Tara found herself needed as soon as she reached the concierge desk, a beautiful five-drawer mahogany Chippendale piece out of an English country house. Mrs. Alfred P. Woodford pushed her wheelchair bound husband across the lobby with energetic determination and a militant gleam in her eye that did not suggest satisfaction with the Belmont.
“Where’s our driver, Ms. Keegan? We expected him at eight.” The clock in the lobby began to strike the hour as she spoke, and a uniformed young man came striding in the front door.
“Ah,” said her husband. “I believe Thomas is here.”
“Yes, but, we should be pulling away from the curb already. Now we have to get you settled and wrestle with your chair and explain where we’re going when we could have been underway.”
“Of course, dear, but you’ll manage. You always do.” His eyes twinkled at Tara. For their anniversary each year the Woodfords made a pilgrimage to Notre Dame des Victoires, the French national church a few blocks away on Bush Street, where they had been married. In the past two years, with Alfred in a wheelchair, all the anxious fretful elements of Mrs. Woodford’s nature had intensified. She would not be cheated out of her chance to complain.
“Yes, but, you know how traffic in the city makes it impossible to get anywhere on time.”
“The church will still be there.”
“Let me help, Mrs. Woodford.” Tara took over with Alfred’s chair, while Thomas got the door. “Shall I call Father Pierre for you? Then he could meet you at the curb.” With a little more fretting, a call to the church, and a great deal of patience from Thomas they were underway.
After the Woodfords left, Tara managed to get a much-coveted reservation for two foodie guests at the restaurant Frances, signed a younger guest up for the Uber phone app taxi service, and booked a spa day for a pair of sisters. It was just what she loved most about her job. When she handed a wine country tour packet to a visiting couple from Rhode Island, the green ring flashed on her finger. She smiled. She could deal with Daniel’s proposal plans.
***
By any measure Jack Reeder could call himself a success even in San Francisco with its changing mix of fabled old fortunes and fabulous new ones. The medical practice he and his fellow physician Anne Campion had established in downtown San Francisco was thriving. The way they combined different kinds of expertise with new technologies for patient care felt right for a city of innovators and decidedly old-fashioned traditionalists. He could bike to work from his house in lower Pac Heights. He had a dog, lots of friends, male and female, and if he didn’t have a CEO-sized yacht, he had a kayak to glide smoothly over the bay’s waters or anchor in McCovey Cove to catch a splash home run from a Giants’ game. Not bad for a farm boy from Eastern Washington who had made his way through school on student loans and odd jobs.
This morning Anne had reminded him that his success required him to give back a little to the city. He sat at his desk, staring at the email she had forwarded to him from one of her former sorority sisters. The Charity Chicks and Benefit Babes Fundraiser was looking for bachelors to compete in a Mr. Single San Francisco contest. The money would go to the city’s homeless shelters, and the publicity would boost Anne and Jack’s medical practice. So he shouldn’t hesitate. They had already written up a bio on him.
Who can resist a doctor with blue eyes and healing hands? Dr. Jack Reeder will win your vote and steal your heart. Trained as an ER doctor, a veteran of medical missions in Latin America, Jack studied at Washington State and did his residency here in the city, where he has his own medical practice, Whole Person Health. This hunky MD bikes to work, so he’s as easy on the environment as he is on the eyes. No girlfriend—that we know of.
The write-up was technically true, except maybe the part about the healing hands. He had a curious brain and lots of good training from great physician teachers. He liked to listen to his patients, and he was willing to test more than one theory before he jumped to any diagnosis or prescribed a course of treatment. And he did like to do medicine, to see results, rather than simply refer his patients to specialists. That’s what the ER had been all about, doing medicine on the spot, acting directly for the patient’s benefit. And that was the thrill of a medical mission.
“Why are you balking at this contest?” Anne had asked him the day before. “I’m curious. I never see you hesitate.”
He’d put her off, but the answer was simple. The write-up made him feel like a fraud. While most of his patients were pleased with his work, the words of one dissatisfied patient from his ER days stayed with him. More than anything he had wanted to fix that patient, so the man’s words stuck, outweighing all the good comments on Internet rating sites since.
