“Well, Father Flanagan,” Susan said when she opened her door. “Where’s the little tyke?”
“He’s with Henry Cimoli,” I said. “I need to talk.”
“Oh, really. I thought perhaps you’d been celibate too long and stopped by to get your ashes hauled.”
I shook my head. “Knock off the bullshit, Suze. I got to talk.”
“Well, that’s what’s important, isn’t it,” she said, and stepped away from the door. “Coffee?” she said. “A drink? A quick feel? I know how busy you are. I don’t want to keep you.”
“Coffee,” I said, and sat at her kitchen table by the bay window and looked out at her yard. Susan put the water on. It was Saturday. She was wearing faded jeans and a plaid shirt and no socks and Top-Siders.
“I have some cinnamon doughnuts,” she said. “Do you want some?”
“Yes.”
She put a blue-figured plate out and took four cinnamon doughnuts out of the box and put them on the plate. Then she put instant coffee into two blue-figured mugs and added boiling water. She put one cup in front of me and sat down across the table from me and sipped from the other cup.
“You always drink it too soon,” I said. “Instant coffee’s better if it sits a minute.”
She broke a doughnut in half and took a bite of one half. “Go ahead,” she said, “talk.”
I told her about Paul and his mother. “The kid’s making real progress,” I said. “I couldn’t let her take him.”
Susan shook her head slowly. Her mouth was clamped into thin disapproval.
“What a mess,” she said.
“Agreed.”
“Are you ready to be a father?”
“No.”
“And where does this leave us?” she said.
“Same place we’ve always been.”
“Oh? Last time we went out to dinner it was a fun threesome.”
“It wouldn’t be that way all the time.”
“Really? Who would guard him when we were being a twosome? Do you plan to employ Hawk as a baby- sitter?”
I ate a doughnut. I drank some coffee. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Wonderful,” Susan said. “That’s really wonderful. So what do I do while you’re playing Captains Courageous? Should I maybe join a bridge club? Take dancing lessons? Thumb through The Total Woman?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you should do, or I should do. I know only what I won’t do. I won’t turn the kid back to them and let them play marital Ping-Pong with him some more. That’s what I know. The rest has to be figured out. That’s what I wanted to talk with you about.”
“Oh, lucky me,” Susan said.
“I did not want to talk about how you’re in a funk because I’m paying more attention to him than to you,” I said.
“Perhaps what you want to talk about isn’t terribly important,” she said.
“Yes, it is. What we have to say to each other is always important, because we love each other and we belong to each other. And will forever.”
“Including what you refer to as my funk?”
“Yes.”
She was silent.
“Don’t be ordinary, Suze,” I said. “We’re not ordinary. No one else is like us.”
She sat with her hands folded on the edge of the tabletop, looking at them. A small wisp of steam drifted up past her face from her coffee cup, a fleck of cinnamon sugar marred her lower lip near the corner of her mouth.
The kitchen clock ticked. I could hear a dog bark somewhere outside.
Susan put one hand out toward me and turned it slowly palm up. I took it and held it.
“There’s no such thing as a bad boy,” she said. “Though you do test the hypothesis.”
I held her hand still and said, “First the kid wants to be a ballet dancer.”
“And?”
“And I have no idea how he should go about that”
“And you think I do?”
“No, but I think you can find out.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the detective?”
“Yeah, but I’ve got other things to find out. Can you get a handle on ballet instruction for me?”
