Francesca
It was time. She spun the tumblers, Anthony’s day/month/last two numbers of his year of birth being the combination. She should get a new floor safe, high tech, biometric, electronic, digital. That sounded prudent to her. She just might prudently buy one to secure her precious possessions, right after she got a new prudent life, high tech, biometric, electronic, digital.
She pulled off her wedding ring. It was oh so simple, like doing brain surgery on herself.
She gently set the ring inside a royal blue velvet-lined box she’d kept since her child princess days, and then filed it alongside passport, pink slip, deeds, jewelry, cash, trust docs, and all the other supposedly precious possessions. But look right there, a cache of photos. She had almost forgotten she had put the album there, but she could never forget the pictures inside. For a second, the album made her glad. A second after, anything but. That’s when a tear threatened—but the waterworks were bone-dry.
She slipped on her finger, the opposite hand, a new marquise diamond. This ring was elegant and stylish enough for store-bought jewelry, not a sign, not a symbol, of eternal commitment. What had she been thinking? A new ring? Why? This was the instant she discovered she had been wrong about something else: she was not cried out. She dropped like a tree snapped by a storm. The Persian-carpeted floor felt like the correct place to rest her head awhile, a minute, a month, whatever required. Maybe she was going to miss her social engagement tonight. Maybe Francesca didn’t care.
New floor safe? Maybe she should get a huge steel vault and lock herself inside.
—
People continued to think of her as a Fitzgerald, as she herself did—with or without wedding ring or last name. Strangely, when she studied the new ring, she visualized her wedding ring—and Anthony. She wasn’t moving on. Not today. She was also not staying put. It was impossible to explain where she was and where she was going, if anywhere. And nobody was there to ask anyway. Some days, moving on and staying put were flip sides of an untradeable coin.
After whatever was deemed the proper period of mourning, people supposedly moved on with their lives: a platitude espoused by otherwise apparently sane human beings. The terminology landed with a thud. Times like these, words themselves were overrated, but then again, everything else was too, and she had nothing else to use.
Was time like a river? She had heard people voice that view. For her, it was more like a flood, more like a blasting fire hose. She ought to have learned a lot after the passage of three years. One thing she wished she never learned is that time didn’t proceed placidly, steadily, linearly by. Her traveling through time was marked by the equivalent of skid marks and roadblocks and felled walls and sink holes and downed, sparking power lines. This was a world as viewed in footage shot after a natural disaster, after what insurance carriers called an act of God on the order of tornado, earthquake, hurricane. Death was nothing but a relentless B-roll.
When first stretched upon the grieving rack, she had made her share of mistakes. In bleaker moods, she could catalogue them. She went on manic spending sprees: clothes, gadgets, shoes, wine, cookware, cars, electronics. She remodeled the kitchen—pointlessly, and then, more pointlessly, again. There were drinking and eating binges. Followed next morning by frenzied three-hour workouts. And sedatives and painkillers, some medically prescribed, some not. And more sedatives and painkillers. A few too many pills. And how could she forget a couple of one-night stands? More than a couple. Not that she cruised watering holes, and not that she was judgmental of anybody who migrated to one. It proved surprisingly conceivable to sleep with strangers, though in order for her to follow through, she perfected a little magic trick. All she had to do was slide mentally out of her body, move off to the side, and observe herself from some imaginary distant vantage point—a hill, a tower, a treetop. She thought casual hookups might constitute a path to momentary relief, at least a distraction, being immune as she was to the threat of relationship, of mutual expectation, or of the enduring dread of sharing morning coffee with somebody whose name she was unsure she caught. These liaisons, an incongruously upscale term for physical slip-slap and swapping of corporal secretions and disposal of decorum and undergarments, weren’t anything she could use. One day kids would categorically reject slut-shaming—an overdue cultural advance Francesca would approve of. But as for her own hookups, such as they were, there was one night that was different. That was a night she spent with somebody she cared about, and in some true if skewed sense loved. And that amounted to the lowest moment of all.
She consulted with a psychiatrist. People in bereavement do that, she understood, that was one tried and true script to follow. She knew she shouldn’t have felt ashamed to reach out to a mental health professional, but she didn’t tell anybody, including her own family. She would admit to herself that Zoloft or the other benzos seemed to help a little, when their effects kicked in after a few weeks. At the indicated dosage, they blunted the razor edge of her panic attacks and anxiety. Francesca also saw a psychotherapist, with whom she felt a personal connection and upon whom she relied for counsel, insight, and wisdom. In other words, she was doing what she thought she should in order to regain footing on the shifting, illusory ground. But the more she thought about it, screw empathy and all the slope-shouldered, airheaded, bran-muffining empaths. Nobody got her pain, least of all herself. But everybody got her pain, too. Everybody except herself.
The store-bought ring was a half-hearted attempt at a useful gesture toward personal metamorphosis. Too bad she had no confidence she was capable of transformation, but she had to begin somewhere, sometime. Filing away for safekeeping the wedding ring could be the start, but she doubted it. She may have simply run out of ideas. Then one day Tommy came along. He indeed qualified as a new idea, if, that is, any man qualified as any sort of idea.
Three years, she thought. Enough, Frankie, enough.
But it was not going to be enough, as she would find out.
She rose up from the floor, and headed off to dress for the party. What a bizarre thing to be doing, going to a party. Well, that was the best she could do tonight. There were nights when bizarre was all she had left at her disposal.
—
Tonight Francesca Scalino was attending the black-tie Catholic diocese gala as a guest of honor. Her presence did not qualify as newsworthy, as she was a guaranteed A-lister for any major fundraiser in the city. A wealthy, altruistic woman such as her would naturally be on a roster of must-haves. At the same time, social occasions were not uncomplicated to navigate, considering her predisposition to anxiety, a condition exacerbated after Anthony, though nobody seemed to notice, or if they did notice, bothered to remark upon much less pry into. Maybe she should buy a Geiger Counter and measure her radioactivity. She had extensive practice faking composure, assisted by meds, different ones experimented with, on the coldblooded anxious search for the perfect pharmaceutical protocol. That was then. Now she had a shoebox full of old pill bottles, one after the other rejected, but intolerable to discard. She had wearied of the pills’ side effects: the dry mouth, the psychic glass-like wall interposed between herself and the world. On this score, tonight posed a challenge. She determined she had been foolhardy renouncing pills. She could benefit from pharmacological modification of her brain chemistry in order to withstand the onrushing tides of good cheer overwhelming her at the gala.
