I prefer to ogle beautiful, charismatic women at the Chelsea.” The Chelsea was a pool hall and bar a few blocks south of the Valley News headquarters, near the train tracks. “All heterosexual men go out of their way to ogle beautiful, charismatic women. If they don’t, nine times out of ten it’s because they’re dead.”
“And the tenth time?”
“They’re with their wives.” He held out his hand as if waiting for her to pass him something to dry.
She rinsed a bowl and delivered it into his towel-draped hands. “All right. Maybe he attended a poetry reading and went berserk over Laura Ryershank. So berserk he had an affair with her—the only affair of his that you know about,” she added, testing him. If he thought Paul had been within the realm of normal male behavior in sitting through a poetry reading, he might know of other instances when Paul had ogled women.
He didn’t take her bait but simply dried the bowl.
“And he went berserk enough to give her my pocketknife.”
“His pocketknife. You gave it to him.”
“Whatever. Do you know exactly where in Great Barrington she lives? We could drive out there—”
“She’s not there now. She’s on the board of directors of a writers’ colony in upstate New York. It’s closed during the winter, but she helps to open it up in the spring.”
“Where in upstate New York?” Sally didn’t remember ever hearing about any writers’ colonies when she’d been growing up—but then, she didn’t hear about lots of things when she’d been growing up.
“In the Adirondacks. Somewhere west of Lake George.”
“West of the town or west of the lake?”
He looked stumped. “I didn’t know there was more than one Lake George. I’ve got the name of the town written down, though. We could figure it out.”
