team, showing up the way he did, claiming I invited him. I never saw him come in. Must’ve been there awhile before I spotted him and threw him out.”
“Saw him one more time, right?”
“Couple of days later. Showed up here again like nothing ever happened. Walked right in-Nancy was out to lunch.”
“One last try to hook you into the club.”
“Yeah.” Some of the old fierce burn had come into James’s eyes. “Invited me to a meeting that weekend. Said the other guys were professional people or businessmen, all married men and none of ’em judgmental. Then he laughed like something was funny. Said, well, except one man who was but wouldn’t be.”
“Was but wouldn’t be what? Judgmental?”
“Fuckin’ double-talk.”
“ All married men? Including himself?”
“What he said.”
“Give you any of their names?”
“No.”
“Tell you where the meeting was?”
“SoMa loft belongs to one of ’em. Said we’d watch some rare Super Bowl film one of ’em had, have a few drinks, have a good time-maybe experiment if we felt like it, but only one-on-one and strictly in private. All very discreet. That was the word he used, ‘discreet.’ We were standing over there by the door and he starts telling me all this and leaning up close, putting his hand on my arm and looking at me the way the little bugger did at the show. Plain as hell then where he was coming from.”
“You accuse him of being on the down low?”
“Damn right. Him and his buddies. He just shrugged, said did it matter if they were? I told him yeah, damn straight it mattered, and then I threw his ass out. I should’ve busted his head for him.”
“Too bad you didn’t.”
“You know the last thing the fucker said? Said he guessed he’d misread me. Misread me! All along he thought I was a switch-hitter like him!”
James had worked himself into a brooding rage by then, glowering all over his face. She wouldn’t get anything more out of him-lucky she’d gotten as much as she had. She slipped on out of there herself before he started venting his rage on her. The way he was sitting, rigid, staring back into his bitter memory, he didn’t even see her go.
6
When I came into the condo, Kerry was out on the balcony with the sliding glass door wide open. Ordinarily there wouldn’t have been anything unusual in that. We live in Diamond Heights, on the side of one of San Francisco’s seven hills, and on clear days and nights the balcony view is pretty alluring. But the day had turned even colder as night approached; the wind swirling in through the open door had an arctic bite. And she was standing out there at the railing with her hair tangled and streaming, arms folded, wearing nothing but a light sweater and skirt.
I went out to stand beside her. She looked my way, gave me a wan little smile. There was color in her face from the cold and her eyes were teary. Not from the wind; the unhappy expression in them said she’d been crying. That scared me. The first thing I thought of was her breast cancer, in remission now but always and forever a lingering fear.
“Hey,” I said, “what’re you doing out here?”
“Trying to decide what to do.”
“About what?”
“I’m glad you’re home,” she said.
“Me, too. Do about what? Kerry, you haven’t been to see your oncologist…?”
“No, it’s nothing like that.”
“Cybil?” Her mother was eighty-seven and in failing health.
“No. Cybil’s all right.”
“Then what?”
She sighed and unfolded her arms. Extended one fisted hand in my direction to show me what was on her palm.
Rough-textured, bronze-colored tin box, about the size of the ones sore-throat lozenges come in, with the same kind of hinged lid. Plain, no markings except for a few scratches and dents.
“Open it,” she said.
I flipped up the lid. Inside was a rectangle of cotton, and when I poked inside that I found a clear plastic tube, about three inches long, mostly full of a white powdery substance. I knew what the substance was even before I pulled the little cork stopper in one end of the tube, licked a finger, and tipped out enough for a bitter taste on the tip of my tongue.
Cocaine.
The relief I’d been feeling died in a sensation like an acid burn. “Where’d you get this?”
“I found it. A few minutes ago.”
“Where?”
“In Emily’s room.”
“Oh, Christ, no.”
“I went in to get my Roget’s, ” Kerry said. “She was using it last night and I needed to look up a word. The box was on her desk, in plain sight, and when I picked up the thesaurus I accidentally knocked it off. It popped open when it hit the floor.”
Emily. Sweet, smart, intelligent, forthright, straight-arrow Emily. Not your typical rebellious thirteen-year-old; just the opposite, in fact. In the four years since Kerry and I had adopted her, she’d never given us any cause to distrust her. Not once.
I put the tube back into its cotton nest, closed the tin box, and slipped it into my coat pocket. “Come on,” I said, “let’s go inside. It’s freezing out here.”
“Yes.”
We went in and I shut the door. The living room was cold now, even though I could hear the furnace pumping warm air through the vents. I took Kerry’s hands in mine, chafed them until I could feel some of the chill go away.
“Did you find anything else?”
“No. Just what’s in the box.”
“But you looked. Searched her room.”
“You know I did. I had to, didn’t I?”
“Sure you did. I would’ve done the same.”
The privacy thing. We had a pact in this family: always respect one another’s right to privacy. Even under the circumstances, Kerry felt guilty at breaking the pact. Was that what Emily had counted on, why she’d left the box on her desk in plain sight? Flaunting it because she felt safe? No, that wasn’t like her. But hell, it wasn’t like her to bring drugs home in the first place.
Kerry said, “I keep telling myself it’s not as bad as it looks. That there must be some innocent explanation.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something. We had the drug talk with her, didn’t we? Both of us?”
“Yeah, we had the drug talk.”
“She swore she’d never have anything to do with drugs.”
“She probably meant it at the time. But thirteen’s a bad age, you know that. And peer pressure can be more persuasive than parental pressure.”