Tonight’s gaudy event would tomorrow make headlines, but regrettably for the bishop and the Catholic diocese, headlines for sensational, unfortunate reasons. The night was also remarkable for another, altogether mundane, reason. Francesca had attended countless formal parties with Anthony. During the excruciating years afterward, she would, rarely, go by herself, as often as not to get out of the house and submit herself to a diversion, any diversion. Tonight marked the occasion of Tommy Thomas and her first date for such a tony affair. This was a man she was beginning to sense she might have feelings for.
The limousines lined up around the block. Searchlights scanned the overcast sky, causing soft raindrops to sparkle as they drifted and parachuted down. On the ground, one Oscar de la Renta and YSL and Vera Wang gown-wearer after another high-heeled along the rolled-out red carpet. Rain unexpectedly contributed to the festive mood. Umbrellas were bursting open like a popped-up field of wild mushrooms moving in psychedelic slow motion, and partygoers were mindlessly laughing, sharing in their slight communal ordeal. Despite the weather, people were gathering in opulent style, ostentatiously, to raise money for the disadvantaged and the impoverished. The facile irony was noted by a few, and dismissed by others as being beside the point if not in dubious taste. After all, no money, no mission: the universal common sense mantra chanted by fundraising acolytes.
At the gala the bishop was seeking commitments in the so-called silent stages of a capital campaign; first, to build a desperately needed new high school and, second, to fund Caring Street House, the diocese’s non-evangelizing ask-no-questions outreach program for street kids, an organization that had endured management and personnel problems—until, that is, the freshly installed new bishop, the new sheriff, rode in on his high horse and cleaned up the town. Caring Street was his immediate challenge. The bishop arrived almost a year ago, but tellingly, people still considered him the “new” bishop.
—
Dr. Hector Alessandro had been on the job as Caring Street executive director for some time, installed since practically its inception, retained by the bishop’s predecessor, a man critics deemed notorious for weak judgment and for fomenting institutional laxity. Alessandro was inarguably brilliant, a charismatic, big-boned, pony-tailed, darkly handsome, work-shirted fellow who could light up a room—any assemblage at all, from runaways to clergy to fat cat donors. He could also hit the streets with uncontested authority. He himself was a product of the inner city, grew up in the hood, only member of his family to graduate high school, while his CV highlighted his doctorate in sociology and his years of counseling in public high schools and operating various children’s welfare nonprofits. His religious bona fides were respectable, as well: as a young man he had been a novice in a Catholic monastery—and called Brother Hector. But a religious vocation was not to be for him.
Only now a few problems pertaining to him had freshly surfaced. For one thing, his CV was partly fictitious. Dr. Alessandro was, as it happened, not. True, he had finished the graduate coursework, and with distinction, but he hadn’t actually completed his PhD. He was an ABD, All But Dissertation. This information came to light when the new bishop conducted comprehensive personnel reviews of the entire diocesan staff he inherited. In itself his misrepresentation was sufficient cause for termination, but there was one other serious matter on the table. The forensic accountants indicated that Caring Street was bleeding cash as a result of one unauthorized expenditure after another—often drawn from petty cash, and more than a few times from the checkbook. A thousand here, a few hundred there, not serious moneys in absolute terms, but cumulatively amounting to a major breach of trust that could not be whitewashed away. Everything traced back to Alessandro. The dummied vita was one thing, fraud, another order of complication.
The bishop’s hands were tied. He called in Alessandro and did not provide him an opportunity to defend himself. Facts were facts. The bishop told him he was letting him go, but that he would receive a severance package on the condition he departed quietly and swiftly—and if he signed and abided by the binding nondisclosure agreement. And if he proved cooperative, the police would not be notified of the defalcation. It was Hector’s choice, but the diocese had leverage and the bishop was not timid about employing it. This kind of move made self-serving sense for the bishop, too, because there was no upside to calling attention to the fiscal mismanagement of precious church funds. Alessandro pleaded and pleaded with the bishop, to no avail. The bishop was embarrassed for the man begging for consideration, and he wished he would stop.
“Look,” the bishop told him, “you’ve done good work, I can’t deny that, and when we are asked for a reference, we will accentuate your achievements. But we can’t tolerate your abuse of fiduciary responsibility, or the misrepresentation of your academic credentials. You have to go, Hector. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
“Excellence, please reconsider. I’ll never do it again. I needed the money…” He couldn’t explain. The money wasn’t for him, he implied, but the bishop had him dead to rights.
“I’m also not bringing up something else you should have disclosed before you were hired: your arrest record.”
Alessandro couldn’t restrain himself. “Oh, you’re not bringing up what you are bringing up? Fair enough, when I was younger, kind of rootless after the novitiate, I slipped up.”
“Assault and battery when you were in your twenties and you put two pistol-whipped guys into the hospital. That’s not slipping up, that’s crashing and careening out of control.” The bishop had been made furious all over again when he reflected on his predecessor’s slipshod management practices; that man should have flagged Alessandro’s record, which included three months in county. “You might have mentioned your checkered past when you applied.”
“Yeah, right, good idea, checkered past, like I would have been considered for the job. Those guys assaulted my friend, use your imagination, and I tuned them up, which they deserved, but that was a long time ago, and since then, what? Not a speeding ticket. And yeah, sure, okay? I was once a gangbanger, it’s true, and so what? I’m not proud of it, but my life experience gave me the street cred somebody in this position needed. And I’ve done a damn good job at Caring Street, everybody knows that. You’ll never find anybody half as good as me. You yourself know that, Excellence.”
That did indeed put a different spin on Alessandro’s situation, and the bishop momentarily considered stepping back, moving more deliberately.
“I was a young man, it was a long time ago, people change. I’ll finish the stupid dissertation if it’s important to anybody. Can’t I get a second chance? That’s what we’re offering kids every day of the week here at Caring Street, a second chance, that’s everything we’re about.”
But the new bishop had made up his mind. “We require transparency, and you haven’t been transparent.” It was an impossible convergence of disqualifications: the CV, the arrest record, the financial recklessness. “Please don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be. This meeting’s over.”
“You want transparent? Let me leave you with some information as to what I did with the money.” He admitted taking cash and drafting the checks, but he surreptitiously spread the money around to certain kids, the ones who needed it badly, often to take care of siblings stuck at home, or to pay off the family utility bills or buy groceries. He knew it was a risk, and ill-advised, but he had to be honest. It was something he would do again if presented the chance. Was it too late to be honest?
Evidently so, as the bishop had now depleted his minimal stores of tolerance. “You’ll get your severance once you sign off on the agreement, Hector. Thank you for all the good things you accomplished. I do respect you and wish you well in the future.”
