“She has good taste.”
“I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t ordered. Well, I do know, but I’m glad I didn’t have to.” She nodded again as Lucy held up an unopened bag of carrots. “I can’t abide the idea of being financially dependent on Mike. Been there, done that, not doing it again.”
“Poor Mike. All he wants is to take care of you, and all you want is to take care of yourself. You’re going to have to marry him soon.”
“I know. But the thing about Mike Moody…” A dreamy smile came over her. “He’s steadfast. That man is not going anywhere.”
Lucy swallowed her pain. “Other than in and out of your bedroom window every night.”
Bree actually blushed. “I told you about that in confidence.”
“The same way you told me what a lusty lover he is. Something I could have gone to my grave not knowing.”
Bree paid no attention to Lucy’s objections. “I really believed Scott when he said I was the one with the problem, but now all I feel is pity for his poor little nineteen-year-old.” The dreamy smile was back. “Who would have thought a straitlaced, religious guy like Mike could be so-”
“Lusty,” Lucy said, cutting her off.
Bree’s face clouded. “If Toby catches us…”
“Which he’s bound to do sooner or later.” Lucy added a block of Parmesan cheese and-resisting the urge to shatter it against the wall-an unopened jar of Panda’s orange marmalade.
“Mike’s getting more nervous about sneaking around. He actually threatened to withdraw his, uhm, services… until I agree to set a date. Blackmail. Can you imagine?”
Lucy closed the refrigerator door. “What’s holding you back, Bree? Really?”
“I’m just so happy.” She swung her legs, thought it over. “I know I have to get over my aversion to marriage, and I will. Just not yet.” She slid off the counter. “You’ll come back to the island to see us, won’t you?”
Lucy never wanted to come back to the island again. “Sure,” she said. “Now let’s get this stuff over to the cottage. And no long-drawn-out good-byes, okay?”
“Absolutely not.”
But they both knew it wouldn’t be that easy to hold back tears. And it wasn’t.
EVENTUALLY PANDA STOPPED COUGHING AND his energy began to return, but he felt as if he had a limb missing. His reflexes were no longer sharp-not bad enough for anyone else to notice, but he knew. At the shooting range, his aim wasn’t as true, and if he went for a run, he lost his rhythm for no reason. He knocked over his coffee mug, dropped his car keys.
He read Lucy’s interview with the
He noticed a couple threads of gray in his hair. As if that weren’t depressing enough, his job wasn’t going well. The actress who played the secondary lead in the film had started hitting on him and wasn’t taking no for an answer. She was out-of-this-world beautiful, with a body that almost rivaled Dr. Kristi’s, and tumbling in bed with a new female would be the best way to wipe out memories of the last one, but he couldn’t even think about it. He told her he was in love with someone else.
That night he got drunk for the first time in years. He awoke in a panic. Despite all his care, the ghosts he’d been able to keep at bay for so long were coming back. He called the only person he could think of who might be able to help.
“Kristi, it’s me…”
LUCY FOUND AN APARTMENT AND a job in Boston while Nealy’s press secretary dodged an avalanche of calls from the media.
On her last night at home in Virginia, she sat with her parents on the patio of the estate where she’d grown up. Nealy wore one of Lucy’s old college sweatshirts to keep warm but still managed to look patrician as she sipped from a mug of hot tea, her normally neat honey-brown hair rumpled from the early October breeze.
Her mother’s fair complexion and
Nealy cuddled her warm tea mug. “It happened so gradually, and you were always so cheerful about stepping in, that we were oblivious. Reading what you wrote… It was clearheaded and heart-wrenching.”
“I’m glad you’re going to keep writing,” her father said. “You know I’ll help however I can.”
“Thanks,” Lucy replied. “I’m going to take you up on that.”
Out of nowhere, her mother hit Lucy with one of the roundhouse punches that were her political specialty. “Are you ready to tell us about him?”
Lucy tightened her grip on her wineglass. “Who?”
Nealy didn’t hesitate. “The man who’s taken the sparkle out of your eyes.”
“It’s… not that bad,” she lied.
Mat’s voice dropped to an ominous rumble. “I’ll tell you one thing… If I ever see the son of a bitch, I’m going to kick his ass.”
Nealy lifted an eyebrow at him. “One more reminder of how grateful we all are as a country that I was elected president instead of you.”
PANDA WALKED AROUND THE BLOCK twice before he worked up the nerve to go inside the three-story brown brick building. Pilsen had once been home to Chicago’s Polish immigrants but now served as the heartbeat of the city’s Mexican community. The narrow hallway was covered in bright graffiti, or maybe they were murals-hard to tell in a neighborhood where bold public art figured so prominently.
He found the door at the end of the hallway. A hand-lettered sign read:
I’M ARMED AND PISSED OFF
WALK IN ANYWAY
Where the hell had Kristi sent him? He pushed open the door and stepped into a room decorated in early Salvation Army with a cracked leather couch, a couple of unmatched easy chairs, a blond wood coffee table, and a chain-saw-carved eagle sitting beneath a poster that read:
U.S. MARINES
Helping bad guys die since 1775
The man who emerged from an adjoining room was about Panda’s age, rumpled and beginning to bald, with a big nose and Fu Manchu mustache. “Shade?”
Panda nodded.
“I’m Jerry Evers.” He moved forward, arm extended, his gait slightly uneven. Panda’s gaze inadvertently strayed to his leg. Evers shook his head, then tugged up the leg of his baggy jeans to reveal a prosthesis. “Sangin. I was with the Three-Five.”
Panda already knew Evers had been in Afghanistan, and he nodded. The Marines in the Fifth Regiment had been hit hard in Sangin.
Evers waved the file he was holding in the general direction of an upholstered chair and laughed. “You were in Kandahar
Panda pointed out the obvious. “Others had it worse.”
Evers snorted and slumped down on the couch. “Fuck that. We’re here to talk about you.”
Panda felt himself being to relax…
BY THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER, Lucy had settled into life in Boston and the apartment she’d sublet in Jamaica Plain. When she wasn’t writing, she was at work, and even though she was tired all the time, she’d never been more grateful for her new job and busy schedule.
“What do you care?” The seventeen-year-old sitting on the couch across from her sneered. “You don’t know nothin’ ’bout me.”
The spicy scent of tacos wafted into the counseling room from the kitchen where, each day, the Roxbury drop- in center served dinner to fifty or so homeless teens. They also offered showers, a small laundry area, a weekly medical clinic, and six counselors who helped the runaways, couch hoppers, and street kids as young as fourteen find shelter, get to school, work on their GEDs, secure Social Security cards, and look for jobs. Some of their clients
