Looking for Laura

Ten

Her house was dark and her kid was snoring. She obviously hadn’t expected to arrive home so late; she would have left a porch light on if she had.

He hadn’t expected to get back to Winfield so late, either. He’d thought they were going to drive into Boston, have it out with Laura and drive home, not turn the trip into a marathon of sight-seeing, shopping and dining.

He had to admit the meal he’d eaten in that cozy restaurant on a charming, narrow street in the North End had been pretty damn good. And even though he’d put more miles on the soles of his shoes in one day than he ordinarily did in a week, he felt invigorated, not tired.

The outing had been educational. He now knew that Sally Driver could use the word exemplar correctly in a sentence, and that Vigo Hawkes was famous in certain circles for making bowls. And that it was possible to write on rice.

He’d gained other knowledge, too. Knowledge of things he couldn’t quite put a name to, things that zipped and zapped inside him like electrical currents, refusing to congeal into a solid, recognizable shape. Things that made him feel as if the day he’d spent in Boston had changed him somehow.

He braked to a stop in her driveway and turned off the engine. She unclipped her seat belt and twisted to study her happily dozing daughter. “I hate to wake her up,” she whispered.

“I can carry her in,” he said, startling himself. What had made him blurt out such a suggestion? He wasn’t even certain he liked the little girl who insisted on calling him “Daddy’s Friend,” as if “Daddy’s” was his first name and “Friend” his last. She’d already taken him for that silly necklace. Did he really want to lug her dead weight into Sally’s house?

Well, he’d offered. And Sally was looking so grateful, her eyes radiant even in the car’s shadows.

She lifted her tote bag from the floor, then got out of the car and opened the back door. Rosie didn’t stir, although her nose twitched slightly as the cooler outdoor air mingled with the car’s warm interior. Sally released Rosie’s seat belt and lifted the crossbar, then stepped back, leaving Todd to do the heavy lifting.

Actually, Rosie wasn’t too heavy. Considering how much she’d packed away that day—cannoli, eggplant, tempura and intermittent animal crackers—she was a little creature. As he hoisted her into his arms, her arms dangled down his back, her chin dug into his shoulder, her feet poked his belt and her butt settled comfortably into the bend of his elbow. She shifted and sighed, her hat tumbling to the ground and her hair tickling his ear.

Sally gathered the fallen hat as well as her own straw hat, Rosie’s car seat and the bakery box. She shut the car door, then sprinted up the walk to the porch ahead of him.

Maybe her front door wasn’t that garish. If the orange had been as awful as he’d thought, it would have glowed in the dark. But at 9:00 p.m. on a half-moon night, it looked a rusty brown.

She wiggled the key in the lock and the door swung inward. She flicked on a hall light, then a light above the stairway. Todd followed her up, less aware of Rosie’s limp body than Sally’s animated one. Not for the first time, his thoughts wandered back to what she’d said about wearing skirts, how she liked to feel them flow freely around her thighs.

He’d never realized how arousing it was to hear a woman utter the word thighs. Especially when she was referring to her own thighs without criticizing them. Sally hadn’t commented on the circumference of her thighs, their shape or their ratio of flab to muscle. She’d mentioned them in the context of freedom.

And he’d been thinking about that far too much during the drive home.

He felt more of those electrical pulses zooming around inside him. Something had become skewed today, something that should have remained stable and familiar. Something regarding the way he felt about Sally. She’d been her usual flaky self, dragging him all over the city, clunking around in a silly hat and toting a silly bag. And yet…

He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her thighs.

At the top of the stairs she turned on another light, which illuminated the second-floor hall. They moved past a freestanding wardrobe with a filmy mirror adorning the door, past a bathroom and into a bedroom at the end of the hall.

Todd would have known this was Rosie’s room even without the assortment of toys cluttering the top surface of the dresser, the stuffed animals crammed onto the rocking chair in front of the window, the wallpaper featuring flocks of colorful balloons and the dirty socks piled on the floor in a corner. He would have known because on the wall above the bed hung a huge construction of colorful yarn strung between two sticks that had been lashed into an X.

The dream catcher.

