Friday Mornings at Nine (17 page)

She studied him as he said those words. He wasn’t being sarcastic, caustic, acerbic, nor did he pair any of his usual criticisms with his typically exasperated-with-her facial expressions. He just stated—simply, plainly—that he was a man confused. That her signals regarding her love for him were unclear.

“But you
are
sure?” she asked him. “About me? You believe there’s hope for us to be happy?”

He gave her one of his almost smiles. A resigned, nearly tender look. “I’ve always wanted to think so,” he said.

A moment later, they left their unfinished coffees, and he took her hand, took her to their hotel and made love to her for the first time in weeks. Made it feel like the first time in years. The softness, longing and familiarity could be felt viscerally, entwined with decades of kinesthetic memory. For a soundless instant, a mere heartbeat in time, every part of her remembered
knowing
this man.

It wasn’t until their early-Monday flight home that she realized Jon’s answer to her questions had been inconclusive. He hadn’t said an unequivocal “Yes.” He’d said it’d been what he’d “wanted to think.” And those were
quite
different responses.

Some of the glow from their weekend of connectedness dimmed for her, and she was left with a small but piercing ember of anxiety burning uncomfortably within her abdomen. Too tiny to mention to him for fear of being seen as petty and, yet, intense enough to be impossible for her to ignore. She wondered, did Jon feel anything like this? Or, if he did, would he dare to utter it aloud?

Thursday, October 14

B
ridget felt like a chubby Mata Hari, and not a very sexy one at that. She parked her silver Honda Pilot in the otherwise empty Smiley Dental lot at ten
A.M
. precisely (for once, she wasn’t even one second late!), the start of her regular shift. But she wasn’t working today. She was meeting Dr. Luke for a chat and, whenever they got to their mysterious location, a private lunch.

What she knew about their “date” could be listed in three short sentences:

Place: somewhere Italian.

Dress: business casual.

Emotion: anxious to the point of nausea (but also kind of excited).

Well, that was
her
emotion. She had no idea what
he
was feeling. Especially given that he wasn’t here yet.

She did a quick check in her visor mirror for fallen eyelashes, smudged lipstick or anything else that smacked of disarray. She’d never been good at sneaking around, even if there wasn’t any real reason for subterfuge. But it was just a luncheon, right? No need to be so nervous.

As she flipped the visor back up again, she spotted Dr. Luke’s black car turning into the lot. He pulled up beside her, rolled down his window and said, “Hey, great day we’ve got. Poor hygienists, having to be stuck indoors all day at their conference.”

She smiled at him. Definitely enthusiastic. He looked…kind of excited, too, but maybe he just liked weather that was mostly sunny and sixty-two degrees. “Yes,” she said agreeably.

He glanced around the lot. They’d agreed to meet here just like it was a normal work day, and she had assumed she would follow him in her own car to wherever they were headed. But Dr. Luke must have had a different idea because a sudden look of concern crossed his face.

“You know, I don’t think there’s a town ordinance or anything for parking here when the business is closed, but just in case—” He pointed to a space across the street from them, near Franklin’s Diner. “Why don’t you leave your car there and jump in with me. No reason for us both to drive.”

He stated this as if it were a perfectly logical suggestion, but she sensed something else. Was he a little bit anxious, too? Was he worried someone might recognize her car in the empty dental lot and ask her later why she’d left it there?

But Bridget wasn’t Tamara. She couldn’t bring herself to ask pointed questions like that. What if she made him feel uncomfortable or something? So, she said, “Sure,” and moved her car.

But when she slipped into his sedan—a Volvo? she thought that was what the symbol on the steering wheel meant—her awkwardness started to get the better of her. The last time she had been alone in a car with a man (who wasn’t her husband, a male family member or a hired taxi driver) was years ago. Zach-somebody, whom she’d met when she was still single, at the wedding of a college friend. Zach drove a dark blue Corvette, and all she could really remember about him was how he was so much more interested in showing off his prized car than in getting to know her.

“Everything okay?”

“Huh?” she said, staring at the warm, kind man driving the Volvo. A man who, again, was not her husband. “Oh, yeah. Everything’s great, Dr. Luke.”

He grinned and focused on the road. “Just Luke. Please. At least while we’re out of the office.”

She bobbed her head jerkily, and for a few moments she observed him. His nice gray dress slacks. His maroon pullover. He looked like he’d just stepped out of men’s Suburban Casual clothing catalogue.

But then Dr. Luke—or just Luke now—broke the ice by telling her a funny story about his kid brother. The one with the nephews who had been visiting. “Matthew’s a great dad,” he said, after explaining about some camping outing, complete with toads in their tent and a coyote scare. “But he was a handful as a child. My mom was happily naming her brood after the saints and was prepared to devote her mothering to seven or eight of us. She stopped after three because of Matthew.”