“Thanks for the solid when the diner calls about my dishwasher job app.”
After Hector stormed out of the office, Father Philip Fitzgerald and the bishop debriefed. That didn’t go well, either.
“Never realized he had such anger,” the bishop said. “Though under the circumstances…”
“He’s a good man, Excellence,” said Father Philip, who might have been counted as his most trusted advisor in the Chancery if, that is, the bishop invested trust in any advisor, and it was not clear that he did. What was destined to come up for further scrutiny was that Philip’s sister-in-law was the office manager at Caring Street, hired by Hector on Philip’s recommendation as nothing more than a help to his little brother and his wife, both of whom were perennially struggling to get by. Fortunately, Matty’s wife’s fingerprints were not found on the shady money transactions of the organization. Philip himself had to wonder, however, how that could be possible, since her job was to be on top of such details, and nobody ever questioned her competence and diligence. Over and above all that, Philip also didn’t want to think about what a headache it would be replacing a beloved ED, assuming that Alessandro would keep the agreement to go quietly. On that score, the bishop had already made his next move.
“Father Philip, you’ll be the interim director, until we conduct a thorough search for a permanent replacement. You should begin as soon as possible, let’s say Monday morning. Unless you think it will be a challenge for you to work with family, in which case we can also let Claire go and start from scratch. In fact, maybe we should let her go right now, make a clean break. We all know Matty is not happy these days with the new teacher’s contract and his wife doubtless shares his disloyal views.”
“Let’s give her a chance, let me see what I can do with her.” He wasn’t optimistic, but that was enough change for now.
“As long as we all realize she’s on a short leash. Hector and Matty might have turned her against us.”
“No need to clean house top to bottom yet, Hector’s departure will provide complication enough. Give me a chance to work with my brother’s wife. But Excellence, I have an overriding concern. People make mistakes,” said Philip in a dramatic tone of voice. “I know I have. So I’m going to ask this question for the record. Are we sure we’re doing the right thing with Hector? Is it the right thing, ultimately, for Caring Street?”
This is what crossed the mind of the bishop: We are not doing the right thing, or the wrong thing for that matter, I am. But that would have sounded argumentative, and if he could achieve this result, he would like to retain the influential priest as an ally. For the truth was, the new bishop was feeling pressures mount. The diocese was beset with issues and couldn’t withstand another controversy, and Alessandro was collateral damage, a defensible casualty. Had the political atmosphere not been so supercharged, they could afford the chance to rehabilitate the man’s reputation. But that was not in the cards. The bishop had pedophile priests to expel and virtuous ones to keep in the fold if not inspire; he had teachers and other diocesan staff inciting revolt against him on account of his newly imposed employment contract requirements; and he had money he badly needed to raise—not only to help settle standing lawsuits but also to rebuild facilities in serious disrepair. Every bit as significant, he had his own reputation to cement in the minds of his flock right now.
“I take your point, Father. He’s damaged, Hector is, I see that now. There’s a sadness in his eyes that isn’t telling the whole story, not yet, and I wonder what that story might be. Someday when you’re sitting where I’m sitting you’ll find there’s nothing but hard options, choosing between competing versions of rotten. You’ll learn this the day you take my seat and become a bishop yourself.”
You didn’t need to be a bishop to know that some choices are competing versions of rotten. You didn’t even need to be a priest. Live long enough, truth becomes harder and heavier to bear. But if Father Philip was certain of one thing as it pertained to his ever sitting on the bishop’s throne, it was this: his investiture would constitute the first miracle along his heavenly path to canonization—and nobody in his right mind would ever confuse Philip with a saint. Not to be confrontational, he could say the same thing about the bishop as well. But why bother? No point belaboring the obvious. Besides, he was now about to have his hands full running Caring Street, not to mention dealing with his brother’s difficult wife. Bishop Philip Fitzgerald would have to wait his turn, till never happened.
—
The bishop understood, as did everybody at the gala, that all this work in the diocese, all this need, called for major capital outlay. Numbers with lots of zeroes.
At one end of the social spectrum, teenagers deserved a safe new college preparatory school to replace the crumbling heap that Holy Family High had become. HFH, which was Francesca’s alma mater, had deteriorated into a place where students dodged the occasional ceiling tile crashing down upon classes discussing Romeo and Juliet and studying the Emancipation Proclamation and learning how to solve for x, in buildings where pipes sporadically burst in lavatories and where the gym floor was warped from storms that blew in through broken windows and where mice used the cafeteria kitchen for a speedway. Mold, fire hazards, vermin infestations: the cash-strapped diocese had deferred maintenance for far too long and the entire physical plant had slipped over the years into severe disrepair. Now it was virtually a lost cause, and Francesca herself felt distressed about the fallen state of the school she retained some deep loyalty to. She was glad the new bishop seemed determined to correct the problem.
High school, everybody knows, is crucial to the development of children. It holds the key to success and stability—a game-changer especially for graduates who would be the first in their families to attend college. It’s also the gateway to the Ivies as well as to the Catholic Brahmin Ivy-equivalents like Georgetown and Notre Dame, not to mention the strong state university and the admired hometown college, Saint Monica’s, where Francesca was destined to be named the chair of the board. The bishop had found the perfect location to build. And significant pledges were being cultivated. But real estate negotiations were not going smoothly. Though the owner was Catholic—Catholic at least in name and by baptism—he was a man reputed to have unsavory, possibly underworld associations. Catholic fundraisers knew how to finesse such ambiguities, to work around such potential public relations debacles. More to the point, the man who possessed title to the land was holding out for a much bigger payday than the diocese was prepared for.
“Let’s go to contract,” the bishop tried to reason with the man. “Your property would be perfect for our kids.”
The owner wasn’t budging: “I know, it would be, wouldn’t it? But land, they don’t make too much of that stuff these days, Excellence.”
“You know,” said the bishop, “there is another property on the market that would make do. It’s nowhere near as good as yours, but it would serve our purposes, if we had to go in that direction.”
“Free country, Excellence. You gotta do what you gotta do.” Clearly, this man regarded negotiation as sport, one he had long practice and success in. “And you know what they say. You get what you pay for.”
“And what you don’t pay for, either.” The bishop himself dimly realized that statement made little logical sense, but sometimes in a negotiation you cannot be silent, you have to respond with something.
The two had been going round and round like that, unproductively, for some time, with no end in sight. The bishop and the seller each banked on the other to blink first.