The yarn was layered, some wrapped outside the sticks and some inside to give the object depth. When Sally turned on a night-light near the door, he could see some of the colors—turquoise, magenta and lime green accented with black and cream-colored strands. The ends of the sticks were trimmed with more yarn dangling in multicolored tassels.

It was an odd piece. Definitely not Paul’s style. Not Todd’s style, either—but he could sort of see why someone might want to hang such a decoration over a child’s bed. Not his bed—it would give him nightmares, all that bright color looming just above his skull—but he could see it working for Rosie.

He lowered her carefully onto the mattress, centering her head on the pillow. She made a snorting sound, loud enough to wake herself up, but after blinking once or twice without focusing her eyes, she rolled onto her side and exhaled, as if expelling what little consciousness she’d had. Sally deftly pulled off the little girl’s sneakers and worked the blanket out from under her, then spread it over her. She touched Rosie’s hair, reminding Todd of the way it had felt against his neck, silky and fine.

What would Sally’s hair feel like? It was much thicker than Rosie’s, with all those hints of red. He bet it would feel heavier, denser, more womanly.

What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he thinking about her hair?

And her thighs.

She was Paul’s wife, for God’s sake. Paul’s widow. The woman Paul never should have married. Why should Todd give a damn about Sally’s thighs?

She straightened up from the bed and smiled at him, and he found himself thinking about her thighs and her hair and her smile, too. Again he told himself that she really wasn’t pretty. Her eyes were too far apart, her nose too broad, her chin too round. But when she smiled…

More electrons rocketed through him, glancing off his heart, ricocheting the length of his spine, detouring to his groin.

She nodded toward the door, then tiptoed around the bed and led him out into the hall. “Are you going to let her sleep in her clothes?” he asked in a muted voice as they started down the stairs.

“That’s easier than trying to get her undressed while she’s asleep. When she wakes up tomorrow and finds herself dressed, she’ll think it’s cool.”

“Won’t she worry about her missing hat?”

Sally grinned over her shoulder at him. “I’ll tell her I took it off her so the dreams would be able to reach her head.”

They arrived at the front hall. He spotted Rosie’s purple hat, as well as Sally’s straw sun hat, tossed onto a chair beside a small semicircular table, atop which sat the bakery box and Sally’s tote bag. The car seat lay on the hardwood floor next to the chair.

“Can I get you—

“So what do we do?” he said simultaneously. They both stopped. Sally grinned again and he edged a step backward, trying to will away those tiny, prickly shocks that nipped at him from inside.

“I was going to offer you a drink or something. A cannoli, maybe?”

“Save those for Rosie. She likes them more than I do.”

“A drink, then?”

“No, I’m…” I’m much too tempted to say yes. “It’s late. I think I just want to get home.” Actually, I don’t. But I should. I know I should.

“I appreciate your doing all the driving today.”

“Even though you hate my car?”

“Well, it’s a bourgeois car. That’s probably one of the reasons you bought it.”

He shrugged. He wasn’t going to admit how right she was. “You’ve got your CD, don’t you? I don’t want to find those sweet animals corrupting Nirvana in my glove compartment.”

“I think I’ve got it.” She turned away and poked around inside her tote. “Yes, I’ve got it. And you know what else I’ve got?” She poked around some more, causing the contents to clatter and clang. When she turned back to face him, she was armed with a small white tube. “Vitamin E cream.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that. If she’d managed to lose a playmate of Rosie’s in her tote bag for three days, why shouldn’t she have a tube of vitamin E cream, whatever that was, in there?

“Let me put a little on your nose.” She unscrewed the cap and touched a dab of ointment to her finger. “You got a sunburn today.”

He wasn’t going to let her smear that gunk on his nose. “I don’t need—’

“It’ll soothe the skin, keep it from getting dry and peeling.”

“Really, Sally, I—’

She ran her finger gently over his nose. The ointment had no fragrance, and it didn’t feel particularly greasy. But having her rub her fingertips the length of his nose, across the bridge, over the slight bump where bone met cartilage and then down to the knob of skin between his nostrils…

It should have felt weird—and it did. But more than weird, it felt nice, her fingers moving on him, stroking his face, her hand so close to him, her whole body so close. Her freedom-loving thighs. Her breasts. Her hair. Her smile, a smile that transformed her features into something astonishingly sexy.

