“But a handsome, well-dressed cop who—”
The sausage popped before I could complete that thought.
He looked down at me with a speculative eye. “Who what?”
“Who makes me forget I’m supposed to be fixing breakfast for an old friend who’s due here any minute.” I rescued the sausages just before they began to burn and gently rolled them over without piercing their casings.
“Not for another half-hour.” He put his arms around me from behind.
I tried to concentrate on browning the sausages. “Would you like for me to wrap toast around a piece of this for you to take with you?”
“Actually,” he said huskily, “what I’d really like . . .”
Okay. I admit it. I’m easily distracted. So what else is new?
Praying that Cyl would be late, I turned off the stove.
Cyl was on time, but it turned out not to matter. By the time she drove up in her rental car, Dwight was finally dressed and walking toward his truck.
He waved to Cyl, said he’d see me at Aunt Zell’s, and then headed back out the way Cyl had come.
The mercury must have been rising all night because it was a little warmer this morning than the night before. I was comfortable enough in my dark blue zip-up cardigan and gray wool slacks, although I could feel the cold porch floor through my wool socks as I held the screen door open for Cyl.
I hadn’t seen her to actually talk to since back in early summer, three months before Dwight proposed, so even while we were busy hugging, we were also taking a quick inventory of each other. I wasn’t consciously eating less these days; nevertheless, my scale and my clothes both told me that I was thinner than I’d been in years, probably because I seemed to be riding a perpetual roller coaster of happiness and exhilaration. Being in love apparently burns up a lot of calories. I knew I looked okay, but next to Cyl?
She was drop-dead gorgeous again this Sunday morning, in a fitted tan leather jacket and a slim tan leather skirt that was topped by a russet turtleneck in silk jersey. A vaguely African-looking necklace of polished brass and beaten copper disks flashed in the thin December sunlight beneath her open jacket and echoed the radiance of her face.
“Atkins or South Beach?” I demanded.
She shook her head with smug smile. “Neither. I eat anything and everything, but nothing seems to stick to my ribs. Or my hips. And what about you, girlfriend? I was noticing last night that you’re getting downright skinny.” Her smile became a mischievous grin. “Dwight giving you plenty of exercise?”
At that instant, something else caught the sun and I grabbed her left hand. There on her third finger was a gold ring set with the largest emerald I’d ever seen outside of Fitch’s Jewelers in Raleigh.
“Wisconsin?” I asked.
She blushed. “We’re flying out to meet his parents and spend Christmas there.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“We haven’t set a date yet, but probably in the spring.”
Over sausages and blueberry pancakes—we figured we might as well enjoy our immunity while it lasted—I heard all about Taylor Hamilton Youngblood and how they’d met outside a Senate subcommittee’s chambers, both of them there to lobby for a bill to improve workplace conditions for pink-collar workers. He was Northwestern Law, followed by a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. More important, he was also tall, good- looking, with skin as dark as hers (the rest of Cyl’s family are so light that she and her favorite uncle used to call themselves the only real Africans in the family), and totally smitten.
“Smitten’s good,” I said, passing the maple syrup.
“Smitten’s great,” she agreed. “I was so envious when you told me about you and Dwight. I thought it was never going to happen to me again, and then three weeks ago, bang!”
It had been a hard year for Cyl, getting over her doomed affair with a married minister.
“You were wasted here in Colleton County,” I said. “You’re meant for bigger things.”
“You think?” But a shadow had fallen over her lovely face. “Do you ever see Ralph and the children?”
“Occasionally. He’s always going to be a little in love with you. Oddly enough, though, I get the impression that things are better between him and his wife these days. She’ll need crutches the rest of her life, but she can drive again and she seems to have undergone something of a sea change since the wreck. She’s not as hostile to whites and Stan says they’re even allowed to watch television now. I gather she’s eased up a lot. Finally realized what she came so close to losing.”
“I hope so.” Her large brown eyes misted over for a moment. “He deserves that.”
By which I knew that she was always going to be a little bit in love with him, too.
Inevitably, talk soon wound around to Tracy Johnson’s death.
“That poor baby!” Cyl exclaimed. “It’s wicked that she had to die, too.”
I told Cyl everything I’d heard. She was appalled to realize that Tracy might have been shot while talking to her killer and could have had a split second’s awareness that she was going to die.
“Did y’all keep in touch?” I asked. “Do you know if she was seeing someone?”
“Sorry. We weren’t close at all. Never did the girl-talk thing. I didn’t even know the adoption had gone through till you told me, remember? She and I joined Doug’s staff about the same time and I think she resented it when I got to lead some big cases while she was still sitting second chair. I had the feeling that she thought it was a matter of reverse discrimination, not because I might have been more competent than she.”
I laughed and speared a stray blueberry with a tine of my fork. “Certainly not more modest.”
