LAURIE WASN’T SURE WHAT EXACTLY had gotten into her, but she wanted her whole apartment, and especially the table, to be particularly nice.
Last night, with Beth and Ginny in her kitchen, using real plates and utensils, eating food that had flavor, it was all still so odd, something she vaguely remembered from another era that now, late but maybe not too late, was making an unexpected reappearance in her life.
If she had to say what it was, as she had tried to describe it to Alan when they’d talked in the morning, she felt as if she’d come awake after a long sleep. The feeling had lasted all day, bolstered by two meals—she’d scrambled an egg for breakfast and ate some turkey—a slice and a half—sometime in the middle of the afternoon.
Oh, and a spoonful of the java chip.
The feeling was still with her, a kind of hopefulness that felt as though in some way she was regaining some of the strength in her muscles.
Beth and Ginny would be here again in a few minutes, and she checked herself in the bathroom mirror. She’d put on jeans that weren’t too loose and a bright red pullover that bulked her up somewhat. With a little makeup, the blotches disappeared, a touch of mascara brought her eyes to life, some gloss gave a clean definition and fullness to her lips.
She realized that in spite of everything she’d put herself through, all of the eating problems, the psychological trauma, she still looked good, reminiscent in fact of how she’d looked when she and Frank . . .
With something of a shock, she realized that she hadn’t once thought of Frank all day, not even when she’d been outside buying the bouquet for the table at the place he’d always stopped to get flowers for her.
She walked into the kitchen. The bouquet was in a vase in the middle of the table, which she’d set with great care. It was full of fall foliage, large and flamboyant and the orange and yellow in it matched the placemats and made it look as though somebody lived here.
Somebody could live here.
“Okay, I’ve got one,” Ginny said.
Laurie swallowed a bite of lamb meatball. “Go.”
Beth didn’t let on, but she was taking an inventory of the food that Laurie was eating and thus far, it looked promising. That was also the way Laurie herself looked. Not that she’d gained any visible weight since yesterday, of course, but she was carrying herself differently, with what struck Beth as confidence that hadn’t been there before. She’d also told them about her meals during the day, if you wanted to call them that—a slice of turkey and an egg—but Beth realized that any eating was a bonus.
There was no question about whether she loved the meatballs. She was on her third one, smothered in yogurt sauce. Plus, two relatively big servings of rice pilaf, two stalks of asparagus. One whole piece of pita bread. More importantly, without dwelling on it she seemed to simply be enjoying the food, the experience of eating.
And beyond that, the younger women were clearly having fun. They’d spent almost ten minutes howling over some app on Ginny’s cell phone that gave the wrong, but invariably hysterical pronunciation of common, or sometimes not so common, words. Such as synecdoche—syna kyna dotie chotie! When Ginny had first discovered the app, Beth herself had laughed until she’d cried more than once.
That had led to a few rounds of riddles, Laurie stumping Ginny with, “What never leaves the corner and yet travels around the world?”
Beth having to supply the answer—a stamp.
And then Ginny jumping in with, “So Donald Trump and Sarah Palin are both drowning in the pool right in front of you, and you know there’s only going to be a minute or two before one or both of them goes under. Here’s the question: What kind of sandwich do you make?”
Laurie laughed out loud. “That’s awful,” she said.
“It is, a little,” Ginny agreed. “I feel bad every time I tell it, but not bad enough to stop.”
As the two girls continued laughing and generally yucking it up, Beth got up from the table, took a few steps over to the refrigerator, and pulled the java chip out of the freezer so it would soften up a bit before she served it. She had just placed it on the counter by the sink when the doorbell rang. “I’m up. I’ll get it,” she said. “Are you expecting anybody?”
“Not really. It’s probably just Alan.” At Beth’s fleeting, questioning expression, she raised her palm as though taking an oath and said, “Unplanned, I promise. Sometimes he just stops by.”
The younger girls had gone into the living room with their ice cream and they’d put on some music, someone Beth didn’t recognize. She and Alan stood by the sink, and she handed him plates to dry as she finished washing them. “The thing I’m so surprised about,” she said, “is how young Laurie is. Tonight she seems almost like Ginny’s age, which is eighteen. When I first met her, I thought she was closer to thirty. Of course, that was the day she heard about Frank Rinaldi’s death, and that could put a few years on a person.”
“She’s twenty-three,” Alan said.
“So? What? You’re in your twenties, too?”
He chuckled. “Hardly. I was nineteen when she was born.”
“Same mom and dad?”