As that one homeless man had put it, jabbing Jack in the chest with a bony finger, “You may be smart, boy, but you try to fix people. You can’t fix people like you fix cars. Fixing is not healing. To heal a person you’ve got to be in a relationship with the person. If you just see the disease or the broken body parts, you won’t heal anyone. You heal by working with a whole person.”
At the time, he had rejected the advice. He didn’t appreciate anyone questioning his new skills, especially not someone whose lifestyle had landed him in the ER with a smashed nose and a concussion. Jack had been living in a small apartment with a crushing amount of student loans, but he had a degree and self-discipline and big plans. What did some homeless guy know anyway?
But the words had stuck. And when he heard the ideas of the homeless man echoed in the conversation of one of his more outspoken colleagues, he found himself thinking about whether he could practice medicine a bit differently from the way he had imagined doing it.
When he was ready to go out on his own, he’d sought out the fellow student who had been so outspoken in her views about what it meant to treat people. They’d hammered out a partnership, raised the start-up money, and begun their Whole Person Health practice, which they had located where even the homeless could find them. He owed Anne a favor, or two, or a hundred, so he should say yes to this request.
He deleted “healing hands” from the blurb, chose a picture of himself from the Whole Person Health website, and sent off an acceptance email to the Charity Chicks.
Since he and Anne had started Whole Person Health, he’d been working on a relationship with his former critic. He knew he’d feel better about competing in the Mr. Single San Francisco contest, if he could get his favorite homeless vet to agree to get a flu shot before the flu season cranked into high gear. He logged off his computer and headed for the nearest food truck. With any luck he’d find his cranky critic today.
***
Just after noon, Tara found a moment to call Daniel. His executive assistant put her through to him, and she immediately offered her congratulations.
“Cut to the chase, Keegan. Is the hotel up to the job?”
“We are so on it. Does Nicola have a favorite flower? Peony, lilac, tuberose?”
“Red roses will work.”
“So is red her favorite color?” Tara did not remember a photograph of Nicola Solari in red.
“Every woman likes red roses.”
“Her favorite fragrance?”
“Expensive.”
“Great, Daniel. You’ve been most helpful. Any other requests to make your stay more comfortable?”
“Buckwheat pillows.”
“Does Nicola sleep with one?”
“I do.”
“Okay. I’ll look into it for you.” Tara made a note.
“And I’d like an appointment at Goorin Bros. I need a new hat.”
“Do you need an appointment with them?” The flagship store of the famous hat makers was just blocks from the Belmont.
“Timing matters. I hope you’re up to this, Keegan. This has got to be perfect.”
For whom? The question popped into her head from nowhere, and she couldn’t help pushing back a little. “Daniel, if you have any doubts, why this hotel?”
“The view of Coit Tower.”
Daniel was right that the hotel had a perfect view of the iconic white tower at the top of Telegraph Hill overlooking the whole sweep of the bay.
“But does it make sense to host your engagement bash where an ex-girlfriend works? I can call one of our competitors if it seems awkward.”
“Awkward?”
“For Nicola, because it’s her moment.”
“Oh. That’s no problem. I never mentioned you to Nicola. You’ll just be part of the staff and if the staff does their job right, Nicola will never notice them.”
Ouch! “Okay, well then, thanks for the information about her preferences. If you think of anything else, please call. We’ll do our best to make your weekend perfect.”
Tara hung up and took a deep breath. Daniel’s self-important, finger-snapping, bottom-line attitude had pushed her buttons. She had slipped as a concierge. Arturo wouldn’t like her recommending a competitor to a client, especially not a client with important connections. She resolved to stay professional in her dealings with Daniel. Her ego might be in the ICU, but she’d survive. She’d make sure that Daniel and Nicola had their perfect weekend, even if Daniel’s idea of perfect seemed to be about satisfying himself rather than his fiancée-to-be.
Daniel had obviously survived their break up, so maybe she could learn from him about cutting her losses. Maybe it was better to hit delete when the cursor hovered over files of early bad romances and move on, but didn’t people open up to each other about their pasts, about their mistakes and their growth and the things that had happened to make them who they were? Something to think about after her break up with Justin to whom she was now engaged.
The thought made her glance at the ring on her finger, and she held up her hand to look at it again. Hello, ring, I’m listening. Do you have anything to say?
Predictably, the gold and green band was silent.
