Looking for Laura, page 24
We. We could figure it out, he’d said. He was standing in her kitchen, drying her dishes and referring to her and himself as we.
“Are we going to make a trip there?” she asked cautiously.
His gaze narrowed on her, and she was once more distracted by his lush black eyelashes. They made the whites of his eyes look whiter, the irises darker. She felt a pulse flutter in her throat and had to swallow several times to keep from coughing.
“I was thinking, we could go this weekend. It’s a bit of a trek, though. I don’t think we could do it in one day.”
“All right.” She could probably tolerate two days in a car with him. They’d stay overnight in a motel. It would be an adventure. Maybe they could even spend a little time at the town of Lake George, playing miniature golf and eating cotton candy. They could take a boat ride on the lake, too. It would be a whole lot different from the Swan Boat ride they’d taken in Boston….
“But you’re not dragging Rosie along,” he warned.
The flutter disappeared, and resentment slashed through her, stiffening her spine. He’d been so nice to Rosie, listening to her boring monologue over dinner and then rewarding her with those computer-game disks. How dare he exclude her from their outing? “Of course I’m dragging her along.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“It’s a long trip, Sally. I’m not going to spend all that time in a car listening to ‘Animal Sweet.’”
“You could listen to Nirvana,” she said coldly. “I’m sure Rosie would be thrilled.” She yanked the stopper out of the drain, and the bubbly water made obscene gurgling and sucking noises as it seeped out of the basin. She wished her anger would drain away, too, but it wouldn’t. She was doubly exasperated—not just because he didn’t want Rosie to accompany him, but also because she’d been feeling…affectionate toward him. Fond. She’d been responding to his bedroom eyes, his sweet self-deprecation, his use of the word we.
Damn it. She’d started to like him, and now he was handing down orders like a control freak.
“Either Rosie comes with us,” she threatened, “or…”
“Or you won’t come? I can live with that.” He took a long drink of beer, and she wanted to tear the bottle out of his hands and smack him on the head with it. The nerve of him, enjoying her beer while he dictated the terms of their expedition.
Yet she didn’t want him going off to see Laura Ryershank without her. This Laura could really be the right one.
No way was she going off to upstate New York without Rosie, though. Especially on an overnight trip. What did he think, she could leave her daughter with strangers? Hire a nanny? Sure, Rosie had spent the night at Trevor’s house now and then, but that wasn’t the same as spending the night somewhere while Sally was in another state.
She hated him for snubbing Rosie—and worse, for snubbing her, implying that whether or not she came made no difference to him, implying that he’d be just as happy if she didn’t come at all. She hated him because his hair was so dark and his jaw so sharp, and his hands were so goddamn masculine.
Paul’s best friend. Two peas in a pod. Two birds of a feather. Two of a kind.
Two assholes.
And Todd was the prime asshole because he was the live one, standing in her kitchen and drinking her beer.
Fifteen
“I’ll watch Rosie,” Helen said.
“No.” Sally topped off the insulated silver pitcher with cream and returned the container to the refrigerator under the counter. “Really, it’s sweet of you to offer, but no.”
Helen fussed with the waist sash of her apron. She’d donned it over her blazer and it looked ridiculous, but Sally didn’t have the heart to tell her to take the blazer off. It was part of a slate-gray pinstripe pantsuit, and she obviously felt her grooming was extremely professional. It was—for another profession. Sally didn’t know Helen well enough to give her sartorial advice, though. If she got confectioner’s sugar on her perfectly tailored lapel, or some coffee splattered on her crisp two-button sleeve, maybe she’d rethink her work attire.
“I don’t know why Todd wants to go to Lake George,” Helen said. She toyed with the stack of napkins, pretending to tidy what didn’t need tidying. “All I know is, it’s got something to do with your husband. His being the executor of Paul’s will and all, he’s got to take care of this thing in Lake George that I guess has to do with the estate.” She concluded by presenting Sally with a questioning gaze.
