Blessing in Disguise (49 page)

Different.
Was that why most of her life she’d felt as if she were swimming against the tide? Why she often looked at things upside down instead of right side up?

It was that kind of upside-down thinking that caused something inside her to click now. Cordelia Truscott. Suppose she didn’t just find out? What if somebody actually
told
her—not just that Nola Emory worked at Maguire, Chang & Foster, but that
she
was the one who’d come up with the winning design?

And what if I were that somebody?

Crazy? Maybe. But wouldn’t it be better to act now, take a gamble, no matter how stacked against her the odds were? Because there
was
a chance, however slim, that she could convince Cordelia Truscott that only she, his flesh and blood, could make the Senator’s library what it ought to be. Like a suit of clothes tailored to his exact measurements, her design would embody every principle he’d stood for, every battle he’d fought, every ideal he’d aspired to.

“You’re right. Ken.” Along with her pulse, Nola’s mind was racing. “She has to know it’s my design.”

She watched Ken’s jaw drop. “I didn’t mean—”

Nola stopped him with a sudden sweeping gesture. “If I met with her, face to face ... made her see that I’m the only one who could do this right ... Oh, Ken, am I dreaming? Isn’t there a chance she might come around?”

“Nola, I know what this means to you,” he said. “But in this business we rarely get what we want. It’s a terrific opportunity, sure. And the library most likely
will
get built ... somewhere down the line. It just may not be your design. I know, it’s frustrating, but that’s life, huh?”

He walked over and, for the first time ever, put an arm about her shoulders. But even though her body—with every nerve still rubbed raw from Ben’s assault—automatically tensed, she knew it was just Ken, in his own bumbling way, being kind. Letting her know in a nice way that, if she were crazy enough to approach Mrs. Truscott, the library would go from being a lame duck to a dead one.

But did that mean she ought to forget it, write the whole thing off? After all the weeks and months of slaving here till midnight; of her dreaming and longing to somehow be one with her father? No, she couldn’t bear to. She wouldn’t!

“Life is also when you do something dumb because you have nothing to lose,” Nola told him; then she turned and walked out.

Back at her work station, she picked up her phone and punched in Grace’s number. Grace answered with the first ring.

“Hey,” Nola said. “It’s me.”

“Hey, there, yourself. How are you holding up?”

An odd camaraderie seemed to have sprung up between them. They were like two soldiers crouching in the same foxhole, Nola thought.

“Okay,” Nola lied. “You?”

“I’ll survive. But, listen, if there’s anything I can do to help ...”

“Don’t ask why,” Nola rushed in, “but I need to get hold of your mother. Mind giving me her number?”

She heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, but Grace, bless her, wasn’t prying. “Mother is here in New York,” she told Nola. “She’s staying with my ex-husband.” She recited the phone number and address.

Nola said a hurried goodbye, and pressed the disconnect button. As she dialed the number Grace had given her, she could feel her breath coming in shallow bursts. What if Cordelia hung up on her? Listening to the hollow ringing on the other end, Nola was on the verge of hanging up herself.

Then a sweet, almost singsong voice came on the line. A voice she recognized instantly as belonging to the petite, always impeccably dressed woman who used to stop at Mama’s desk to say hello on her way into her husband’s office.

“Hello?” she was saying now.

And Nola—becoming once again a little girl with her coloring book and crayons, crouched out of sight behind her mother’s desk—was suddenly tongue-tied.

“Who
is
this?” Cordelia was starting to sound impatient, suspicious.

Nola took a breath.

“It’s Nola. Nola Emory,” she plunged in. “I was hoping we could meet. Just to talk. Please. It’s important.”

There was a pause during which Nola could feel herself sitting taller, becoming her grown-up self again.

Then Cordelia was saying softly, but with unmistakable firmness, “I don’t believe there’s anything we need to talk about. Miss Emory. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve already made your position perfectly clear.”

“There’s more. Things you don’t know. Please.”

“Is it money you’re after? Is that what this is all about?” She sounded agitated, as if she might be on the verge of losing her temper.

“No!” Nola snapped, horrified. “I don’t want anything from you. I never even wanted
this ...
this whole situation.” She dropped her voice, struggling to regain control of herself.

“Then what
do
you want?”