Bridget laughed. He’d already told her about his older sister, Teresa, who lived in Philadelphia with her family, but the Matthew stories were fun, and Luke clearly adored his nephews. So, despite her normal lack of courage, she had to ask, “Did you ever want to do that, um, Luke? Get married and have kids?”

An odd expression crossed his face, at least she thought so. He kept his eyes fixed on the road, so she couldn’t be sure. After a few lengthy seconds, he said, “A long time ago. I was going to do it once, but the bride, she…she had a troubling habit.”

She blurted, “Really? Smoking? Drugs?”

“Nope.” His smile was tight and unreadable. She didn’t think he was going to say any more, and that was fine with her. She was curious, sure, but she didn’t want to pry. Finally, though, he added, “Getting sick. Terminally, the last time.”

She caught her breath. “Oh, I’m so—I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged it off.

Oh, God. Why did she have to ask him that? It just went to show that she should never be curious. She should never ask inappropriate things that weren’t any of her business or she would be punished somehow. She should never be alone in a car with a man like—

“She got sick for the first time about a month after we got engaged,” he explained. “Her kidneys were failing, and she needed a transplant. Her sister turned out to be a match and immediately insisted on donating. Close family, you know? Good people…” His voice trailed off.

Bridget didn’t know what to say. She tried to project sympathetic understanding at him. Oh, poor Dr. Luke.

“If that had been all, it might’ve still worked. Turned out, the doctors missed a little tumor in their diagnosis. Ovarian. The
silent
cancer,” he said, his voice a touch sharper than she had ever remembered hearing it. “The kidney failure had masked some of the disease symptoms, and it had already metastasized to several lymph nodes by the time they found it. She was twenty-seven then. She died four months later.”

The same age Bridget had been when she and Graham had gotten married. She tried not to personalize it too much or to keep focusing on the tragedy of it, or she knew she’d lose it. But the anguish in Luke’s expression was hard to ignore. Seeing him so vulnerable and recognizing the depth of his loss brought her tears too close to the surface. She tried to blink them away. Tried to speak without her voice trembling in empathy.

“I—I can’t imagine how horrible that must’ve been. What”—she took a deep breath—“what was her name?”

He mimicked a cheerier smile and, for a few moments, fingered the gold cross he wore. Then he tucked it back inside his shirt and laughed—a sound closely approximating his real one. “It was Hope, actually. Her sister Bethany and I made some terrible puns about that on the day of the funeral. Privately, of course, but we couldn’t stop ourselves. ‘We’d lost Hope.’ Morbid stuff like that. We’d been living with the fear of that day for so long by then, it helped to have someone else to cope with. To share the pain in a way we knew Hope would’ve found kind of funny if she hadn’t, you know, been dead.”

They drove in silence for a several minutes. Bridget, having lost the battle with her tears, turned to face the window so she could furtively swipe away the droplets with the back of her wrist.

“No more sad stuff today, okay?” Luke said as he took one of the downtown Chicago exits off the expressway. “Don’t you want to hear about the restaurant we’re going to?”

“Of course,” she said, injecting jollity into her voice. “What’s it called?”

“Ah, that’s one of the many beautiful things about it. It’s Buona Cucina Italia, near the Italian Village.” His tongue lingered over the name and Bridget shivered at the sensuality of it. “Opened up about a year ago and, oh, my…” He turned to look into her still slightly watery eyes. “They do things with freshly grated Parmesan that should be illegal.”

She laughed with as much relief as delight. He was putting her at ease. On purpose. In spite of his own grief, he was so caring and thoughtful that he was concerned about
her
. What a fantastic person! She really and truly
liked
him. And who wouldn’t? He was such a wonderful man. It was hard to believe God—or even Graham—would be so coldhearted as to disapprove of her friendship with The Good Dentist. Which was all this was. They were
friends
. And having friends, she reminded herself (and God), wasn’t a sin.

Traffic had been light, so, even after driving into the city and finding a parking space, they still had plenty of time to window shop for a half hour and then settle in for a leisurely lunch before Bridget would need to be back. A few hours, actually.

Her companion didn’t seem to notice the return of her anxiety upon being seated at their little table. Bridget appreciated the niceness of the place, but it felt kind of, well, intimate to her. She soaked up the atmosphere as Luke got settled in—the golden lighting, the colorful wall tapestries, the smallish rooms that collectively made up the restaurant…each one capable of holding a cozy grouping of perhaps seven or eight couples.