“Right,” Sally muttered. Helen was fishing for information, but Sally wasn’t going to eat the worm. That her husband had cheated on her was humiliating. That she had made it her mission to find Paul’s sweetheart so she could retrieve a cheesy pocketknife was laughable. Bad enough that Todd knew. Sally would just as soon no one else did.
After a long pause, Helen must have assumed that Sally wasn’t going to explain the purpose of the trip. “Well, since it involves your husband, you’ve got to be there.”
“It involves my daughter’s father,” Sally pointed out. “Why shouldn’t she be there?”
“Because she’s a little girl and it’s a long trip.”
“She can handle a long trip.” Sally had taken Rosie to see her mother a couple of times—and to Boston last weekend. The child was a wonderful traveling companion.
“You want to make her sit in a car for, what, five or six hours? And then sit through some boring meeting concerning Paul’s estate or what have you. And then get back into the car for another five-hour drive. No five-year-old girl should have to go through that.”
When Helen described it that way, it did sound pretty grim.
“Rosie and I could have fun together,” Helen persevered. “A lot more fun than she’d have traveling all the way to some godforsaken place to do something with Paul’s estate. Of course he was her father—but do you really think dragging her along with you is going to bring her closer to him, or help her adjust to his death?”
No, Sally didn’t really think that. What she really thought was that traveling all the way to some godforsaken place alone with Todd would be disastrous. They’d bicker. They’d fight. She’d resent him because, without any effort, he made her far too aware of the lack of a man in her life—a lack that caused her to think about him in inappropriate ways, ways he didn’t think about her.
And then they’d be stuck somewhere overnight. She’d be forced to have dinner with him—or she’d have to refuse to have dinner with him, which would be awkward and would make her look like a ninny. She’d have to spend the night all by herself in a dreary motel room, instead of sharing the experience with Rosie. Rosie’s presence could brighten up even the dreariest motel room. Rosie would sing badly and talk incessantly and demand food. She’d make the trip fun.
“What’s with that guy?” Helen whispered, nudging Sally and pointing to the man in black, who was seated at his usual table, sipping an espresso and attacking his notebook with a pen. “Is he a spy?”
“I think he’s writing a novel,” Sally whispered back.
“Really? A novel?”
“He’s a regular. He comes here for coffee every morning, and he writes in his notebook.”
“He looks very angry.”
“Intense more than angry,” Sally suggested. “I think he’s just caught up in the passion of his story.”
“Good for him, then. Everyone should get caught up in a passion every now and then.” Helen gave a loving pat to the stack of napkins and smiled at Sally. Her smile was strained, as if her lips were rubber bands stretched taut. “So, you’ll let me stay with Rosie while you and Todd take care of this business.”
“No!” Sally wanted to laugh, or maybe to pluck Helen’s lips to hear if they twanged. “Why are you so eager to send me and Todd off alone? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were…” She faltered, unwilling to give voice to the possibility that Helen was playing matchmaker.
“You and Todd? Don’t be silly,” Helen insisted so emphatically, Sally didn’t believe her. “Todd’s not a romantic. And you’re in mourning. Poor Paul. I’m still in mourning over him, and I wasn’t even married to him. Such a sweet boy. God, I miss him. You must miss him even more.”
Sally figured that mentioning what a jerk Paul had been would be about as tactful as telling Helen her apron looked wrong with her outfit. Instead, she murmured, “You learn to keep going.”
“Yes, well, you’ve done a fine job of that. I mean it, Sally. You’ve got more backbone than I’d ever realized when all I knew of you was you were Paul’s wife. A lot of backbone. He’d be proud of you.”
He’d be pissed at her—if not for the fact that she was surviving just fine without him, then for the fact that her opinion of him was currently off the scale at the low end. He’d be furious because she no longer thought he was Mr. Wonderful. He’d be defensive because she would never let him forget that he’d given away her knife.