“That’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Or did, at least, until they died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Alan.”
He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. She was ten when Dad passed—heart attack. Then Mom with cancer a couple of years after that.”
“Who’d Laurie live with then?”
“Me, until five years ago, when she moved out for college.”
“You supported her? By yourself?”
He downplayed it. “If you don’t count the two hundred grand my parents left us. That helped a bit. Still does.”
“But you raised her during those special teenage years?”
“I don’t know if I’d call it raising her. We lived in the same apartment. She was pretty much on her own, with me working. But she mostly kept herself out of trouble. Until this food stuff started, which like an idiot I couldn’t even see.”
“And you blame yourself for that?”
He shrugged. “Somebody else might have recognized the signs earlier, that’s all. Gotten a little more proactive.” A sudden burst of laughter came from the living room. “That’s a good sound to hear,” Alan said. “I haven’t heard very much of it lately.”
Beth handed him another plate. “They’re getting along.” Then, “It’s good of you to come by and check on her.”
“It’s good of you,” he replied, “to come by at all.” He indicated the kitchen, the table, the food. “And bring all this.”
“Well, you said it was serious, and I agree with you. I don’t know exactly what should happen next to get her some help, but meanwhile I’ve got a case that’s eating me up and my partner’s daughter is sick in the hospital, so I . . . I mean, there’s nothing else I can do until . . .”
“Hey hey hey. Stop. No apologies. You’re here. Your daughter’s doing more good in there than any shrink or doctor on the planet. I haven’t heard Laurie laugh out loud in a year, maybe more. Whatever the prize for being a great person is, you’ve already won it, so I don’t want to hear about you not doing all you can. This is half a miracle right here, to say nothing of all the food she told me you’d brought over. And speaking of which”—he put down the dry plate and reached for the wallet in his back pocket—“what do I owe you for all that?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous.”
“Well, you’re not giving me any money, either. This has been my pleasure. And listen to them.” She cocked her head back toward the living room. “My daughter’s having a great Friday night and maybe getting herself a new friend in the bargain. That’s worth a lot more than a bag or two of groceries.”
“Maybe. But it still doesn’t feel right, not paying our own way.”
“It feels right to me. So how about we don’t fight about it? Just say ‘Okay, you win,’ and we let it go at that.”
He took in a frustrated breath, cast his eyes around the kitchen, came back to her. “Okay, you win,” he said, then added, “but I owe you.” A beat. “Maybe a dinner, if you’d like to try that again.”
“I might,” Beth said. “But not because you feel you owe me anything.”
“That wouldn’t be it.”
“Well, we’ll see.” Her shoulders settling, she put down the last washed plate and turned off the water. Turning, her arms now folded over her chest, she looked up into his face.
She met his eyes again and drew a breath. To her dismay, she felt her eyes begin to fill with unexpected tears, and she quickly, almost angrily, brushed at them before they overflowed onto her cheeks. She didn’t want to play any part of this for sympathy.
“Twice?” he asked.
She nodded. “Two bullets. One per leg. I thought you might have noticed me walking a little funny as you followed me down the hallway.”
“I noticed you walking, all right. Way more graceful than funny.”
She gave him a no-nonsense look. “Let’s not get all silly now. I’m still a couple of light-years from graceful.”
He shrugged. “Just sayin’. I saw graceful. And so what happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“I mean with you. You’re shot twice. What happened? What did they do to you?”
“More like ‘for me.’ They shipped me down to Kaiser in Redwood City, and I’m not even a member, but you probably know that every bed in the nine counties had a shooting victim or three.” She shrugged. “They triaged everybody, and I wasn’t by any stretch one of the priority people. It was a pretty chaotic time.”
“I remember following it all on the news, but it never occurred to me that you . . . I mean, I knew that you were a cop, but it never occurred to me you were one of the victims.” He pulled around a chair and sat on it, shaking his head in disgust with himself. “I tell myself that if I’d have known that, I would have made a bigger effort. I am so sorry I never followed up,” he said. “But the reality of what you were going through never even crossed my mind. I never even looked around for another explanation, when it was right there in front of me. What an idiot.”
“Well, it’s over now. And let’s remember that I could have called you anytime to explain where I was and what had happened, but then I figured you had probably just decided that on reflection you weren’t really interested.”
“That wasn’t it at all.”
“I believe it if that’s what you’re telling me now, but that’s what I told myself then.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Well, we sure make a great pair, don’t we?”
“Fantastic,” he said, breaking a grin back at her, “if just slightly pathetic.”