That got her more awake. “With what?”
“With blood, toil, tears, sweat, and a pair of very long needle-nosed pliers.”
She sat down on my bed, held my hand. “You could have woken me up.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Wait … I didn’t take care of you yesterday morning. Right? Is that when you figured it out?”
“I did.”
“Then why didn’t you do it yourself last night.”
“Because I like your touch.”
She leaned over and kissed me. “You keep on doing things for yourself, I’m going to think you don’t want me anymore.”
I kissed her right back.
“Don’t ever think that.”
Paula saw that I was still droopy so she told me to stay in bed, which didn’t take much convincing, and she came up a while later holding a bowl of oatmeal with cut strawberries and brown sugar sprinkled in, along with toast and a mug of tea.
I gave the tray a severe look. “What, no meat products?”
“I know you’re typical Irish and think the major food groups are beer, meat, chips, and sugar, but this is healthier for you, and that’s what counts.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. And eat it up, and don’t let me catch you tossing it out the nearest window.”
I ate while she showered and got dressed, then she took the tray down. She came back up later, purse over one shoulder, her computer bag in her hand.
“Have a good day at work, hon,” I said. “Do you need a dollar for the lunch lady?”
“Not today,” she said, and we engaged in a bit more kissing and cuddling.
“That’ll make me feel better than a meatless day,” I said, and Paula surprised me and made my face turn red with a comment about her suffering through a number of meatless days herself.
Something came to me as she headed out of the bedroom. “Hey,” I said. “Got a moment?”
She checked her watch. “For you, two moments.”
“When Diane Woods left yesterday—”
“And interrupted your Penthouse fantasy,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, that,” I said. “Just before she went out the door, it looked like she said something to you. Anything important?”
Paula smiled. “I guess it was, since it involved you.”
“Me? How?”
Smile still in place, Paula said, “Diane said that she was very happy to see the two of us together, but if I did anything to hurt you, she’d kill me and make it look like an accident.”
When she was gone I flopped back in bed, struggling to fight the onset of an early-morning nap. Too much sleep, too much lying around like a lump of flesh, not being active—it wasn’t part of the road to recovery. Heck, I wasn’t even on the on-ramp to recovery. But when your belly is full and your eyes get heavy, that sweet, sweet surrender of sleep is tempting indeed.
It was approaching noon when I got up for good. I made a phone call to the Lafayette House across the street, and as one o’clock approached, a knock on my door announced—I hoped—that lunch had arrived.
I opened the door, leaning on my borrowed cane, and Mia, the waitress and would-be journalist, was there on my steps, yawning.
“You should think about getting a doorbell,” she said. “My knuckles get scraped from knocking on the door.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and I gimped my way back into the kitchen. Mia followed, ditching her coat along the way. Again she went through my cabinets and we sat down to lunch, a roast beef sandwich and broth for me, and a lobster roll the size of my forearm for her.
Mia noted my look and said, “Hey, you said I could order anything I wanted from the menu, so I did.”
“And I’m glad you did.”
As we ate, we talked some about the high cost of living on the seacoast and she yawned throughout her meal—“Sorry, didn’t get a wink of sleep last night”—and said that the Porter Herald had accepted a freelance piece about Revolutionary War–era forts for the upcoming Sunday edition.
“I’m pretty happy with the article,” she said. “The problem will be what it looks like once it hits print. Clowns up there delight in inserting typos and spelling errors that weren’t in the original copy.”
“Happens to the best of us,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess so. Hey, the last time I was here, you said you were a magazine writer. Which magazine?”
“Shoreline,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know it. Is it like Yankee magazine?”
“Fewer recipes and B&B ads, more articles about the history and future of the New England seacoast.”
Mia chewed, swallowed. “Cool. Do you know the editor?”
“I do,” I said. “If you have an article query, let me know, and I’ll pass it on to him. Get past the usual crew of gatekeepers who’ve just graduated from Brown or Northeastern and think they know everything.”
“Yeah, lucky bastards,” she said.
After we were finished she helped me clean up and put away the dishes, and I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” she said. “But only if you answer one of mine.”
“Go for it.”
She pointed at the cane. “What horror movie set did you get that from?”
“The one called real life,” I said.
After I paid Mia for the meal and for her time, we went into the living room; she took a chair and I took the couch. “Your aunt,” I said. “The former newspaper lady. Is she still around?”
“Yep,” she said. “Lives up in Rochester, at a so-called retirement community, though I never mention that phrase out loud to her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gwen Aubrey.”
“And you said she worked around here in newspapers, back thirty or forty years ago.”
Mia laughed. “Oh, God, don’t get her going. She says she’s writing a book about what it was like, being a journalist in the Seacoast years back, and I don’t have the heart to tell her that nobody cares.”
“Wrong,” I said. “I care.”
“What’s that?”
“Your Aunt Gwen. If possible, I’d love to meet her, talk about the old days, about what it was like here back then.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Not at all,” I said. “But