He’d blame that thought on the long day and the rich dinner he’d eaten, and Sting’s seductive tenor serenading them during the last thirty miles of their trip. He’d blame it on the sheer exhaustion he felt, and the frustration of having gotten no closer to finding Paul’s Laura, and the way Sally was gazing up at him. The way her fingers brushed his cheek, his upper lip, the whisper of her touch.

He snagged her wrist and eased her hand away from his face. Her arm was more slender than he’d thought, smoother. Did she rub vitamin E cream on her inner wrists? Was that what made the skin so soft?

He’d blame it on the night, on the moment, on the possibility that if a man spent enough time with a crackpot, he could go a little crazy, too.

Bowing, he touched his lips to hers.

She didn’t pull back. Didn’t wrench her hand from his grip and wallop him. Didn’t gasp and jerk away and say, What the hell is wrong with you?

He could have handled any of those responses. But no. She did the one thing he couldn’t handle. She angled her head, made a tiny moan and opened her mouth.

All right, then. He was crazy. For the next brief portion of his life, he was going to be an absolute lunatic. He was going to grab Sally, haul her lush body against him, fill her mouth with his tongue and let those circuits fire wildly inside him.

Who cared that he didn’t exactly like her? Who cared that he’d never in his entire life thought of her in sexual terms? Right now, sexual was exactly the term in which he was thinking of her.

She was a phenomenal kisser. Her tongue matched his, teased, taunted. She lifted the arm he was holding so she could cup her hand over his shoulder, and combed the fingers of her other hand through the hair at the back of his head. His pulse was thumping so forcefully in his skull she could probably feel the beat through his scalp.

God, he wanted her. He released her wrist so he could circle his arms around her waist and pull her even closer. He was as horny as a kid glimpsing his first centerfold, as out of control as a teenager his first time. The warmth of her breasts pressing into his chest made him nuts. The nearness of her hips made him want to shove up her freedom-permitting skirt and stroke her thighs, spread them apart, fit himself between them. He was dying for her. Sally. He wanted her, wanted her more than he’d ever wanted a woman before.

Sally.

Sally?

He drew back slowly, trying not to wrench out of her embrace. Withdrawing too abruptly would insult her. But his sanity was returning to him in a sudden, stunning rush, and as his brain took over the thinking from his gonads, he realized that kissing Sally Driver had to be one of the most bizarre acts he’d ever indulged in. Stranger than riding the New York City subway system for three days straight, which he’d done on a dare in college. Stranger than trying to teach his mother how to access the Internet. Far stranger than going all the way with Patty Pleckart at a high-school party.

As recently as a day ago, he couldn’t stand Sally. Not standing her made sense to him. Nothing that had happened in the past two minutes made any sense at all.

He glanced down at her, almost afraid of what he’d see in her face. She appeared slightly dazed, deeply bewildered, as shocked as he felt. “Well,” she said breathlessly, then stepped back, putting some more distance between them.

“Um, look—’

“It’s just—the cream,” she mumbled. “It’ll keep your nose from peeling.”

“Okay.” The cream. Vitamin E. Maybe it contained some of those special aphrodisiac herbs from that emporium in Brighton. Maybe that was why they’d gone momentarily berserk.

He inhaled, appalled at how shaky his breath was, and bolted for the door. Outside on her porch, he sucked in another deep double-lungful of air, hoping the cool night would yank his psyche back into alignment.

His psyche was all right. Unfortunately, a part of him located a bit below his psyche was still hot and hard and aching.

For Sally Driver. Jesus Christ.

He stormed down the steps and across the lawn to his car. Flung himself behind the wheel, revved the engine, ordered Todd Junior to chill out and backed down her driveway. He needed to get laid—by anyone other than Sally. He needed a cold shower. He needed perspective. He needed…something. Anything. Anything other than Sally.

His best friend’s wife. His best friend’s weirdo widow.

That would explain it. She was a lonely widow. She’d gone without for a while, and he’d seemed convenient. She was only using him. Hey, he ought to be offended.