***
Jack found Eddie on a bench between the water’s edge and the Ferry Building. He didn’t try to fix Eddie any more. He just tried to keep the contact going, so he sat on the bench, prepared to shoot the breeze about the Warriors’ prospects for the season or the economy, always Eddie’s favorite topic. The fog had burned off, but the day was brisk, and the wind off the bay, sharp. Eddie had his hands wrapped around a tall, lidded paper cup. He looked warm enough in a worn, knee-length, navy wool jacket, and mostly he looked sober.
Jack didn’t know when Eddie had decided get sober, some time after their disastrous experiment in living together. Living together seemed to bring out the worst in each of them. Jack kept trying to help. Eddie kept insisting that Jack’s medical degree was worthless, that he knew nothing about helping a vet in Eddie’s circumstances. The whole experiment exploded when Eddie tore the apartment apart in a drunken rage in front of Jack’s then girlfriend Lisa. Both Lisa and Eddie had walked out on him, and he didn’t see Eddie for more than a year, until he turned up in the ER that night beaten by a couple of thugs.
Jack had done a lot of work since then trying to understand guys like Eddie and trying to resist the impulse to “fix” the broken. Eddie had been right that fixing was not healing, but knowing Eddie was right did not make it easy to see him resisting services that could get him off the streets. The coldest, wettest days of San Francisco’s brief winter lay ahead of them.
Jack unwrapped his turkey sandwich. He knew better than to offer any to Eddie. Pigeons strutted about at their feet, and a gull landed on the railing to watch Jack consume his sandwich. While Jack ate and Eddie sipped his hot beverage, they covered the usual concerns of local sports’ fans, the Niners’ playoff prospects, the Warriors’ coaching woes, and the lead-up to spring training for the Giants. Then Eddie surprised him.
“You dating anyone these days?”
“No.” Jack felt his old wariness immediately surface, and worked to quell it. He and Eddie had very different ideas about women. “Why?”
“I think it’s time for you to meet this girl I know. I think you’d like her.”
That was a new one. Jack tried to picture the sort of girl Eddie would pick for him. She would be someone Eddie had met in a recovering addicts’ meeting or a veterans’ group. Jack pictured tattoos and piercings. Or maybe she’d be a twenty-something barista, with whom Eddie had struck up a flirtation. He pictured tattoos and piercings. The old Eddie, before Iraq and alcoholism, had been a high school hero, Jack’s hero, a popular football player who made diving catches and dazzling runs.
“Tell me about her.”
“Tara’s an Irish girl, descended from Irish people at any rate. She has that look—a smooth roses-and-cream complexion, hair like burnt caramel, big blue eyes.”
“Figure?” Women in San Francisco tended to be model thin or athletically buff.
“She has a figure. You’ll notice right away.”
“So she’s hot, but for some reason, she’s available?” He tossed his sandwich wrapper in the trash, and the gull took flight.
“She’s got this absentee boyfriend, Justin Wright, sort of like an absentee landlord. He neglects her, puts his work ahead of everything. She needs someone steady, reliable, like you.”
“Did you just call me ‘dull,’ because I think you did?”
“You know what I mean. You’re a regular guy. You’re not one of these high-flying tech types. You’ve got a dog. Watson hasn’t left you, right?”
“Now you’re suggesting that I’d be good for this girl because Watson likes me. I feed Watson. What if she’s romantic?”
“Oh, she’s romantic. She just doesn’t know it.”
Jack realized that Eddie knew a lot about the girl, more than he imagined him knowing about most of the people he encountered in his life. Eddie, who was Mr. Self-Reliant, who would have found Walden Pond crowded, sounded almost fatherly toward this Tara.
“How do you know her?”
Eddie got up from his bench, moving stiffly and slowly. It could just be from the cold and from sitting so long, but Jack realized they hadn’t gotten around to talking about a flu shot.
“She brings me my socks and coffee in the morning on her way to work.”
“And where does she work?” Jack asked as casually as he could. He kept his gaze on a passing container ship. It would be unlike Eddie to reveal, even inadvertently, any detail that might let Jack know where he slept at night.
Eddie took his time shouldering his pack. “The Hotel Belmont. She’s a concierge there.” He said it with obvious pride.
