neighborhood of small bungalows, which were rented mostly by students and a few young faculty members. She stopped at a large gray clapboard house and studied the dark windows of the small apartment over the attached garage. A ripple of unidentifiable emotion passed through her. Fear?Anger?Relief? She didn’t know what she felt. She lifted Timmy from the stroller and walked to the outside stairs leading to Tilly Coogan’s apartment.
“What do you think, Tim? You think Mommy’s home?”
Timmy held the blanket tight to his chest. “Mum,” he jabbered.
Megan pressed her lips together. Mum had flown the coop, she thought grimly. Mum was nowhere to be found. She wondered if Timmy knew that. It was only natural that he missed his mother, and yet he seemed like a happy, well – adjusted child. Megan supposed children were flexible at this age. Or perhaps it was a reflection of Timmy’s personality that he could take things in stride.
She knew it was an empty gesture, but she knocked on the apartment door anyway. There was no answer, and she tried the door and the window beside it. Both were locked. There had been no word from Tilly, and Megan was worried. She was beginning to wonder if the girl would return. After caring for Timmy for five days, she couldn’t understand how Tilly could have left him, even for an hour.
She took a stack of letters from the black metal mailbox and riffled through a week’s worth of junk mail. Tilly Coogan must have led a lonely existence in Williamsburg, she thought. No one to take in the mail, and only letters addressed to “Occupant.” She stood looking at the blank window for a few minutes, as if at any time a light might be switched on or the phone would ring. Neither of those things happened, and Megan finally turned with a sigh and walked back to Duke of Gloucester Street.
At five o’clock the twilight was heavy over the darkened buildings. Duke of Gloucester Street was almost empty as the shops closed for the day and the lantern – style streetlights blinked on. Megan paused briefly at BrutonParishChurch and listened to the faint strains of organ music.
Her life had always been very secure, she realized. The little brick house in South River, New Jersey, had been a lot like the practical pig’s house. It had held up against all the huffing and puffing of childhood. Her father had been a policeman. In South River that was as safe as being a shoe salesman, and only slightly more prestigious. Her mother was a housewife, plain and simple. It was what she wanted to do, and she did it well. They’d had a twenty – foot Criscraft in their driveway and a gas barbecue in their back yard. Her father had regarded growing grass as a moral obligation, right up there with church on Sunday and sparkling white socks on Monday.
Megan’s finely arched brows drew together in a frown. She’d spent her whole life worrying about freckles, for crying out loud. This poor kid in the stroller didn’t have a father. He didn’t have a little brick house. He didn’t even have a mother anymore. He had Megan and Pat, and that fact raised frightening questions in Megan’s mind… questions without answers.
She continued past the miller and the silversmith. Anne Hedgeworth stood on the steps of the wigmaker’s shop and waved. She wore a white ruffled pinner, a colonial headdress, and an apricot dress with lace at the shoulders and cuffs. Megan waved back, marveling at how Anne always looked so attractive in the fancier costume of the Williamsburg upper class. At the end of the day, Anne’s stomacher was precisely buttoned and her pinner in place, an accomplishment Megan suspected she could never achieve.
“There’d always be a button popped at my waist from too many sugar cookies,” she told Timmy. “And I can’t manage a mobcap. What would I ever do with a pinner? Anne looks pretty, but I think I’m destined to be a peasant.”
She turned at the alley leading to the Raleigh Tavern Bake Shop. The bakery was closed for the day, and inside two women bustled about, cleaning trays and packing away Sally Lunn loaves and Queen Ann tarts. They saw Megan and Timmy looking in the window and hurried over with a cookie for Timmy.
Getting a free cookie at five o’clock had become a ritual for Timmy and Megan. For the past three days she had taken Timmy for a walk along the quiet streets, gotten a cookie from the women at the bakery, and gone to Patrick’s house to share the evening meal. Usually it was a disaster. Gray chicken cooked in the microwave. French fries that bubbled over and set the stove on fire. Thank goodness they hadn’t burned the house down. The night before, they’d made shoe – leather steak. Tonight they were playing it safe with canned chicken noodle soup and bagels with cream cheese.
It was five – thirty when Megan reached Pat’s little white house. The air over Nicholson Street was fragrant with the smoke from blazing fireplaces, and the windows of private residences glowed golden in the encroaching darkness. Usually she was the first to arrive at Pat’s, but today the lights were shining in every window, upstairs and down, and the cheerfully lit house reminded Megan of a giant jack – o’ – lantern.
Pat was setting the table. He looked up and grinned when she opened the door. “Hope you’re hungry. I’ve gone to all the trouble of opening a can and slicing a bagel.”
He wore jeans with a hole in the knee and a powder – blue – and – white rugby shirt, and Megan thought he looked much more tasty than the soup he was heating. She took off Timmy’s coat and put him in the high chair. “You’re home early.”
“Had some cancellations.” He filled Timmy’s three – section baby plate with green gook, red gook, and brown lumpy gunk.
Megan grimaced when Pat handed her the spoon. “Do I have to do this?”
“I did it last night.”
“Is that red gook smashed beets?”
“Yup.”
She reluctantly sat opposite Timmy. “This isn’t fair. I hate smashed beets. He had smashed beets for lunch yesterday, and it took two showers to get them out of my hair.”
Pat had a sexy rejoinder to make about showers, but he bit his tongue. He’d been very careful since Tuesday night. He’d declared his intentions, and now he was waiting. Not very patiently, he admitted, but he was determined to give Megan a few days to get to know him. Besides, falling in love was more than sex. It was conversation at the dinner table, confidences shared, support offered, and comfortable quiet times. His mind knew this to be true, but his body was pushing for sex.
Timmy plunged his fist into the red gook, and smashed beets flew everywhere.
Megan didn’t even blink. She’d been through all this before. Beets dripped from her nose and clung to her hair. Her khaki safari shirt looked as if it had measles. Pat turned back to the soup, but Megan could see his shoulders shaking with silent laughter. She smiled stiffly and offered Timmy a spoonful of beans. He ate three spoonfuls and sneezed. Now Megan had green interspersed with red.
Pat wiped the beets off her face. “It’s not so bad, honey. It looks… colorful. Needs a little orange, though. Maybe I should give you some squash.”
“I’m going to give you squash in a minute. I’m going to squash your nose.”
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” he said, trying to look serious. “It’s so cute.”
“Hmmm. You think your nose is cute?”
“I know it’s cute. My whole face is cute. You can’t imagine how awful it is to be thirty years old and still be cute.” He set a plate of carrot sticks and green – pepper slices on the table. “Old ladies stop me in the supermarket and pinch my cheek.”
“That is pretty terrible.”
He munched on a carrot. “I always wanted to be handsome, masculine, enigmatic- but I ended up cute.”
He was all those things, Megan thought. When you got to know him, he was handsome and incredibly masculine and even enigmatic. Cute was just a first impression that later gave way to more complicated qualities. She gave Timmy a bottle of milk and took his supper plate to the sink. She poured herself a glass of orange juice, turned toward the table, and stepped in a splotch of beets.
Pat studied her now juice – soaked shirt. “I was only kidding about the orange. You really didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”