At the other end of the social spectrum, where Caring Street House was found, many kids—not exclusively kids from Catholic families—were lost or thrown away, left to their own insufficient devices on the streets. The diocese had spent so much money tapping reserves to pay legal bills not covered by insurance related to the pedophile crisis that, as a result, services to these children stood imperiled. Street kids needed meals, hot showers, and safe beds for the night. That meant the diocese needed more money. And it was next to impossible to raise money in the service of paying off legal settlements, justified as those payouts were. But a new school or a shelter? Those were fundraising winners. Or so went the strategic planning.
The bishop had charismatically preached on behalf of both causes whenever he was given a forum—and he would do so tonight, too. He wasn’t interested in laying the foundation for some personal legacy. His concern for all the children and all their families was absolute and authentic. He worked relentlessly for these causes even as he was cleaning house with regard to the sex scandals of the past, and even as he was running the Byzantine day-to-day affairs of the diocese: twenty-two parishes, seven elementary schools, and one crumbling high school, all the attendant intricacies of a midsize corporation that uneasily doubled as a spiritual big tent: a cash-strapped big tent with outsize aspirations.
—
Francesca knew firsthand about managing complex organizations. A Chicago MBA, she had held top-level positions in the early days of dot-com startups everybody now regarded as indispensable for internet commerce and communication and social networking. As a result of her vision and sixteen-hour workdays and stock options and, to be candid, freaky good luck, she had amassed a considerable personal fortune. She lived in an Architectural Digest house; drove around town on ultra-flashy, fast wheels that made teenage boys weep; personally managed her vast portfolio of equities and other investments; and enjoyed choice bottles of wine temperature-controlled in Anthony’s cellar. Wealth never went to her head. People might disparagingly slot her into the nouveau riche, but she never shook her self-image as the middle-class Italian American girl from hometown Holy Family High and local Saint Monica’s College before she struck it fantastically rich—but she wasn’t to blame for making the right bets in business. This was a subject that consumed hours of conversation with her psychotherapist. She may be overcompensating, she could not discount that probability, but she was generous with her money. She felt an overriding responsibility to be magnanimous, philanthropic—to give back, as the saying goes among the high-minded wealthy. Her father did not share what he regarded as her outlandish predilection. Madonna, he would call upon the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, how the hell could Francesca defend giving so much of her own money away like that—to total strangers? All right, tax deductions were useful but again…people outside the family?
She had observed from a distance the new bishop. He had a huge and dirty job, she presumed. She may have had expert familiarity with the competitive corporate world, yet it was hard to conceive how anybody, no matter how skillful, conducted without turmoil the politically contentious business in the back-biting patriarchal bureaucracy that was the diocese. If she had to surmise, under every rock the bishop had to be finding snakes slithering—when he wasn’t spawning new reptilian adversaries. A good leader has loyal followers. A great leader also has dangerous opponents. And leaders unaware of the existence of their opposition do not qualify as leaders at all—because they are blind to reality. If you couldn’t manage both friends and foes, you couldn’t manage either. The jury was out on the bishop.
On gala night, Francesca was unaware that her name appeared prominently on a very short list of people the bishop planned to have over for dinner soon, to become acquainted—and to be asked to step up financially in support of his initiatives. And yet she could hardly have been astonished. She had chaired capital campaigns; she knew everything about fundraising. If she had given the matter any thought, she would have been surprised he hadn’t already made overtures to her.
The bishop had been hearing her name again and again from multiple quarters, and he had concluded she might be somebody whose expertise he should exploit. Without consulting in depth with his staff, and without doing the due diligence, he went with his gut. That’s how he unfortunately characterized his management style: going with my gut. That was a pet phrase of his, along with flying by the seat of my pants. He had already decided, going with his gut and flying by the seat of his pants, to discuss with Francesca Scalino a radical idea: that she might take the lead in the real estate negotiations for the new HFH along with chairing this capital campaign. The proposition was one they could talk through in private and at leisure, over a bottle of fifty-year-old cognac he’d received as a welcome gift to the diocese and been reserving for the proper occasion, a gift he’d forgotten had come from her.
This was the substance of his thinking. A layperson, and in this case a woman, specifically a wealthy and business-savvy woman, would be in a more advantageous position to achieve success with donors—and particularly with that hard-driving property owner. Maybe the bishop and the landowner could cease butting heads like bighorn rams. At a minimum, she could take down the temperature a few degrees. This could be, under the right circumstances, a brilliant scheme.
The night of the gala, she herself had no inkling as to his plan with regard to her. And he himself had no notion as to how complex, if not impossible, such a negotiation might be for her to conduct. New bishops were entitled to make a few mistakes—and according to critical observers he had made more than his fair share. If he had done the due diligence, an exercise he deemed trivial, he would have appreciated why his was a vexed idea. Not that this would have stymied him for a moment. Vexed ideas were his favorite kind.
—
From the moment Francesca slit open the embossed gala invitation, she was sold: All right, I’m in. She envisioned the dress she would wear: the long robin’s-egg blue chiffon, slit along the leg, off the shoulder. She had not worn that gown since Anthony, but it fit—better than she might have expected. Besides, it was time if it was ever going to be. All she needed was to pick up a tux for Tommy. Smart as she was, she might have anticipated some hurdles to surmount. Early, experimental stages of a relationship, where the two of them found themselves, may be invigorating and intense, may be a frantically fun cha cha cha of thrilling endorphins, but it can also siphon off IQ points, at least in the short term for a forty-something woman and a fifty-ish man, both of them out of practice if not awkward when it came to romance.
Nonetheless, Francesca and Tommy had indeed grown closer and closer over the past few months, since they first collaborated on the successful investigation of certain suspicious criminal circumstances that shocked the entire town: the unforeseen death of her board colleague at Saint Monica’s, which prompted a search that, largely thanks to Francesca and her father, led to the uncovering and ultimate solving of a series of other unexpectedly connected crimes. Soon after that, Tommy retired, and before long he and Frankie were seeing each other. As for surprises, during this year Francesca and Tommy were both taken aback by possibly starting to fall in something like love—with, of all people in the world, each other.
On the surface, they seemed an unlikely pair. Since when, however, does anything on the surface presage the feasibility of the impracticality called love, or something like love? She had known plenty of men from her professional life, men with social cachet, men with more money than they could ever spend, a number of them admittedly estimable human beings. Yet it was this retired detective who took off the top of her head and jellied her knees. Money didn’t do that, not for her anyway, and as for gym-toned boy-men, meticulously unshaved, tooling around in their Bentley Silver Spurs and wearing their Kiton suits and flashing Patek Phillippes on their wrists—well, she was not instinctively inclined to be impressed.
