anymore. It’s more the idea that I lived with this, this illusion, for all that time, thinking I was going somewhere, that he and I were going somewhere, and that all of it mattered.” She leaned in across from him. “I mean, Mick, it all made sense. It hung together. I’m talking about the world.”
“And now it doesn’t?”
“I can’t seem to find where my real life connects back in to it.”
“You think you’re going to find it sitting up in the tower?”
“I don’t know where I’m going to find it.”
“So you’ve given up looking? That’s kind of what it seems like from here.”
“Well, that’s not it.”
“No?”
Anger flashed in her eyes. “No!” Then, in a softer tone, “I am really trying not to lose it altogether here, Mickey. I don’t think you can really understand what it’s like when the rug’s pulled out from under you like it was from me.”
“Yeah,” Mickey said. “I can. It got pulled out from both of us another time. And that was a lot worse than you losing your boyfriend. I remember it pretty well.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is you’re too young to give up. There’s people out here in the real world who care about you-me, for instance, and Jim, and even Wyatt-and maybe you owe it to all of us to try to care a little back in return.”
“I do care about all of you guys.”
“You do? How are we supposed to tell? You quit working for Wyatt, you dump your job there on me, you disappear on Jim-”
“I didn’t-”
“You did, Tam. Yes, you did. And we all felt bad for you, and still do.” He reached a hand over the table and touched hers. “But you’ve got to come back now. You’ve got to start, anyway. Remember back before Jim even took us on, we swore we’d always call each other on it if we started down a wrong road? Remember that?”
“Yeah, okay. Of course.”
“Well, this is your brother calling you. You need to get out of this now, start going another way. Jim’s going to need you these next weeks at least. I’m going to need you for him. Maybe even Wyatt will wind up needing you.”
“Wyatt won’t ever need me. He never did. And now he’s mad at me.”
“He’s never said one word about being mad at you. If anything, he’s worried. But not even slightly mad. He blames himself, is what I think. For hiring Craig in the first place, for keeping him on, for you guys getting together.”
Tamara looked up at the ceiling and seemed to be gathering herself. She inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a long sigh.
The waitress appeared and placed a small dish in front of each of them, then a plate of six pot stickers down between them. “Kung pao shrimp coming right up next,” she said.
Mickey picked a pot sticker up with his chopsticks and put it on the dish in front of his sister. “If you eat, you’ll feel better,” he said. “Promise.”
4
Saturdays, Mickey went to his cooking class at La Cuisine, located in a large Victorian house on Webster Street between Clay and Sacramento. He was already halfway through his six-week Professional Series course-“Knives and Butchering,” his eighth formal class in the past three years. At his present rate, he could expect to get his Certified Culinarian ticket, the lowest professional ranking, and possibly get hired to cut onions or sift flour for eight hours a day, in only another two or three years.
But it was working toward something that he loved. By the time he was thirty, if everything worked out, he’d be working in a kitchen; at forty he’d have his own place. Maybe a small one, but his own.
It was a timeline he could live with.
His class began at the stroke of eight o’clock, and if you were late, you weren’t admitted. No excuses tolerated, even if you’d paid your entire tuition up front, even if you couldn’t find a parking place, your uncle died, all of the above. Marc Bollet, the maitre, locked the front door at showtime sharp, and didn’t unlock it again for five hours. “You want the experience of working in a professional kitchen?” Marc said more than once in his still- pronounced French accent. “You must learn never, ever to be late. Never to be sick. Don’t plan on too many days off, or vacations. La cuisine is not a career. It is a vocation, a sacred thing. Never be less than at your very best. Or you will find yourself without a job. Because there is always, always, someone who wants your chance.”
Now Mickey, a full twenty- five minutes before class was to begin, courtesy of the best parking spot he’d ever found, got to the stoop with his cup of Starbucks and was somewhat surprised to see that, even this early, he wasn’t the first of his classmates to arrive. Ian Thorpe looked up with an easy, crinkling, blue-eyed smile under a wispy blond mustache. He wore chef’s clogs, a pair of stained khaki shorts, and a blue fisherman’s sweater with white horizontal stripes. “Hey,” he said. “I was hoping I’d catch you before class.”
“Me? You caught me. What’s up?”
“I saw you on the tube last night.”
Mickey broke a small smile. “Me too,” he said. “But only four times. After that it got boring.”
“They identified you as a private investigator.”
“I know, but they didn’t get that part exactly right. I just work in the office, more or less the grunt. Answer phones, get the coffee, like that.”
“Damn.”
“What?”
Thorpe blew out. His eyes scanned the street behind Mickey for a moment. “Nothing, really. I was hoping maybe… well, maybe you could talk to your bosses…”
“Boss. Singular. Wyatt Hunt. The Hunt Club. You need a private eye?”
“I don’t know what I need, to tell you the truth, but somebody like your boss might be a good place to start. I need somebody who knows something about the law and how it works and who isn’t a cop. And it’s not for me. It’s my sister. She worked for Dominic Como.”
“She did? What’d she do?”
“She was his driver.”
Mickey’s mouth all but hung open. “You’re kidding me?”
“No. Why do you say that?”
“ ’Cause that’s what my grandfather did for him too.”
But just at this moment, another pair of their classmates showed up at the corner. “Maybe we can talk a little after class?” Thorpe said. “You be up for that?”
Mickey shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
After class, back at the nearest Starbucks, Mickey removed the plastic top from his cup, blew over the coffee, and took a sip. “So,” he said, “your sister.”
Thorpe nodded. “Alicia.”
“Younger?”
“Three years. She’s twenty-five. Maybe I care about her so much because she’s my only family, actually.”
Mickey put down his cup. “I’ve got a sister who’s pretty much my only family, too, except for a grandfather.” He didn’t see any reason to include his boss, Wyatt Hunt, an adopted foster child himself, who, on his own time, back when he’d been working for the city’s Child Protective Services, had tracked down Jim Parr and convinced him to meet with his all-but-forgotten and abandoned grandchildren, a meeting that had eventually led to Jim’s job as Dominic Como’s driver and then Jim’s adoption of Mickey and Tamara less than a year later. Mickey went on.
