locked it, already feeling better.
She'd leave it overnight, give him a chance to come back for it. But if his shit was still there in the morning, she'd call the Children's Hospital or some other charity and have them haul it away.
It was a morning without fog, a morning without clouds, and Laurie stood on the stoop staring up at the sky. It was rare in San Francisco that the sun shone this early in the day, that blue showed through before noon, and despite everything that had happened recently, the uncharacteristically good weather brightened her spirits, made her feel, for the first time in over a week, slightly hopeful.
Tia Guiterrez , the young woman next door, waved from her porch. 'Beautiful day, huh?'
Laurie nodded. 'For once.'
'You should call in sick, take the day off.'
'You should, too.'
Tia smiled. 'I am.'
Laurie smiled back. It had been a long time since she'd taken a day off. And she had accumulated plenty of vacation hours. But, no, she couldn't. There was too much work to do. There was theMieger account to go over: the customized software that the manufacturer had ordered had apparently not been satisfactory, and now Mieger was pushing for upgrades that he wanted for free and done yesterday. And she was supposed to chair a meeting on flexible benefits packages at three o'clock.
She couldn't take off today.
But she could walk to work. She went back inside, checked her hair in the mirror, popped a few vitamin C's, and picked up her purse and briefcase. Stepping out of the house and locking the door behind her, she waved to Tia, still on the porch, and started off. The day was indeed beautiful, and the sun felt good on her skin, warm and fresh and invigorating. People seemed friendlier on a day like this, and she said more hellos to strangers in the next hour than she had in the past six months.
She was twenty minutes late by the time she reached the office, but no one noticed and no one cared, and she told Mara to hold all of her calls for the next hour while she reviewed the Mieger file.
She didn't review the file, though. She seemed to be having difficulty concentrating, and after reading and rereading the same memo four or five times, Laurie finally gave it up and walked over to the window, looking between the buildings at the bay.
What was she doing here?
It was a question she asked herself periodically but for which she could not seem to find a satisfactory answer.
There comes a point, she thought, when what you do as a temporary stopgap until you 'find' yourself hardens into your actual personality. The person you pretended to be, while waiting to discover who you are, becomes the real you.
Was that what had happened to her?
Yes.
She'd been the responsible one, and she'd tried to take care of Josh after their parents had died, to provide for him, to give him as stable a life as she could under the circumstances. She'd always intended to move on at some point, to abandon this job and this lifestyle once her brother settled down and got himself established, but Josh never had settled down, never had gotten himself established, and she'd been promoted onward and upward and at some point it had just not made sense to think about quitting and doing something else.
So here she was.
To top it off, she was now all alone. The foundation of the stable loving relationship in which she'd thought she'd been involved had turned out to be built on quicksand, and she was going to have to start over from scratch--although, after all this time, she was not sure that she still knew how.
Laurie sighed, stared once again out the window, looking down at the street and its tiny toy cars below. Her period was two days late. That's what she was really concerned about, that's what was really on her mind.
And while a baby would certainly force a change in her life, she did not want to be carrying Matt's child. She wanted nothing more to do with that sick loser, and despite the fact that her biological clock was winding down, she was not sure that she wanted to be a mother at all. She didn't have any burning desire to reproduce, no deep- seated need to cuddle with something small and cute and fetchingly defenseless, no inclination toward spending the next eighteen years of her life catering to the material needs and overseeing the intellectual and emotional development of another human being.
She wasn't sure she was ready for the responsibilities of taking care of a kitten, let alone a baby.
What if she was pregnant? Would she abort it? She wasn't sure. She didn't think so, but she couldn't rule it out. At this point, she had no feelings for whatever might be growing inside her, no protective maternal urges, no bond of any sort. But how could she tell? She might keep it and it might turn out to be a good thing.
It might force her to make just the changes she needed in order to slough off this midlife malaise or whatever it was that seemed to 'be afflicting her.
Or maybe not.
Laurie looked once more out the window, once more toward the bay, then walked back over to her desk and tried once again to get through theMieger file.
Before heading home, she stopped by the bookstore.
Josh was busy, discussing Taoism with an obviously likeminded customer. She wasn't in the mood to hang around for an hour or however long it took for him to wind down, so after browsing politely, waiting a respectable ten minutes, she smiled at him, blew him a kiss good-bye, and started out the door.
'Wait!' he called after her, holding up a hand.
She mimed dialing a phone. 'I'll call you,' she said in the exaggeratedly simplistic tone she'd use on a deaf person attempting to read her lips.
Her brother nodded from across the store, circled his thumb and forefinger in an 'OK' gesture, and turned back toward the customer.
It was late afternoon, the sun already hidden behind two of the taller buildings, and in the shadows of the city this morning's cheerful warmth had disappeared.
Above, the sky was still blue and cloudless, but the hidden sinking sun had robbed it of its attraction and Laurie felt cold, lonely, and curiously uneasy as she walked down the littered sidewalk toward her neighborhood.
There were a lot of cars on the street but very few pedestrians, and something about it all didn't seem right to her.
Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe her hormones were all out of whack and affecting her emotions.
Twenty minutes later, she was out of the downtown business district and passing through an interim area of old buildings and Victorian homes that had been converted into boutiques and coffeehouses when she saw up ahead, parked by the curb in front of Starbuck's, Matt's Mustang.
Her heart started racing. Maybe it wasn't Matt's.
Maybe it was someone else's, someone who had the same car in the same color and a similar bumper sticker on the back window. She took a few steps forward, then stopped, looking at the license plate.
It was Matt's.
What was he doing here? He didn't even like coffee.
He was probably here on a date.
But why was he staying this close to her neighborhood?
She'd expected him to keep as far away from her as possible, had assumed that out of common decency he'd relocate to another area of the city. The last thing she figured he'd do was hang around here. Didn't he have any shame?
Maybe the bitch he was with lived in this area.
That would make sense. He'd probably met the slut when he'd been off one day, cruising around the neighborhood, pretending to work on his art, while she really had been at work at Automated Interface.
She thought of waiting for him by his car, embarrassing him, causing a scene, informing him loudly in front of