They had been tentatively discussing living together, and they were inching closer and closer. They had already practiced a sort of domesticity by raising a dog together, a rescue pit bull mix they named Dickens, and that was a success. Dickens split time between their two homes, and when convenient they alternated nights being together. Francesca had once been apprehensive around dogs, but Dickens had an amiable disposition so at odds with the commonplace misperception of the breed, and the pooch loved both of them, and they both loved him. She craved the hours and the nights they shared with Dickens—and with each other. The experience with the dog underscored for Francesca that all she and Tommy needed was a little more time together.
On the domestic front, they also liked to cook in tandem, which activity can amount to a minefield around a kitchen countertop, but he made tomato sauce that Francesca’s father enjoyed, and enjoyed much more than he should have. Tommy wasn’t Italian and he could make sugo for real? Theoretically, if her father closed his eyes and ate his pasta, this new man in his daughter’s life was the definition of a keeper—theoretically.
Francesca’s dad had been slowly, reluctantly, coming around with regard to Tommy—painstakingly slowly, reluctantly. The man’s impressive sauce, which her dad called gravy, might have won the day. At first, Big Mimmo wasn’t comfortable with the prospect of his daughter possibly hitching up with a detective.
“Ex-detective,” Francesca told him a dozen times, as if that would make a difference, and it often seemed it wouldn’t. “Ex,” she reemphasized.
“Once a cop, Francesca,” he would portentously begin, and leave unexpressed the implicit follow-up. At the same time, he couldn’t miss that the man treated his only daughter like gold, and that—along with the gravy—went a long way with him. A detective…
“Ex-detective, on a pension, Papá.”
A detective would be properly protective, at least he was schooled in techniques of protection. Perhaps Tommy was a little bit too old for Francesca, and the man certainly wasn’t—and couldn’t speak—Italian, though Francesca and Tommy had started taking language classes together, which warmed the heart of her dad. And before too long in Big Mimmo’s mind those two did seem to click, a little. His only daughter deserved a good mate after all she had been through. He called her every morning, to check in, and lately he detected escalating hopefulness in her voice.
She herself believed her late husband would have approved of Tommy. He was the frill-free, bullshitless sort of man Anthony gravitated toward. He had contempt for dirty cops, slippery criminals with badges, and Tommy was nothing like that. She conducted imaginary conversations with Anthony, but he wasn’t the problem. She had little doubt he would have given her the green light to move on with her life—but there again was that dumb expression, to move on with her life. Francesca’s seeking the imaginary endorsement of Tommy sounds maudlin but it wasn’t. She deeply desired his sanction. On the other hand, when would she begin not thinking of Anthony as her husband? Perhaps that was a sane objective, but was it conceivable? Then she would take a step back and ponder—and discuss everything with her cherished therapist, Ruth.
She had seen Ruth for about a year after Anthony died, then dropped her: she had nothing left to say, or nothing she cared to say. Only recently had she returned, and it felt right, and now there was a lot that needed to be said. She was younger than Francesca but from the first she struck her as wise beyond her years. She could use a dose or two of wisdom. Look at the facts: What was she doing with a seriously unmarried, widowed ex-homicide cop of blue collar origins, she a widowed woman whose stock options made her rich during the dot-com boom and whose father was a retired bookmaker—even if nobody was convinced he was retired? Francesca didn’t lack for subject matter to fill the fifty-minute hour.
What were the odds a man like Tommy and a woman like Francesca could make it? Her dad could plausibly calculate them, and she could intuit he had already done so: something of a long shot. Of course, long shots do occasionally come in. But bookmakers make a living off those gamblers who fail to make a living off taking chances on a twenty to one.
Tonight also marked the occasion of the first conflict between Tommy and Francesca, which she didn’t know they were having till it was essentially over. Similar observations could be made about lots of crucial moments in one’s life—including possibly the totality of one’s existence. A fight in which people are not fighting about the thing they are really fighting about is always the worst, and simultaneously the most revealing, fight. Which sounds blindingly obvious to anybody who is not in love, and which couples’ counselors guide clients to understand.
Well, everybody had questions to answer, matters to work through, tensions to resolve. And a couple had a gala to attend.
—
Under the vast vaulted dome of the flamboyantly ornate baroque rotunda—complete with mermaids and knights-errant and unicorns depicted on gaudy murals—Francesca and Tommy were slated to sit at a table of honor, up front where the podium loomed large on the stage and where the heavy-hitter dignitaries, like the bishop, were scheduled to hold forth—and make passionate pitches for game-changing donations.
To a disinterested observer, Tommy may have indeed looked quite handsome, turned out in the new tuxedo Francesca had gotten for him. He wasn’t used to gifts on that order. But she was simply being pragmatic.
“Tommy,” she had explained to him weeks before, very reasonably, “we’re going to be going to these types of events, and we don’t want to rent a tux some teenager sweated up at his prom.” For Italians, it was no triviality how one appeared in public. Both men and women might spend an hour putting themselves together to go out for bread or to fill up their Vespas. Italians refer to cutting an attractive figure as fare la bella figura, a notion that has quasi-religious force—close to the force of Catholicism itself. There were worse principles to live by, Francesca supposed.
“Never went to the prom. Couldn’t get a date. I miss something?”
She could have answered two or three different ways—No, Yes, and Can we talk about something else? —but elected silence. She was learning, she was open to learning more. Once she might have successfully changed out Anthony’s closet and disposed of his corduroys and chinos, but when she saw Tommy in a corduroy jacket of his own, that prospect seemed foreclosed.
The intention behind formal wear for him was above suspicion, but she ought to have been better prepared for Tommy’s reaction. After all, he was old-school, which was, frankly, part of his appeal. Naturally, he might be troubled over some woman buying clothes for him. Or to put it the way he conceptualized the problem: that some woman bought him. Because look, that was the man’s job, to pay.
“It’s not some woman, it’s me, Tommy.” And what she didn’t need to say, because it was obvious, was that it was not a financial strain buying him a tux. Dinner jacket! The purchase did not rise to the level of a rounding error in her checkbook. But buying him a dinner jacket dredged up an issue that burgeoned for them: disparity in finances. Her dad might have been hung up on Tommy’s being a cop, reasonably or not, and given her dad’s past, that was at least a semi-legitimate concern. Francesca did not share her father’s reticence on that score. No, if she saw any red or yellow flags, Tommy might have trouble acclimating to her moneyed status—why, even her dad had difficulty when he first realized Francesca had made a killing. When she explained how her start-up ground-floor stock options operated and how she cashed out, all he had to say was: “Mama mia, they thought I was a crook?”