Jack got up, too, careful not to show that he’d picked up on what Eddie had revealed. It was stunning information. If Eddie accepted help from this girl regularly, he must be hanging out more or less permanently in North Beach, an area of the city that was marginally less dangerous for the homeless. Jack felt a certain tightness in his chest loosen a fraction at the idea.
“So, did I talk you into looking her up?”
Jack was due back for his afternoon round of appointments, and he had one stop to make on the way. He wasn’t going to admit it, but he was curious about the woman who had won so much of Eddie’s trust. “You did convince me that I’ve made a big mistake agreeing to compete in the Mr. Single San Francisco contest. What woman is going to be interested in a steady guy with great dog-feeding skills?”
“Well, listen, you take Tara out, and I’ll get that flu shot you want me to have.” Eddie turned and started to shuffle off. Squawking gulls swooped in over their abandoned bench.
“Did I say anything about a flu shot?” Jack shouted over the gulls’ din.
“You can’t stop being a doctor, you know. You’ve been checking my vitals mentally since you sat down. I’m going to give Tara your cell number.”
***
Across the lobby Tara saw Jennifer approaching to fill in while Tara took her lunch break. She could use one. Mrs. Woodford had returned from lunch with another series of complaints, and a list of anticipated difficulties about their dinner plans.
Jennifer threw a quick glance around and unwrapped another cough drop. “Whew, it’s a going to be a crazy weekend, isn’t it? Just don’t get in Arturo’s way.”
“I won’t. Are you okay?”
“Just a dry throat.”
“Listen, I’ve got to do an errand on my break. Can you keep the desk covered if I’m a little late?”
“No problem.” Jennifer coughed. “But show me the ring. I heard from Hadley that your man proposed.”
Tara held out her hand. Okay, the Justin Wright thing was getting a little out of hand. Now she was deliberately misleading her friends, and that felt weird. She promised herself she would make it up to them. George opened the door to usher in a young couple, and traffic noise briefly filled her ears. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard a voice. You’ve been misleading your friends for years.
Jennifer looked underwhelmed by the ring. “It must be an heirloom, huh? I mean it’s not Tiffany’s or anything, but it’s sweet and traditional. It’s Irish, too. I didn’t know that your Justin could be so thoughtful.”
Tara looked at the ring, which seemed to lose its luster as she wore it. Was she the only one who did not know her Irish rings? “That’s Justin, so thoughtful.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean that he isn’t. It’s just that he always puts his work before you, you know, like when it’s your birthday, or when you got promoted, and he was away.”
“He does travel a lot.” An unexpected thought popped into her head as if the words were spoken aloud, and she looked at the ring again.
Even your fictional boyfriend is a bad boyfriend. Why?
First the ring had sounded like Eddie, and now it sounded like a therapist. Her imagination was clearly out of whack and inventing voices.
“Well, congratulations anyway.” Jennifer took over Tara’s position at the desk. “We should celebrate—pizza and gelato? And maybe the next time Justin’s in town we’ll meet him.”
Tara nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
She collected her bag from the staff room and headed for the door. Since her grandmother’s passing she made regular trips to her grandmother’s attorneys’ offices on Montgomery to handle matters relating to the estate. It was odd that the ring was Irish like her grandmother, whose people had come in the late nineteenth century to the foothills above Sacramento for the last of the gold in California’s streams. She wasn’t particularly familiar with Irish lore as her mother favored brioche over soda bread every time.
Tara ducked out of the hotel behind a pair of guests as George helped them into a cab. She wanted to avoid any awkward questions about Eddie until she had a chance to warn him. She had not yet seen any of the security men. Outside the hotel the fog had lifted on a sparkling, crisp day, sunlight glinting off gleaming skyscrapers and the bright bay. She grabbed a Muni bus down to the financial district.
The late lunch crowd of returning lawyers and legal assistants streamed back into the neo-deco building that housed the firm of Burke, Wright & Ross. Tara’s heels clicked on the patterned floor. With the holiday decorations down, the grand foyer resumed its more understated elegance, not that anyone bunched in front of the elevators noticed. They all seemed intent on snagging a spot on the next car. Tara felt invisible in the mob. She glanced at her phone. No texts. She just had time to do her errand.
A bell rang, the doors opened, and the crowd surged forward. Tara tried to press into the last available space before the doors closed, angling forward leading with her left shoulder. As she twisted to face the doors, she realized her bag was going to be caught. She tried to squish back and met a firm hand at her back.
