dining room door and at the harried hostess trying to seat parties, Joanna decided against it.
Instead, threading her way through the crush of people, she headed for the lobby cocktail bar. On the way, she walked past the gas-log fireplace where she had sat for such a long time the previous evening. Was that only yesterday? she wondered. It seemed much longer ago than that.
“Joanna,” a man’s voice called. “Over here.”
Without the subtle distortions of the telephone, Bob Brundage’s voice stopped her cold. The timbre was so familiar, she hardly dared turn her head to look. At the far end of the massive fireplace, a man in a military uniform rose from one of a pair of wing chairs and gestured for her to join him. Unable to move, Joanna stood as if frozen in middle of the room.
D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop himself could have been standing there. Her father was standing there. And yet he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Big Hank been dead for years. Besides, this man was younger than Joanna’s father had been when he died. But the resemblance was eerie. It was as though the ghost of her father had stepped out of one of those old black-and-white photos and turned into a living, breathing human being.
When Joanna didn’t move forward, the man did, coming toward her with his hand outstretched and with a broad smile on his tanned face.
“Bob Brundage,” he said, introducing himself. He took Joanna by the elbow and guided her back toward the two empty chairs. “Colonel Brundage, actually. I told you it wasn’t Amway.”
“Who are you?” she asked, finally finding her voice.
“I’m the surprise,” he said. “Eleanor had her heart set on introducing us at dinner, but it seemed to me that might be too much of a shock for you. Judging by your reaction, I believe I’m right about that. What would you like to drink?”
Joanna watched him in utter fascination. When Bob Brundage’s mouth moved, it was Joanna’s father’s mouth. He had the same narrow lips that turned up at the corners, the same odd space between his two front teeth.
“I don’t care,” she answered. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Bob Brundage signaled the cocktail waitress. “Two Glenfiddich on the rocks,” he said. “So your folks never told you about me, did they?”
“No. I knew there were a series of miscarriages before they ever had me, but ...”
Bob Brundage laughed again. The laughter, too, was hauntingly familiar. “I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, but never a miscarriage,” he said. “Your mother—my birth mother, as we say in the world of adoptees—was only fifteen when she got pregnant with me.
“According to Eleanor—you don’t mind if I call her that, do you?”
Joanna shook her head.
“According to Eleanor,” Bob continued, “Hank had just come back from the Korean War and got stationed at Fort Huachuca when they first reopened it. They met on a picnic on the San Pedro River. Eleanor wandered away from the church picnic and met up with a group of soldiers. She told me it was love at first sight. Of course, those were pre-birth control days. Her folks shipped her out of town when she turned up pregnant, forced her to give me up for adoption. But she told me that she and Hank secretly stayed in touch by letter the whole time she was gone, and that they took up again soon as she came back to town. By then he was out of the army and working in the mines. After Eleanor graduated from high school, her folks finally consented to their getting married.
“It’s a very romantic story, don’t you think?”
The waitress brought the drinks. Romantic? Joanna thought, No, the story didn’t sound the least bit romantic to her. It sounded absolutely hypocritical. Do as
