Olivia thought for a minute. She couldn’t tell her she was making a panel for a nursery—she could hardly let Lacey know she was pregnant when her own husband had no idea. “I’m making a panel for one of the bedrooms in my house,” she said.
“Do you have a design? Mom always worked with a design.”
“Yes.” Olivia lifted the graph paper from her lap to the table. The hot-air balloons probably looked simplistic to Lacey after the kinds of things her mother had done. But Lacey smiled.
“That’s nice,” she said, and she sounded sincere. She watched as Olivia pulled a roll of copper foil from the case. “You never told my father you saw me in the emergency room,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because what happens in the ER is confidential.” She looked up at Lacey. “How’s your friend doing? The boy who used crack?”
Lacey wrinkled her nose. “He wasn’t my friend. He’s gone back to Richmond. He was an asshole, anyway.”
Olivia nodded. “He took a major risk with his life.”
“He didn’t care. Some people’s lives are so screwed up they don’t care.” Lacey picked up one of the spools of solder and began playing with it. Her fingernails were chewed short; a couple of her fingertips looked red and sore. There was a scared little girl behind that tough facade.
“Your father told me you have a collection of antique dolls,” Olivia said.
“Yeah.” Lacey didn’t look up from the solder. “My mother used to give them to me for my birthday.”
“Could I see them?”
Lacey shrugged and stood up, and Olivia followed her up the stairs. They passed what had to be the master bedroom, the bed a beautiful four poster covered by a quilt. Lacey opened her bedroom door and Olivia could not prevent a laugh. “Oh, Lacey, this is great,” she said. There was a shelf going three fourths of the way around the room on which delicate, ruffle-dressed dolls sat, wide-eyed and prim. Above and below the dolls were posters of rock groups—young men in leather pants and vests, bare-chested, long-haired, ear-ringed and insolent- looking.
Lacey smiled at her reaction.
“Is this room a good description of you?” Olivia asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean half angel, half devil.”
“Three quarters devil, I guess.”
Olivia saw the textbooks on her bed. “What are you studying?”
Lacey groaned. “Biology and Algebra.”
Olivia picked up the biology text and skimmed through the pages, remembering how enthralled she’d been by her own biology book in high school, how she had read the entire book by the end of the first week of school. “What are you up to?”
“Genetic stuff.” Lacey picked up a worksheet from her bed. “This is my homework. I
Olivia looked at the sheet, then at Lacey. “Let me help you with it.”
The girl colored. “You don’t have to.”
“I’d like to.” She kicked off her shoes and sat down on Lacey’s unmade bed. “Come on,” she said, patting the space next to her.
Lacey joined her on the bed, and Olivia talked about Punnett squares and dominant and recessive genes until Lacey had a grasp of the concepts herself. They were comparing earlobes and trying to roll their tongues—which she could do, but Lacey could not—when they heard Tripod barking downstairs.
“Anybody home?” A female voice called out from the kitchen.
“It’s Nola,” Lacey said. She raised her voice. “We’re up here, Nola.”
They heard footsteps on the stairs and then an attractive blond woman dressed in a dark blue suit appeared at Lacey’s door, holding a pie in her hands. This was the woman who had “designs” on Alec, Olivia remembered.
“Oh, excuse me, Lacey,” Nola said. “I didn’t know you had company.”
Olivia leaned forward on the bed and lifted her hand to shake Nola’s. “I’m Olivia Simon,” she said.
“She’s a friend of Dad’s,” said Lacey.
“I’m just helping Lacey with her biology.” Olivia felt as though she owed Nola some sort of explanation. “Alec had an emergency at the animal hospital.”
“Oh.” Nola looked a little lost. She patted a strand of her pale hair back into place above her ear. “Well, I brought this pie over for him. You’ll let him know, Lacey?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll leave it on the kitchen counter. It’s his favorite, strawberry rhubarb.”
Nola left the room, and neither of them spoke again until they heard the back door open and close downstairs.