Except he could think of few things he’d enjoy more than being used by a busty, lusty woman with a keen sensitivity about the freedom of her thighs. Even if she was a flake. Even if she could be pushy and bossy and sanctimonious. Even if her five-year-old kid knew more about music than she did.

“Paul,” he muttered, speeding down her street in a rage to get away from her. “Paul, you son of a bitch, this is your fault. This whole thing—the letters, the knife, the whole goddamn day and that kiss, that absurd, in-fucking-credible kiss…It’s all your fault.”

The woman who entered the New Day Café looked familiar to Sally. On the petite side of average and the far side of middle age, she had a compact body, a disproportionately long face and short, stiff hair, red with a faint undertone of violet. She wasn’t a regular at the café, but Sally knew she’d seen her before.

She congratulated herself on knowing that much. Her mind had been as scrambled as a Spanish omelette since Saturday night. Thank God she hadn’t had to work Sunday. If she had, she would have been useless. Worse than useless. She would have filled the sugar bowls with salt and burned the unbaked pastries Greta left. She would have burned the coffee. She might have burned the whole damn place down.

Instead, she’d stumbled through Sunday like someone emerging from a fever-induced delirium. The morning sunlight had singed her eyes, but that was preferable to the alternative. Whenever she’d closed her eyes, she’d felt a deep, physical pull of memory—a memory of kissing Todd Sloane.

Ugh. Todd Sloane. The pompous boob. The driver of a Snob, the condescending twit, the defender and protector of Sally’s cheating husband. Why on earth had she kissed him?

The worst part hadn’t been kissing him. It had been stopping the kiss, ending it, watching him leave her house and wishing he would have stayed, wishing—God help her—he’d stayed all night, kissed her again, torn off his rumpled-journalist apparel and made savage love to her.

Paul had been good in bed, but he’d never been savage. It had never even occurred to Sally that she’d like savage. But one kiss from Todd, one unexpected, unrestrained, totally inappropriate kiss, and savage had become her new point of reference.

The entire incident left her profoundly disturbed. She’d sent Rosie next door to play with Trevor all day yesterday, and tried to lose herself in assorted sections of the Sunday Boston Globe. Thumbing through the so-called regional news section, she realized that the Globe’s idea of regional didn’t offer nearly enough coverage of Winfield, its neighboring hamlets and the orchards, granite quarries and ski slopes that occupied this part of Massachusetts. She’d reached for the phone, thinking she ought to call the publisher of the Valley News to recommend that they add a Sunday edition.

Then she’d remembered that the publisher of the Valley News was Todd Sloane. She wouldn’t phone him even if her mouth had erupted in hives and she had to report that she was suffering from some deeply contagious infection that she’d likely passed on to him during those prolonged seconds of insanity in her front hall the previous night. She was not going to phone him, ever—other than to demand that he give her back the Laura letters and then stay far away from her.

She had enjoyed the Saturday they’d spent together, though. And when she’d kissed him, when they’d stood so close to each other during those few minutes in her entry hall, his eyes darker than the space between the stars in the night sky and his hair even darker than that, and his mouth had come down on hers…

Well, she hadn’t regretted kissing him then. Only afterward, when she’d come to her senses, did she comprehend what a colossal mistake it had been.

“Has Officer Bronowski had his second cup yet?” Tina asked, directing a look at the tall, gaunt officer seated two tables to the left of the black-clad novelist and one table to the right of the trio of burly guys wearing Evergreen Landscaping T-shirts and devouring banana-nut muffins and jumbo lattes. Officer Bronowski was so predictable Tina and Sally would worry that something was wrong if he didn’t order a refill precisely 12.3 minutes after he paid for his first cup.

Sally checked her watch. “It’s only eleven minutes,” she assured Tina. “How are you? How was your weekend? Has Howard made up his mind about Dartmouth yet?” She’d rather talk about Howard than think about the man in her own life—who wasn’t in her life and who never would be, as long as she kept her wits about her.

