Looking for Laura (25 page)

“Well, if it doesn't work out, she can always quit. It won't be the first time someone's quit on me.”

“Why do they quit? Because you're a lousy boss?”

“No. They graduate from college and leave town.”

“So my mother's going to be working the sort of job that usually goes to Winfield College students.”

“She's young at heart. She'll fit right in.”

“How did this happen?” His voice cracked slightly and his shoulders slumped. He gave up trying to be reasonable, trying to stay poised. “How did you and she hook up?”

“You were the one who sent her here,” Sally reminded him.

“For a fucking cup of coffee!”

Sally glanced past him. Turning, he saw Bronowski rising, his hand once again hovering near his gun. Todd hadn't realized using the f word was a capital offense in Winfield.

But then Bronowski picked up his mug and approached the counter for a refill. Tina had the pot in her hands by the time the cop was within range. Bronowski looked much taller than Todd because he was so skinny, but Todd would bet that if they removed their shoes, no more than an inch in height would separate them. They exchanged glowers, and then Bronowski addressed Sally while Tina poured his coffee. “Everything all right here, Mrs. Driver?”

“Everything is fine, thank you. How was that apple tart?”

“Good,” he said, taking his refilled mug from Tina, directing one final quelling scowl at Todd and returning to his table.

“What exactly do you have a bug up your ass about?” Sally asked. “Your mother wants to work here. I want her to work here. You don't want her to work at the paper. You ought to be thrilled by the way things fell into place.”

He opened his mouth and then shut it. He
should
be thrilled. For a few mornings a week he was not going to have to worry about being summoned by transoffice hollering from her. He was not going to have to talk her through the intricacies of Windows 2000. He was not going to have to listen with filial respect to long-winded lectures on why he should or should not support the mayor's new sewer initiative.

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 fist
ful 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?”