“Whoa, lady, take that trunk of yours and get the next one,” a male voice suggested.
Simultaneously, she felt her bag turned ninety degrees by unseen hands and looked up through the closing doors to catch the merest glimpse of a gorgeous man in a dark gray suit and blue tie. He had wind ruffled dark hair and a pair of steady blue eyes that made her heart catch. He had seen her need and acted. The doors closed on his grin, trapping her bag against her shins as the elevator rose in a quiet whoosh. Feeling that she’d violated the unwritten code of elevator etiquette, Tara hunched her shoulders, and tried to make herself as small as possible. She felt the ring on her finger where her hand clutched her bag and heard again in her head the stranger who’d warned her—Don’t let your bag get in your way. At the first stop three people exited, jostling past her bag, making her tighten her hold on it.
She stepped out on the eleventh floor. Maybe she should retain Burke, Wright & Ross to defend her bag. Really, her bag had never been a problem before today. A tight squeeze in an elevator was just part of city living, and she’d reached her appointment on time. Her bag had hardly held her back. In fact, it had earned her a grin from a handsome stranger.
On her way back to the hotel, Tara looked for Eddie in two parks and one cafe. When she didn’t find him, she turned back to the Belmont and reached her desk in time for a brief afternoon lull while most guests were out shopping or touring the city. As soon as she took care of dinner reservations for a foursome from Sydney, she started an Internet search for Irish rings.
It wasn’t hard to find them. They were called Claddagh rings and had a long history starting with a young Irishman captured by pirates in the seventeenth century and sold into slavery to a goldsmith in the Middle East where he learned jewelry making. Released after fourteen years, he had returned to Ireland to marry the girl who waited for him. Talk about a global relationship. The ring he fashioned for her represented love, loyalty, and friendship.
Since then the rings had been handed down in families and had accompanied the Irish wherever famine and troubles had driven them. The rich and famous had worn them as well as the humble and obscure. Over two hundred Claddagh rings had been recovered from the rubble of the twin towers after 9/11. That fact stopped her dead in her research tracks. A little frisson of awe passed over her.
She looked at the ring on her finger, wondering whether it had been lost on that day and found and passed on again because to bear the burden of such loss was hard work, and lighter for everyone if each bore it only a short time, sort of like the terrible burden of Tolkien’s ring on poor unsuspecting hobbits.
She knew her own burden of loss was small compared to the losses of that day, but sometimes the memory of loss came back fresh and stingingly sharp. On a sunny October Sunday when she was eleven, a month into her parents’ separation, before she had begun to use the word divorce, Tara had been reading in her favorite spot on the porch with her dog Sherlock when the first smell of smoke in the air alerted her to the fire. It was nothing like the smell of a barbeque.
She’d looked up as her neighbor’s front door banged open, and the woman came running out to her car. Seeing Tara, she shouted that there was a fire and they needed to evacuate the neighborhood now. Tara was still staring at her when a car careened wildly down their narrow street. The driver’s panicked face had set her heart pounding, and she’d dashed inside to find her mother painting. Her mother insisted on confirming the news, but once she turned on the radio, she acted, instructing Tara to pack an overnight bag for each of them. While Tara put the bags and her rabbits’ cage in the car, her mother went back to her studio. She gathered up several canvases, and as they rearranged things in the car to fit the paintings, Sherlock bounded away down the street. They took off, Tara with the car window down calling for Sherlock, while ash and embers blew around them in swirling eddies. The scale of that disaster was nothing like the attack on the Twin Towers, but people had perished that day, too, and at least one marriage.
Tara’s grandmother liked to say that love was the enduring memorial that marked a person’s passage through this life. But Tara’s parents saw things differently. Each wanted to leave a body of work. For her father that meant his life-saving medical research; for her mother that meant her art. For them the fire had intensified that determination. Her father had disappeared into his research. Her mother had answered the old philosopher’s riddle of what to save in a fire—the pet or the painting—by saving her paintings. Sherlock had not turned up among the lost pets recovered later.
There had been nothing left of their house but the foundation and the skeletons of appliances. The blackened twisted metal of Tara’s eleventh birthday bicycle marked the end of the porch. Tara and her mother had moved in with her grandmother in the city. The rabbits had found a new home in Danville.