Sex and money: that’s what people say only matters when either is in short supply. Nobody ever said having too much of either could be a problem.
—
That night they rubbed shoulders with the well-heeled designer-dressed folks. Such mingling came with gala territory, and Francesca was accustomed to it. Tommy, another story. She was glad she had in her possession some pills to tide her over tonight.
True, her anxiety intermittently flared, and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and benzodiazepines had been variously prescribed over the years. She had experimented with many pharmaceuticals, like the current champion of the anxiety-ravaged set, Klonopin. She wondered, strictly as a marketing and branding proposition, how did they come up with such names? To her, they seemed more suitable to environmentally sensitive, technologically advanced automobiles.
Let’s Go Places, Ativan.
Buspar, The Car That Cares.
Zoom Zoom in Your Zoloft.
Shift Expectations: All-New Celexa.
Paxil, Pursuit of Perfection.
Valium—Or Nothing.
Imagine Yourself in a Brand-New Klonopin!
So far she was not ragingly anxious. She showed up in her gorgeous gown, didn’t she? She got the man his own tux. Okay, set that last one to the side. She put on blush and lip gloss, her shoes were nowhere in the zip code of sensible. Lights, camera, whatever.
But then she initiated a preemptive, precautionary action, which she took in the ladies’ room. All she needed was a little pop pop of pharmacological leverage in the stairway-to-the-stars form of an old-school Valium 10. Hey, she herself was attracted to old school. So maybe she was more than a little bit panicky, and maybe exclusively with regard to Tommy, though drugs wouldn’t help with that long-term. That’s what vodka was for. Set that to the side, too. She noted the absurdity referenced on the warning label of the instant anti-anxiety elixir she had selected: Side effects may include anxiety. She should enhance, accelerate the process, take a couple of Vitamin Vs.
Then she returned to Tommy’s tuxedoed arms. “You’re the cat’s meow, Detective Thomas, all decked out in your dinner jacket duds.” Instantly she wished she hadn’t put it that silly way. Unlike Anthony, Tommy wasn’t entertained. She made a resolution: Curtail the quaint vocabulary, he doesn’t find it adorable, he thinks you sound like an idiot.
—
She knew that Tommy was a size forty-six regular, a solid number. The Fitzgeralds had indoctrinated in her their shorthand for male assessment. They categorized men by suit coat size. Thirty-eight being suspect, on account of the boyish, small shoulders, which implied a deficit of power and loyalty, and forty was but a tiny immaterial step up. Forty-two was borderline respectable, and forty-four and forty-six very sound. Forty-eight and fifty meant expansive shoulders, which translated into stature and command. Larger than that, a fifty-two or fifty-four, could lead to complications, through weakness or excessive self-regard or uncontrolled appetite.
“What do you do, grab them by the lapel and steal a peek of the label?” Francesca said to Anthony one time, finding the whole concept ridiculous.
“Don’t have to, it’s obvious.”
“Anthony, that’s absurd, men are not their suit size.”
“You sure about that, Frankie? Haven’t you ever looked at a guy and said, ‘That is one empty suit’?”
“Sure, but come on, you’re telling me you have access to a man’s soul when you know the cut of their jib?”
“What, now you’re watching pirate movies? Look, I’m not saying suit size is fate, but it’s not irrelevant, either. I hire jury consultants and pay them way too much, but I don’t hesitate to overrule them when I see a thirty-eight or a forty, or for that matter a fifty-two or fifty-four in the jury box for voir dire, because those guys are, good chance, unreliable, especially the slope-shouldered thirty-eight, who is totally insecure, been pushed around all his life, which makes them therefore unpredictable, and a risky wild card.”
“What about my dad? He’s not fit to serve on your jury?”
“He’s a fifty-six, and that’s a very, very good number, a noble suit size. But Big Mimmo sitting on a jury? Can you visualize that? He’s the capo di bias, like every Italian, no offense, but you know I’m right and he’d never make it through one question before being thanked for his service and handed his hat, have a nice day.”
“Like every Italian? Oh, you mean Italians are more chauvinistic, opinionated, and pig-headed than the Irish? No offense taken, you Mick.”
They both had to laugh.
—
Francesca had caught herself thinking about Anthony’s suits hanging in the closet: size forty-six. Forty-six, like Tommy.
“Cat’s meow, huh?” said her bemused date. “Been wondering. About my duds, what’s the diff, dinner jacket, tux?” He wasn’t intending to inject a note of hostility into the proceedings, at least consciously.
“Same same. Shawl grosgrain lapel, one button, stripe down the leg. You look like somebody poured you into your tux for the spiffy party.” Cat’s meow, now spiffy, it was going to require concerted effort to reprogram herself.
“Whole slew of Fancy Dan people here tonight, guys in their shawl grainy collars, which I don’t know what that means. The phrase fish out of water occurs to me.”
“Party like it’s 1999 occurs to me.”
Saying that, she had inadvertently alluded to a most unfortunate calendar year. Of course, she would not have phrased it that way if she had put together that that was the year Tommy’s wife went into the hospital for a routine procedure and didn’t come out.
“You can always cheer yourself up and make a citizen’s arrest before the night is through.” It never hurt to try lightening the mood, but she was misgauging his by a mile.
“I think I’ll run myself in first, impersonating a big shot.”
How about changing the subject? “I’m glad you’re opening up your private-eye office,” she said and she meant it. She could see him in that role, and if she knew anything about male psychology—an open question, certainly—men had a tough time with retirement. They needed work. And so did she, of course, but in the same kind of way? To her, retirement was the equivalent of self-immolation. That’s why she was heavily involved in nonprofit causes, like Saint Monica’s College, that consumed her time and imagination and gave purpose and shape to her day. She would sort this out sooner or later—with the assistance of her Rock of Gibraltar therapist. Based on tonight’s conversation, resolution needed to be achieved sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, the image in her mind of a private detective might have been terminally dated, tainted by old black-and-white movies of gumshoes and cherry-red-lipsticked broads and wise-cracking tough guys with brogans propped up on their desk in some dilapidated office building while sipping Old Grand Dad from a chipped, stained coffee cup. Nowadays, private investigations were likely all about cybersecurity and surveillance and forensic accounting, but that was merely speculation. If so, Tommy might struggle to gain his footing, but if people needed some old-fashioned private detective work, he would thrive.