Tina didn’t answer. She was watching the woman who’d entered, the one with the hair so oddly colored and motionless it looked like the molded and painted plastic hair found on cheap dolls. The woman wore cream-colored linen slacks with crisp pleats running down the leg fronts, a tan linen blazer with brass buttons, a beige shell blouse and an artfully tied silk scarf featuring a paisley pattern. Gold marble-size balls adorned her earlobes, and a wide gold band and a matching gold ring with a hefty chunk of diamond embedded in it circled her ring finger. If not for her hair, she’d look like a well-groomed professional. A real-estate saleswoman, perhaps, or a deputy mayor in charge of the arts. As it was, she looked like a real-estate saleswoman or a deputy mayor whose hairstylist had been having a very bad day.

Where had Sally seen her before?

The woman stopped scrutinizing the pastries in the showcase below the counter and lifted her gaze to Sally. “My son said I had to come here,” she announced. “But I don’t know why.”

Todd, Sally thought her mind still elsewhere, then silently berated herself for remaining fixated on him a full thirty-six hours after that stupid kiss. She faked a polite smile for the woman, and then it hit her. Todd. The woman was Todd’s mother.

“He said I should come here and have some coffee and stay out of his hair,” the woman continued. “Now, tell me, what kind of son would say that to his mother?”

Sally suffered a brief flashback to Saturday night, when she’d been in his hair, her fingers twining through the thick black waves, feeling the heat of his skin at his nape. She shook her head clear, forced another smile and said, “It’s the kind of son who knows how good our coffee is. Today we’ve got our usual breakfast blend and a delicious Sumatra, and our flavored coffee is an almond-cinnamon.”

“The almond-cinnamon is awesome,” Tina interjected, reaching for the breakfast-blend decanter as Officer Bronowski pushed back his chair. In a perfectly timed choreography, she had the decanter poised and ready to pour the moment he slid his mug onto the counter. He smiled bashfully as she refilled the cup, nodded his thanks and moseyed back to his seat.

“It sounds appalling,” Todd’s mother said. “Almond and cinnamon? What’s wrong with regular coffee?”

“We’ve got regular coffee,” Sally said.

“Good old-fashioned coffee?” Todd’s mother asked. “The kind of coffee that, when you ask someone for a cup of coffee, this is what they give you?”

“That would be our breakfast blend.” Where had Sally met her? At her wedding, she recalled—Paul had wanted Todd’s parents there because he’d developed a close relationship with them over the years. And at Paul’s funeral. Mrs. Sloane had swooped down on Sally in the parlor of the funeral home, clamped both her hands around one of Sally’s and said, “You don’t know me, but—”

“Yes, I do,” Sally had said.

“No, you don’t,” Mrs. Sloane had insisted. Then she’d introduced herself and babbled for a while about how she’d always admired Paul’s height. “Todd is too tall,” she’d said. “Paul was the right height. There wasn’t too much of him. I never got a stiff neck with him.”

Why had Todd told his mother to come to the New Day Café? Was Sally supposed to acknowledge that they’d met before? At a wedding and a funeral?

“You probably don’t remember me—”

Sally cut her off. “You’re Todd Sloane’s mother,” she said, smiling cordially.

“Helen Sloane. All right, I’ll have some of that, what is it? Breakfast blend? Explain this, Sally—can I call you Sally?”

“Yes.”

“Explain this, Sally—what exactly is blended in the breakfast blend?”

“Different roasts of beans,” Sally told her. “Colombian regular roast, dark roast, a touch of mocha java. It’s a nice combination. It tastes very…regular.”

Helen Sloane gazed earnestly across the counter at her. “How are you doing, dear? You must miss Paul terribly. It’s been awful for you, hasn’t it.”

“I’m doing okay, thank you.”

“Just awful,” Helen overruled her. “Tragic. Heartrending. He was such a fine young man. I was so happy he was Todd’s roommate in college. I thought, what a fine young man! He’ll keep Todd in line.”

“I don’t think he did,” Sally muttered.

“No, but he was a fine man. This is the breakfast blend, right?” she asked as Tina handed her a mug of coffee.

“Yes,” Tina said. “You’re gonna love it.”

“What is wrong with the world that you can’t just get a plain cup of coffee anymore?” Todd’s mother issued a sigh deep enough to have originated somewhere in the vicinity of her kneecaps. “Just what is wrong with this world? I’ve had it up to here—” she karate-chopped the air next to her forehead “—with all this new stuff. The computer. You know? I’ve had it up to here with that blasted computer.”