“Just to meet with you. Talk. Ten minutes. That’s all. I can be there in”—she glanced at her watch—“half an hour.”

“No. Not here. My grandson—”

“The park, then. The playground at Sixty-seventh.”

No answer. But she wasn’t hanging up, either.

“I don’t see why I should give you the time of day,” Cordelia said in the same curt tone. “We have nothing in common.”

“Why don’t you decide on that
after
you’ve heard me out?”

A long silence seemed to wrap about Nola, as if the walls of her work station were pressing in on her, making it impossible to breathe.

“I’ll be there,” Cordelia finally said.

Nola’s lungs opened up. She felt a dizzying glow warming her all through, as well as an odd untethered feeling, as if she’d been cut loose from the earth’s gravity. Maybe this was what it was like to be crazy. Or maybe it was the other way around—she’d been a little crazy all her life, and now she was finally becoming sane.

A full minute after she’d hung up the phone, Cordelia sat staring at the receiver as if it were a poisonous snake that had bitten her. Had she really agreed to meet this woman? Oh, what
could
she have been thinking?

She tried to recall the somber little girl she occasionally used to glimpse playing at her mother’s feet. But the image that kept overlapping was of the tall, imposing woman she’d seen last night on TV. The woman who’d looked straight into the camera and said,
Yes, Senator Truscott was my father.

Cordelia had wanted to blot out that image and those words, even as she now sought to silence the small voice of reason deep inside her that was asking.
Why would she lie?

Win? Where was Win? He’d know what to do. The night before last, hadn’t he handled those reporters who, unable to reach her in Blessing, had called here, hoping to speak with her lawyer? Win had made sure they stayed away, answering their awful questions about Gene as smoothly as if from a memorized script.

But Win was at his office ... and Nola wasn’t a reporter. She had to resolve this on her own. Just as she had always attempted to do with every problem, no matter how sticky.

Seated on the sleeper sofa in Win’s extra room, Cordelia observed for the first time since she’d arrived that, for a man’s study, Win’s had an oddly fussy appearance. Marbleized green bookshelves with squatty little pottery figures set strategically here and there among the bright-jacketed best-sellers, and a thick leather-bound edition of the Social Register. A truly hideous African mask on the wall over the sofa—some decorator’s idea of what represented masculinity, no doubt. She could see no imprint recognizable as Win’s. But could that be because she didn’t know him as well as she’d imagined?

A knock at the door startled her, and her heart jumped. “Come in,” she called.

It was Chris, in his baggy jeans and too-big sweatshirt, like a waif out of a silent movie. Cordelia longed to drag him into her arms and smother him with kisses. But he was too old for that; she’d only embarrass him. These days, Chris allowed such affection only from the dog trotting in on his heels, a half-grown golden retriever with big feet that seemed to trip over each other as he bounced and frisked at Chris’s side.

“Are you okay, Nana?” Chris asked, stopping to peer at her. “You look kind of ... I don’t know, sick or something.”

Does it show that much? Cordelia wondered. She had to pull herself together. She mustn’t let Chris think anything was wrong.

“Not a bit,” she told him with a brightness she had difficulty mustering, even with her many years of practice. “You know, dear, as much as I love New York, perhaps I am overdoing it a little. All the museums and galleries and department stores—I simply can’t keep up the way I could when I was younger.” Not to mention her making the rounds to all of her and Eugene’s old friends and colleagues, trying to muster their support for the library.

“Sure, Nana.” Chris rolled his eyes. “I’ll bet you could run in the marathon and come out ahead of everyone else.”

“That,” she told him, keeping her expression dryly deadpan, “is entirely possible.”

Cordelia felt gratified by the smile she could see lurking at the corners of his mouth. But Chris was still troubled about something. She’d been aware of it since she arrived, but had hoped it was merely a case of hormones running amok.

“Nana ... can I ask you something?” Chris knelt on the rug in front of the sofa to pet his dog, his hair falling in front of his face. “Do you like my mom?”

“What a question!” Cordelia, even so, felt herself wincing at his needing to ask it. “Goodness, she’s my daughter.”

“Then why are you staying
here?”

“Well ... it’s rather complicated, dear. Your mother and I ... we’ve had our differences. But that doesn’t mean we don’t love one another.”