“Then it’s decided,” Helen announced brightly. “You’ll go with Todd. I can either bring Rosie home to stay with Walter and me, or I could stay at your house with her. Whichever you think would be easier on her.”
“Are you sure you really want to baby-sit for her? She can be a handful.”
Helen gave Sally a steady gaze. “You want to know why?”
“Yes.”
“I like her.”
Sally tried not to gape. “You like her?”
“She’s spunky and mouthy. She’s got more backbone than you and me combined.”
Sally wasn’t sure how to respond. Of course Helen liked Rosie—anyone with half a brain or half a heart couldn’t help loving the child—but that didn’t seem like enough of a reason for Helen to be forcing her baby-sitting services on Sally.
It had to be that Helen was trying to match her up with Todd. The idea was preposterous. They weren’t the least bit right for each other. Sally and Paul hadn’t been the least bit right for each other, either, but that was no reason for her to get into a relationship with another not-the-least-bit-right-for-her man.
Maybe Helen thought that if Todd and Sally hooked up, he’d be distracted enough to let her resume running the newspaper. Or maybe she thought that if he found a new lady, he’d give her some more grandchildren, who would live close by, unlike her other grandchildren in New Haven.
Maybe she knew the real purpose for Todd’s trip, and she wanted Sally to be with him when he confronted Laura Ryershank. Maybe all her blather about what a fine young man Paul had been was so much bull. Maybe she wanted Sally present for the big showdown.
Of course, it was always possible that she liked Rosie that much.
“I’ll think about it,” Sally muttered, then headed for the kitchen, determined not to think about it at all.
Sally insisted on phoning home from Albany. Todd offered her his cell phone, but she said she’d prefer to use a pay phone—which Todd understood to mean she’d prefer to call Rosie from someplace he wouldn’t be able to listen in on the conversation, the way he would have if she’d called from the car.
Stopping wasn’t a bad idea, anyway. He could use the break to take a leak and buy a soda. He found an all-purpose pit stop on the highway, watched her vanish into an alcove where the pay phones were located, then made use of the men’s room, emptying his bladder so he could get to work filling it again.
She was still on the phone when he emerged from the rest room and headed for the snack area. He pulled a chilled Coke from the refrigerator case and carried it over to the alcove, using sign and body language to ask whether she wanted him to buy one for her. She shook her head and turned her back to him.
She sure was chatting up a storm with Rosie. Todd wondered what they could be talking about for such a long time. It wasn’t as if they’d been separated for months.
Maybe Sally just wanted to talk, period. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet during the first stretch of the drive. He felt bad about that. He’d thought maybe they could become friends on this trip.
The notion was so bizarre it made him smile. He and Sally had nothing in common other than Paul, whom they both used to love and now loathed. Yet Todd had tried, really tried, to make this excursion something more than an ordeal.
He hadn’t said a word when she’d trudged out of her house lugging a suitcase that looked like a cross between Mary Poppins’s carpetbag and a marine duffel. Todd knew Paul had owned a neatly matched set of leather luggage, but apparently Sally didn’t care to make use of it. Perhaps Paul had brainwashed her into thinking she must never touch it. He could be very territorial about his things, a trait Todd had learned about firsthand during their freshman year of college, when he’d borrowed volume one of Paul’s Oxford English Dictionary without asking. Paul had made it quite clear, in a lecture that had lasted a good twenty minutes, that the OED was his, not theirs, and that if Todd wanted to share something, he ought to ask first, and if he asked, Paul reserved the right to say no. Todd had thought he’d been doing Paul a favor by not asking, because Paul had had his nose buried in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and he’d hated being interrupted when he was reading de Tocqueville. But he’d learned that Paul could be very prickly about other people using his things.
So Sally wasn’t using Paul’s luggage. In the interest of forging a friendship with her, Todd had suppressed the urge to make a snide remark about her moth-eaten valise. He’d stocked his glove compartment with CDs he thought she might like—no Nirvana, no Led Zeppelin, but instead the softer-edged stuff: Bonnie Raitt, the Gin Blossoms, that Eric Clapton disc with all the sappy songs on it.