Tina sent Sally a hesitant smile, one that communicated, Should I signal Officer Bronowski that we’ve got a problem, or do you think she’s harmless? Sally refused to smile back, afraid Helen would suspect they were laughing at her. “I’m sorry you’re having computer problems. Would you like a pastry? We’ve got pear tarts today. They’re wonderful. Also cheese Danish, banana-nut muffins, zucchini bread, bagels, croissants—”

“The thing is…” Todd’s mother took a delicate sip of her coffee. “Mmm. This is good. What do I owe you?”

Tina turned and deliberately stared at the wall behind the counter, where a placard listed the café’s prices. Then she turned back, a large, head-swiveling turn. “A dollar thirty.”

“This is very good,” Todd’s mother murmured, unsnapping the flap of her purse and sliding two dollars from her wallet. “I’m not that old, but I remember a time when a person could put out a newspaper with nothing but a typewriter on her desk. None of this computer nonsense. A document was something you got from City Hall and wrote an editorial about. A file was a stack of papers in a manila folder. Enter was what you did through a door. Escape was what jailbirds tried to do. Am I making sense?”

“Absolutely,” Sally said politely.

“Todd is trying to run an entire newspaper with these blasted computers. Fine, I understand, it’s a new millennium. Computers are necessary. But they made typewriters obsolete. You see what I’m getting at? It’s that feeling of obsolescence. My son tells me I’m in his hair.”

Sally did see what she was getting at. Tina obviously didn’t. She frowned, shrugged and wandered down the counter to the cash register to get Helen’s change.

“Did Todd tell you he didn’t want you to work at the paper anymore?” Sally asked. If the woman answered yes, Sally would add that to her already substantial list of reasons to hate the man.

“It’s not as if I don’t think he can run the paper. He grew up with it. He worked at every level, starting as a newspaper deliverer. We can’t call them newsboys anymore, did you know that? Too many girls are delivering papers, so we have to call them newspaper deliverers. But Todd was the best deliverer we ever had. I’m not just saying that because I’m his mother. He really was the best. Never threw the paper on people’s roofs, never missed a house, never missed a day—not even in a blizzard. Then, when he got older, he wrote copy, he sold ads, he did layout—the old-fashioned way, by hand. Now it’s all done by computer. Everything’s done by computer. It’s a whole new world.”

“We use a computer here,” Sally said. “I’m sure you could learn how to use one.”

“I don’t want to learn,” Todd’s mother confessed. “I like doing things my own way.”

“So Todd told you to leave the newspaper? He ought to be shot.” Saying so cheered Sally.

Helen grinned, “Now, don’t you go threatening my son with death.” She sipped some more coffee. “So how is your little girl doing, Sally? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine.”

“She was the light of Paul’s life, you know. I didn’t see much of him after you two got married, but when I did, when he’d drop by the newspaper offices to visit Todd, he always told me Rosie was the light of his life.”

“He was a wonderful father,” Sally said, meaning it. As long as he wasn’t having assignations with Laura when he was supposed to be taking care of Rosie, she’d give him bonus points for his paternal devotion.

“He’d always stop in at my office when he came to see Todd. He was such a gentleman, your husband. Always had a friendly word for me. He never gave me a hard time about my struggles with the computer.”

“There’s really nothing to working a computer,” Tina pointed out as she handed Helen her change, then untied her apron and reached for her backpack. “If you can program a VCR, you can use a computer.”

“I can’t program a VCR,” Helen admitted, then took another sip of coffee. “This is really good. I shouldn’t be taking up all your time. I’ll just go sit at that table over there.”

“You aren’t taking up our time,” Sally said, but Helen held up her hands to silence her, then carried her coffee to the empty table near the black-clad scribe and settled into the chair.

“I gotta go,” Tina said, slinging her backpack over one shoulder and heading for the door. “I’ve got my eugenics seminar.”

Eugenics? They hadn’t offered any seminars in eugenics when Sally had been a student at Winfield College. Perhaps Tina would learn from it that Howard wasn’t worth breeding with. Or that he was. Perhaps his lack of a tattoo marked him as a higher order of human.