“So you can love someone and still not want to live with them?”

Cordelia realized that Chris was no longer talking about her and Grace. “Why, yes, I suppose so,” she said softly, careful to tread lightly, as if over newly seeded lawn. “It would depend on the circumstances.”

He looked up, and she caught the shine of tears in his eyes. “My dad wants me to live with him ... but I don’t know. I miss my mom. I feel really bad about telling her I’d rather stay here.”

“Oh dear.” Cordelia, feeling her spine begin to sag, forced herself to sit up straighten “Chris, have you told your father how you feel?”

“Sort of ... well, actually, yes.” One skinny arm snaked about his dog’s neck, and he pressed his cheek into the feathery golden ruff. “Dad, he ... uh, never mind.”

“What did your dad say?”

“He didn’t mean it. He wouldn’t
really
do it.”

“Chris, whatever it was, it’s obviously bothering you, so why not get it off your chest?” She spoke gently, not wanting to frighten him away.

“He said he’d understand, but ...” Chris’s voice, with his face pressed against the dog’s neck, emerged faint and muffled. Finally, lifting his head, he finished in an agonized rush, “... that if I went back to Mom, Cody would probably be too much trouble for him to keep all by himself.”

Cordelia felt appalled. Win had said that? How terrible! Poor Chris, no wonder he was so upset.

She began to see Win in a different light—not as the thoughtful son-in-law who always remembered to send her cards on her birthday and Mother’s Day, and who’d fit in so perfectly at family gatherings ... but as someone who’d casually, maybe even callously, instigated that affair.

“But your mother? Won’t she miss you terribly?” Cordelia was astonished to find herself filled with compassion for the daughter at whom she’d been so angry.

“I was sort of hoping ...” Chris caught his lower lip in his teeth.

“Chris, what is it?”

“Something my dad ...” He stopped. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell.”

“Mercy, I’ve had enough confidences heaped on me in the past few months to last me my entire life.” She managed a wan smile. “I suppose one more won’t hurt.”

There was a long silence, during which Chris busied himself scrubbing behind Cody’s ears and, when the overgrown puppy rolled over onto its back, its belly, too. Then he said in a small voice, “Do you remember the night when Dad stayed over at the office? Well, that’s not where he was. He told me he was at Mom’s. He spent the night with
her.”

Cordelia felt a little shocked, not so much at what Chris was telling her, but at Win for being so indiscreet. A year ago, just a month ago, she’d have been hopeful—yes, even gleeful—over such a sign that Grace and Win might be reconciling. Now she felt neither excited nor disapproving ... merely flat. Was it her imminent appointment with Nola Emory, pressing down on her, leaving little room in her heart for anything else?

“And you’re hoping they’ll get back together?” she asked gently. “That would solve everything as far as you’re concerned, wouldn’t it?”

“I
was
sort of hoping that would happen,” he admitted. “But with Jack and everything ... I don’t know. Nana, what should I do?”

She was on the verge of telling him that
she
would speak with Win, possibly Grace as well, but she stopped herself. Hadn’t she done enough meddling? Wasn’t it time she stepped out of her children’s lives, and let them make their own mistakes?

“You should talk to your parents,” she told him. “Tell them
both
how you feel.”

“I
want
to be with my dad,” he told her, his expression deeply troubled. “But I want to be with my mom, too.”

“Well, then, that’s what you must say. And let
them
decide what’s best. It’s too much of a burden on young shoulders to have to take on parents’ problems as well.”

Chris nodded, but his expression remained clouded. As he shambled out of the room, his dog in tow, Cordelia realized she ought to listen to her own advice. Be honest, she’d told Chris. Tell the truth.

And had she been honest with herself? Had she avoided even glancing at those letters because she was certain they were all lies ... or because, deep down, she feared they might be true. But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, what was in them. Maybe she would live through it after all.

Cordelia got up and reached with a trembling hand for the sheaf of papers that had sat atop the credenza ever since she’d arrived home from Grace’s that night. She’d been in such a state then, but now she was a little calmer. And with a few minutes yet before she was due to meet Nola, she must see what she was up against, look the enemy in the eye, so to speak. Isn’t that what Gene himself would have done? And Gabe, too—he was never one to flinch from conflict.