At her grandmother’s house Tara collected the remnants of her childhood that had survived. The only toy left was Bingo Bear, a stuffed animal she’d wanted one Christmas because the TV ads had suggested that the bear could talk like a real friend. Her grandmother had given Bingo to her, but it had only taken Tara a few minutes to see through the illusion. Each time she pulled the string on Bingo Bear’s back, he uttered a recorded message. She had abandoned him that day at her grandmother’s, and so he’d been waiting there for her after the fire. As soon as her mother settled Tara in the city’s French school—so you can visit me later—she had left for southern France.
Tara shook off the old memories and turned back to her research. There was no image that looked as old as her ring, nor anything in the information about a Claddagh with powers of speech. Now that she knew the ring was Irish, maybe she should listen for a voice like Bono’s or her grandmother’s.
A disturbance at the hotel entrance made her look up. George ushered in an elegant and obviously shaken woman, signaling to Tara with raised brows that he needed her help. Tara went immediately to the woman’s other side to take her arm. She was tall and blonde, fortyish, with blunt girlish features and a perfect pouty red mouth, the lipstick flawlessly applied, the kind of mouth that invited male attention. A knee-length textured gray cashmere sweater over a white, collared shirt and jeans leggings flattered her slim figure, and jeweled open-toe heels revealed a great pedicure. She was a woman used to being noticed.
They guided her to a sofa, and Tara brought her a glass of water.
After a few sips, she began to speak, her voice shaking a little. “I’ve never been so viciously and personally insulted. The man must be mental. He came at me out of nowhere, right in front of the hotel. What kind of neighborhood is this?”
“Ma’am, can you describe the man who attacked you?” George asked.
A diamond bracelet flashed on the woman’s wrist. Her expression was uncomprehending. “He was a street person.” She shuddered. “Grimy clothes. Body odor. Scraggly beard.”
George shot Tara a grim glance over the woman’s head.
“He shoved me. That’s assault. I had to grab my purse, and he yelled vile things at me. He said he was a vet and I should show respect.”
Tara shook her head at George’s grim look. He was ready to blame Eddie for the incident, but Tara knew Eddie. True, Eddie was a vet, like the man their guest had encountered, but Eddie stayed away from the hotel, and he would never yell at a woman. The woman’s assailant was likely one of the shouters, someone off his meds and inclined to take out his frustrations on anyone in his path.
“Excuse me.” The woman shot Tara a sharp look. “Don’t shake your head. Do you people think this is some kind of joke? I assure you this is no joke. I expect you to call the police. I want charges filed against this man.”
At that moment Arturo hurried over to them. “Ms. Ralston, how may we help you?” He gave both Tara and George a look that said he was seriously displeased.
The woman started in again on her complaint. Arturo assured her the hotel regarded the situation as deeply serious and would do everything in its power to make up to her for the distress she had suffered.
“Well, you can call the police for starters. I won’t tolerate being attacked and insulted in this way.”
Arturo nodded to Tara. “Ms. Keegan will get right on it. And call security.”
Tara made the calls from the concierge desk. A uniformed security guard appeared instantly, spoke briefly to Arturo, and left the hotel.
As she expected, at SFPD, the sergeant she spoke with told her that his precinct would send a patrolperson around the area to see whether any of the local characters were acting out. She wished she knew where Eddie was, but she told herself that she should not worry about him. He had not attacked a guest, and he must be somewhere else in the city at this time of day.
As soon as the woman had gone up to her room, Arturo strode over to the concierge desk to demand that Tara tell him where Eddie’s camp was. “And don’t tell me you don’t know. We do not tolerate incidents of this kind at the Belmont.”
“I do not know where Eddie’s camp is, but I do know that Eddie is not the man involved in the incident.” She said it without hesitation.
Tara saw at once that in defending Eddie, she had gone too far, but Arturo was being unjust, condemning Eddie without any investigation. Arturo hadn’t asked the first question that a just person had to ask—is it true?
Arturo’s frown cut deep lines in his brow. “Apparently, Ms. Keegan, what you don’t understand is the meaning of loyalty. You received a direct order, with which you have not complied. If we were not stretched to capacity this weekend, you’d be gone today. As it is, you have until the last of the Lynch party checks out. Then you’re done.”