She waved Tina off, then braced herself as a throng of people spilled into the café: two businessmen toting leather briefcases and conferring solemnly as they eyed the pastries; two musty-looking professorial types, one male and one female, bickering about Joyce Carol Oates; three women in formfitting leggings, sweatshirts and headbands, apparently rewarding themselves after a vigorous workout. They ordered first: two zucchini breads with cream cheese, one cinnamon roll, three large cappuccinos. So much for all their efforts at the health club, Sally thought as she served up their high-calorie treats.

One of the businessmen answered a cell-phone call while Sally poured Sumatra coffee for them both. The professors transferred their argument from Joyce Carol Oates’s philosophy of boxing to the relative merits of bran versus banana muffins—“Raisins are high in iron!” “Yes, but bananas are high in potassium!”

Sally sashayed the length of the counter in one direction and then the other, marveling at Tina’s exquisite sense of timing in having left the café just seconds before this influx of customers. Nicholas, a rock star in waiting, would be arriving around eleven to help Sally with the lunchtime crush—serving coffee and light sandwiches paid him enough to keep him afloat until some record producer discovered him and landed him on the fast track to a Grammy. But eleven o’clock was more than two hours away, and by the time the professors finished arguing over who was going to pay for their croissants so they could resume arguing over Joyce Carol Oates, four more customers had entered, sidled up to the counter and ordered eight coffees, ten muffins and two large orange juices to go.

“You work too hard,” Helen commented when the spate of customers finally trickled off. She had relinquished her table to the businessmen, both of whom were now on cell phones, talking with their callers while simultaneously communicating by hand signal with each other. Helen set her cup on the counter. “You ought to hire someone to help you out.”

“This was unusual,” Sally told her. “We always get an early crowd in, but then it typically quiets down until lunchtime. I don’t know why it got so hectic in here.” Not that she was complaining. Racing around and filling orders had kept her from thinking about Todd.

But now that his mother was hovering directly across the counter from her, staring at her out of sharp, dark eyes that looked uncannily like Todd’s, Sally started thinking about him again. About how he was a menace to her emotional stability, how he had really better give the damn letters back to her, how she could find Laura and get her knife without any help from him, how she owed him twenty bucks for the necklace he’d bought Rosie. How it was horribly unfair that the first man she’d kissed since her husband died had to have been Todd, and he had to have kissed like a virtuoso. A savage one.

“You need to hire more staff,” Helen declared again. “I’m not an expert on the restaurant business, but I ran a newspaper with my husband for forty years, and I know when a business is understaffed.”

“Good workers are hard to find,” Sally said. “I get part-timers from the college, but they come and go, and their first priority is school. Most people who work here don’t want to make a career of it.”

“Who can blame them? I mean, what sort of twenty-year-old wants to spend the rest of her life pouring coffee in a diner? No offense meant,” she added, evidently realizing that she had just come pretty close to describing Sally.

“If I could find older people, I’d be happy to hire them. It’s not that I want to hire college kids. It’s just that they’re the ones available on a part-time basis.”

“Oh, I’d bet there are lots of older people who’d enjoy working at a place like this. Not older, but mature. Mature people who feel obsolete in their other places of business. Someone who can serve coffee and snacks with a smile on her face will never be obsolete, am I right?”

Sally eyed Helen curiously. Was the woman angling for a job at the New Day? Now, that would be hilarious. Todd’s mother working with Sally. Working for Sally. Because her own son had evicted her from the newspaper she’d run for forty years. Because she’d had trouble learning how to use a computer.

Because her son was a coldhearted creep who could kiss like Casanova on his best day and then turn around and walk away without a backward glance. Because he could do that to the widow of his best friend, who’d turned out to be a faithless bastard.

Because the enemy of her enemy was her ally. Because if Todd had told his mother to get out of his hair, Sally wanted the woman on her side, so she could show Helen what loyalty and kindness were really all about.

Oh, the irony of it: Todd’s mother working for Sally. Sally treating the woman with the respect and dignity she couldn’t get from her own jackass son.

“If I could hire you,” Sally said with a smile, “I’d do it in an instant.”