Privately, she also had been slowly, mostly unconsciously, fashioning for herself a little fantasy. She and Tommy could work together—she was hopeful. She knew it sounded crazy, but didn’t she crack the case at Saint Monica’s? She and Tommy, she would correct the record, she and Tommy, while still a cop, along with her dad as a team cracked the case. They could be a good team again.
“We’ll see,” Tommy said, with an edge. “There’ll always be people who need a good private dick.”
She rolled her eyes. “Really, Tommy, really? You in middle school?” She was no prude, anything but, as he knew full well, but come on.
“I’m being hard-boiled, like the eggs chopped for caviar they are spooning out around here, to feed all your fat cat people.”
There it was, out of nowhere, the old gauntlet being thrown down. It had been a long time since she spied the shabby thing at her feet. The gauntlet is never a pretty sight to see thrown down anywhere, anytime. She was no knight in shining armor, and no princess, either, and it had been a while since any medieval object had made its ratty appearance in her life. Men did that throwing down thing with their gauntlets, she supposed, wherever they kept them. And she was woman—and man—enough to pick it up.
“Tommy? You are my people, Tommy.”
The way he shook his head amounted to asking: Was she sure about that?
“Are we about to have an argument?” she said. “Because let’s not.” Going back to her marriage to Anthony, this was a sensitive subject.
“No, we’re not going to argue, honey. Having a complicated night is all.”
Each was having a complicated night, just not the same one.
“Because you don’t want to argue or because there’s nothing to argue about?”
His face reddened and he tugged on the top button of his ruffled formal shirt. The damn shirt collar was too tight, and the bow tie pressed on his windpipe. On the way out of his house, she had engineered for him the thing around his neck because he was all thumbs, but if she were a cop on the beat, he would have called that police brutality.
—
A terrible feeling crept up on her, for the first time. Was this a mistake? She didn’t only mean getting the tux, taking him to the gala, she meant everything. Was it too soon, coming with him to an event like this? Alternatively, maybe she was a fool. When would the Valium kick in?
“Do you want us to leave?” she said. The prospect unexpectedly held some appeal. Her anxiety escalated. The next pill she took would be her third today. That’s two or possibly three too many.
“Do you want to go?”
“What I want is champagne.”
“I’ll get you some, baby. Me, I’m going to try to track down a beer in this joint.”
Her heart sank. She hoped they served beer but wasn’t counting on it at a gala like this. As soon as he turned to hunt down the drinks, she found in her velvet clutch another blue Valium 10 and covertly popped it.
After a few minutes he returned, champagne flutes in both hands. Francesca was beaming and breezily chatting—with a priest possessed of movie-star looks. Tommy didn’t need to have been a crack investigator. The man’s black suit and black shirt with Roman collar was the giveaway.
“Father Philip, this is Tommy Thomas…” She scrambled. How to identify him? “My special friend.”
Philip reached out to shake hands but it was awkward, what with the champagne flutes, and Tommy made little attempt to smooth over the clumsiness.
“Tommy, Father Philip and I went to Saint Monica’s together long ago, when he took college classes while in seminary. Back in the dark ages—like before email.” She had been thrown off her game, the proof being how she had incompletely, and disingenuously, identified the priest who had played a charged role in her life dramas. She’d hold off sharing that information with Tommy.
“You’re so right, Frankie,” said Father Philip, amiably, suavely. “That was around the time they invented blackboard chalk.”
This was Tommy’s cue to say something charming. He whiffed it.
Francesca filled in the silence: “Long time, Philip.”
“Let’s get together soon, catch up. Hey, my dad finally showed, better late than never,” said Father Philip, pointing in the direction of Paddy Fitzgerald across the way. He could tell by the way his father smiled and leaned forward that he was respectfully flirting with a lady of a certain age. “Better pay my respects, you know how touchy the man can be. But wait, before I forget. Excellence is planning to give you a call, he has an idea he wants to discuss. He wouldn’t tell me what it was—but you get three guesses.”
“Sounds mysterious.” Though it wasn’t, and she didn’t need three guesses, as she assumed the bishop was going to do the money-ask in person, which was pro forma when it came to large-capacity fundraising candidates.
Francesca and the eminent and dashing Father Philip hugged as old friends might before he silkily wandered off.
“Let’s do lunch, Frankie!” he cried over his shoulder as he was swallowed up by the swarm of partygoers, pawing, seeking attention.
She said yes, good idea, and hoped he was sincere, because she was. Part of her was astounded he had approached her at the gala in the first place. But then it also immediately felt natural, and right. Too much had happened between them and it had been far too long since they had talked, really talked.
Tommy couldn’t help but notice that, as soon as the priest departed, so did her radiant smile.
“Special friend? Special friend?” It sounded to him like a designation that granted you preferential treatment on public transportation, like with a service dog. Then again, they had never agreed upon how to identify themselves in a social context. It was all too new.
She was guilty as charged. “Sorry, you’re right, I clanked it. I sounded stupid stupid stupid. Don’t make me feel worse than I do. But I didn’t think you wanted me to say you were my favorite homicide detective, or that you’re the man I am sleeping with.” She had some Valium left if required, but she didn’t want to fall asleep on her feet.
Side effects may include saying brainless things.
“You didn’t need to make a confession that you were sleeping with me—or since he’s a priest, maybe you did.”
“Should have said, this is Tommy and he’s with me and you figure out what you need to.”
“He calls you Frankie.”
“Old friends.”
“They let crazy handsome drop-dead gorgeous guys like that be priests? Don’t women think that’s a waste?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, a waste, and besides, to me you’re every bit as good-looking.”
He didn’t need to hook her up to a lie detector or to hang up a Private Eye shingle in thin air to determine she was not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“You do remember I used to interrogate people for a living, right?”
“Why would you want to interrogate me, Tommy?” She mentally located the pills in her tiny clutch purse, but she couldn’t break the glass on the emergency pill box while Tommy was studying her.
Side effects may include taking more drugs.
“You go out with him in college—back in them dark ages?” He was not the jealous type, normally. Then again, that priest cut quite a dashing figure.
“You catch the Roman collar, Detective?”
“Ex-detective.” Tommy filed away for later analysis the fact that she didn’t answer the question. “Let’s change the subject. How much you planning to donate? Just curious.”