One other couple was midway through their meal on the other side of their room, but Bridget knew there were many other couples scattered in similarly snug rooms nearby. Keyword: couples. None of the diners seemed to be families or a group of sisters or any other configuration. Buona Cucina Italia was a place for lovers.

Their server brought out menus and recited a list of specials that sounded like the featured recipes in one of her favorite issues of
The Gastronomical Gourmet
. She bit her lip and scanned for something that looked to be in a reasonable price range. (He’d insisted several times that he’d be treating her, and she didn’t want to take advantage.) But each entrée was so beautifully described, she lost herself in the lustfulness of reading them.

Zuppa di Orzo e Fagioli
—a hearty soup with dried borlotti beans, pearl barley and handfuls of succulent vegetables.

Tonno con Capperi e Cipolle
—braised tuna with capers, onions and dry white wine and served on a bed of fettuccine.

Calamari Imbottiti alla Griglia
—grilled squid stuffed with bread crumbs, ham, raisins and garlic.

“Oh, my God,” Bridget murmured after reading these.

“Ooh, what’d you see?” Dr. Luke asked. “Get to the Sicilian frittata yet?”

“What?” She flipped through the menu until she came to it. “
Frittata di Verdura e Formaggio,
” she read aloud, swallowing a few times at the description of the Sicilian dish made up of wild greens baked into a crispy, cheesy frittata. “This is unreal.” She scanned more of the menu in amazement. “Listen to this one.” She pointed to the explanation of the
Ravioli all’Uova con Tartufi
. “Giant egg ravioli with truffles. And ricotta. And, oh, the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese!”

“We’re ordering that one for sure,” Luke said. “And you’ve gotta read this one. Perfect for us Catholics during Lent or just any ole time.
Pesce al Forno con Pinoli e Uva Passa.
Roasted sea bass with rosemary, pine nuts and raisins.”

She gasped. “Good Lord.”

“It’s pure food porn, this menu,” he said with a wink.

Bridget felt herself blush. Naturally, she was familiar with the expression, but hearing those words coming from his lips made a few impure thoughts bubble to the surface of her mind. She banished them, of course (a woman shouldn’t think of a
friend
that way!), but she couldn’t as easily dismiss the comparisons that were arising between Her Friend Luke and Her Husband Graham.

Like the fact that Graham never got excited about a dish written in a foreign language. When they were first dating, and during their early years of marriage, he was a little more exploratory. At least he’d
tried
a few unusual cuisines. These days, though, he would just wrinkle his nose at the weird pronunciation and ask her why the restaurant couldn’t just have “your basic hamburger, for chrissake.” She’d actually stopped trying to get him to go anywhere that didn’t serve buffalo wings or slabs of pizza because, really, it was no use.

But Luke. Wow. He wasn’t putting on some show for her just to be nice. He loved this stuff, too. He was as zealously focused on those dishes as she was. And she couldn’t help but wonder—fleetingly—what it would be like if she were with someone every day who shared her similar passion for specialty foods.

They went back and forth, with ever-rising ardency, for several minutes. The
Insalata di Gamberi alla Sarda
. No, wait. Look at the
Lasagne di Magro
. Ohhh, or what about the
Bruschetta di Pomodori?

After their waiter had returned twice, Luke finally took the reins and just ordered for them. He chose the bruschetta appetizer and, also, a platter of stuffed portobello mushroom caps. He also ordered the truffle ravioli, a meaty polenta casserole
(Polenta Pasticciata con Ragù di Carne),
crisp salads with Kalamata olives and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing and two glasses of the Tuscan red wine. “It’s the house favorite,” he explained. “And no matter what you do, save room for dessert.”

She laughed. “You must be insane,” she said when their server brought a tray filled with just the appetizers and proceeded to load their table with the beautifully arranged platters. “There’s no way we’ll be able to eat these, our entrées and dessert, too.”

He leaned across the table until he was only about five inches away. “Trust me. We will find a way.”

She blinked, sent him a quick smile and glanced at a couple striding past their table. The man, dressed in a business suit, was oblivious to them, but the woman stared at Luke strangely and shot a scowl at Bridget that bordered on hostile. Luke noticed none of this. Instead, he engaged her in a conversation about salad dressings for twenty minutes and, slowly, she began to relax.

When the main courses arrived, Bridget studied her half-eaten salad. Delicious, but she was already getting full, and Luke was in the process of divvying up the polenta and the ravioli. He touched the back of her hand with his forefinger to get her attention, then offered a plateful to her. Her senses were momentarily overwhelmed by both the physical contact and by the gorgeous food display. “Take a bite,” he urged. “Tell me what you think.”