He’d done a lot of thinking, and he’d realized that while antagonizing Sally came as naturally to him as singing in the shower, there was no point in encouraging hostility between them. He and Sally could do better. They could get along, and if they did, the trip would be a hell of a lot more pleasant.
Actually, he’d thought about more than that. As he pocketed his change and twisted off the cap of his soda bottle, he spotted Sally emerging from the telephone alcove, her denim jumper floating down past her knees and her hair a spill of curls. The sight of her reminded him that there were other reasons he didn’t want to stay her enemy.
And the most important reason wasn’t that. His sexual response to her was an interesting and totally unexpected phenomenon, but it wasn’t why he’d wanted to achieve a détente with her.
The most important reason was Paul. Everything Todd had known about Sally he’d learned through the filter of Paul’s perspective. Everything he’d ever thought of her he’d thought of in terms set by Paul. When he and Paul used to meet for drinks after work—never at the Chelsea, which Paul had considered too downscale for Winfield’s most able lawyer to patronize, but instead at Grover’s, with its pretentious wood paneling and Tiffany lamps and its proximity to the college campus—Paul would tell Todd things about Sally that Todd had believed. She was a slob. She was flakier than dandruff. She was dizzy, daffy and dim. Paul would regale Todd with Sally stories—about how she talked to the flowers in her garden, going so far as to christen some of them with names, how she thought she was safer driving an old car than a new one because anything that was going to go wrong with an old car had already gone wrong with it, how she fervently believed that the best way to potty-train Rosie was to let her run around the house bare assed so if she had to go pee-pee she wouldn’t have to waste time dropping her drawers, how she thought tofu would prevent cancer and if you saw a rainbow you were supposed to close your eyes, spin in a circle on one foot and chant, “Light and color, color and light, now my wish is burning bright.”
Paul would relate tale after tale, and Todd would roar with laughter at Sally’s goofy antics and half-baked theories, never questioning whether Paul was being fair in talking about her that way.
Or loyal.
Paul hadn’t been loyal, and that bothered Todd. He felt guilty for having laughed, guilty and a little ashamed. Especially now that he understood how deeply Paul’s disloyalty ran.
He didn’t speak until they were back in the car, the gas needle pointing at full and Bonnie Raitt crooning from the speakers. “How’s everything with Rosie?” he asked as he cruised up the ramp and onto the highway.
“Fine.” The phone call hadn’t thawed Sally much. She was still chilly and terse, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze straight ahead, her eyes hidden by sunglasses.
He was determined to get a genuine conversation going. “Just fine? What were they doing?”
“Baking brownies.”
He frowned. “I hope Rosie knows how to bake brownies. My mom sure doesn’t.”
“They were using a mix,” Sally told him.
“You were on the phone a long time, considering.”
“I made a second call.”
He gave her a swift, questioning look. He wanted to ask whom she’d called, but that might sound too nosy. “How come?” he asked, instead.
She cut him a break and answered the question he hadn’t asked. “I called the café. Tina offered to work this morning, which was good because Nicholas, who usually takes the Saturday-morning shift, was coming in late. I wanted to make sure everything was all right there.”
“Was it?” At her silence, he added, “All right?”
“Yes.” She leaned back in the seat, her hair bunching in the hollow at the base of her skull. Her flying-saucer hat sat on the seat behind her, and he hoped it would stay there until they got back to Winfield. It looked better on the seat than on Sally.
“Good.” He’d had easier conversations with convicted murderers at the state prison.
She loosened up a bit more. “Tina said several people from the Valley News staff came in for coffee. Apparently, your mother has been talking the place up.”
“I don’t know why. The coffee we make in-house is terrific.” He grinned to let her know he was joking.
Sally arranged her dress over her knees. “You have someone working for you named Eddie, right?”
“Eddie Lesher. Why?”