Francesca pretended not to be stunned, which she was. Usually, he was subtler, and not the let’s-get-everything-out-on-the-table sort of man, because first, the truth only seeps out over time, and second, there’s no table big enough to put everything out on. But the gala was the essence of his being out of his natural habitat, so she could sympathize—perhaps. She doubted he was being innocently curious, since nobody with current brain function is innocently curious when it comes to the subject of money. So she flinched, a reflexive response he detected, but not answering him could be construed as drawing a boundary, so she saw no alternative to being direct—since he was. She was who she was, and so was he. Time to get real, whatever that trite turn of phrase purported to mean, and everybody knows what it means. She told him how much she was contemplating. Her charitable donation exceeded his entire pension by five times or possibly ten—or so she would have guessed, not that she probed into his civil servant personal finances or the status of his IRAs. She could always use the tax deduction, but she didn’t want to get into that level of detail, not to mention that tonight’s causes were those she could passionately get behind. She was planning to split her gift fifty-fifty between the new high school and Caring Street. What she wasn’t going to mention was that, as large as her donation may have been, this was likely not the full extent of her ultimate contribution. She would wait and see before committing what she would term serious money.
Tommy shook his head, which she feared as disapproving, so she asked him—with a tone she could not resist adopting, hard as she tried—if there was something wrong with her donation. What she was asking, of course, was if he thought there was something wrong with her.
“Not exactly, I suppose, though I gotta be wondering about the bishop, who wants a sit-down with you. He is up to some nasty crap. Forcing teachers and other diocesan employees to sign a loyalty oath, a morality clause in their employment contracts—didn’t you see that in the news? Teachers have to commit to upholding Catholic doctrine in their private lives, not only at school, otherwise they can lose their jobs—because he says they’re really ministers, whatever the hell that means. I hear they’re about to push out some good teachers who have the gonads not to sign. Sounds dumb to me, the bishop’s power play. And pretty bad if, I don’t know, like, say you’re gay or use birth control or march for marriage equality, which Catholics are stuck in the Middle Ages about. But you know all this.”
Francesca was distraught she wasn’t up to date on the latest, and the news confused and troubled her. She needed to get back into the loop or she’d one day become an old lady with a dozen cats.
“What a crushingly bonehead idea, a morality oath, loyalty oath, sweet Jesus,” she said. “And here I assumed the bishop was a lot smarter, especially since he’s looking to build a new school, and he could use all the good will he could get. He is a bull in the china shop, like they say.” She decided to bring up this issue when the two of them met. And now she made more sense of all the protestors clamoring outside the gala as they entered. She was embarrassed to be so out of touch. She should have approached one of the protestors, one she recognized, Anthony’s younger brother, and now she regretted that.
“You Catholics can be hard to figure, no disrespect intended.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yeah, Catholics are tough nuts to crack.”
“I meant the disrespect not intended. I’m going to talk to Philip, find out what’s going on here. Father Philip.”
There was information she was holding back. Isn’t there always, the detective would have presumed. Tommy had knocked her off-balance.
“Yes,” said Tommy, “there’s Father Philip. Here’s to the lucky church with drop-dead gorgeous priests,” and he raised his glass, offering a temporary cease-fire. They clinked glasses. Given the emotional intensity, a little harder than they intended.
She tried to align herself with Tommy and toasted: “Confusion to our enemies.”
“They’re everywhere, aren’t they?”
They sipped the second-tier bubbly, which was bitter on the palate, and they both hoped somebody would rush in to fill the gap in their conversation, or at least bless him with a beer, but nobody cooperated. Bystanders and waiters must have sensed theirs was a no-fly zone.
Tommy wondered out loud why people said they liked champagne. The appeal eluded him. “Wish they had beer,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“Frankie,” said Tommy, emphatically, as if he had arrived at a fresh conclusion, “you are a very good person.”
His words dropped like a spider descending onto a spun white linen tablecloth. A chill slid icily along her shivering spine. To her, this declaration sounded appalling, like half a terminal diagnosis and half a press release. She felt a passionate need to defend herself against the charge. And now would be the perfect occasion to do that, which she might if she were in fact a very good person. But she did not believe she was in fact a very good person. She could prove the point if she had to, and she hoped the day would never come when she would.
“Philip? Father Philip? He officiated at my wedding.”
“Must have been a great day.” Tommy, not normally given to self-pity or cynicism, wasn’t having such a great day himself.
“It was, it was,” she said, deciding to ignore the sarcasm if that’s what he intended. “And full disclosure: Philip’s also Anthony’s brother.” That was nowhere in the neighborhood of full disclosure, but it was a placeholder, and there was a lot more she might have said, but again, not now.
Tommy was thrown, but he was practiced enough not to show it. “New ring?”
What difference did it make anymore? She was silly to think this would possibly work out.
When she didn’t respond, he followed up with this: “When did you take off your wedding ring?”
“Today.” She noticed he was still wearing his wedding band.
Gong. Guests were being summoned to take their seats so dinner could be served and the program could begin. Gong.
She handed off the dreaded champagne flute to a passing waiter, put her arm through Tommy’s as if this were her last desperate hope to hang on to him, by keeping him close, and they headed down the long flight of stairs toward their special table, and she remembered, but did not tell him, not now, not after his cheap shot, if that’s what it was, which it wasn’t, that it was also a pretty good day when she and Tommy met.
“Wait,” she said. She scurried back up the stairs in her challenging heels, rummaged in her tiny ruby-studded purse for the pills, found them, took a deep breath, and tossed her stash into the trash, feeling instantly, strangely, exuberantly liberated. She would do this on her own, whatever this was, and she headed back in his direction, whatever his direction seemed to portend.
“Ready,” she said, and hoped she was, because sometimes hope is all you can hope for. Her final old-school benzodiazepine was, as expected, working black magic upon her. She hoped she didn’t nod off and nosedive into her lobster bisque. As an unconscious precaution, she locked her arm into his and held on tight. He construed this gesture as affection on her part, which it also was.
“One more thing, Tommy,” she said as they walked, feeling the need to draw a line. “Just so you know, if you ever call me a good person again, I will probably kill you.”
“Understood,” he said, because he did. And he realized that he’d deserve such a fate. When she said what she said he remembered what it was about her that drew him to her in the first place and he looked at her anew. “You look beautiful,” he said. “I’m glad I came tonight.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“No, truth, Frankie, honest truth.”
In fact, he wasn’t absolutely sure he was glad to be there, but he would also have not been glad not to be there, so it was going to take him a while to get there, yet he knew that was what he should say. And she understood him perfectly, what he said and also what he didn’t say. They had a short walk ahead of them to their honorary table, and a long way to go between them, if they were ever going to arrive. Part of her was wishing she could find a soft couch, curl up into a ball, and slip off into a sweeter dream.