“Bill won’t say anything. He promised not to. I trust him. You should too.”
Kassie clasped Chris’s hands in hers. “You’ve done it again. Changed the subject. You’re a master at that.”
Chris didn’t argue.
“We need to solve Paris before we see Mike. It’s important that I tell him everything at one time. He needs to know where things stand, where I stand, where you stand, where we stand.”
“Because of the divorce?”
“And the business. He’s got it all tied up in a single bow. You’re a central part of it now in more ways than one.”
“I’ll admit, when you put it that way, we are strange bedfellows.” Chris instigated a fight, a pillow fight, that landed Kassie sprawled on top of him on the floor.
“Paris is an opportunity of a lifetime for me,” she pleaded, pinning his arms out in a T. “We survived a five-year, long-distance secret affair. Ten months out of the closet will be a cakewalk. And we’ll be planning this.” She stuck the ring in front of his face.
“There is that.”
“You’ll just travel back and forth to Paris instead of San Francisco.”
As soon as she said it, she wanted to take it back. It wasn’t Bad Kassie talking. It was a mistake, plain and simple.
“Me? I’ll do the traveling? Haven’t I done enough of that already?” Chris lifted her off his prone body.
Kassie climbed on the bed and wrapped the sheet around her. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Of course, I’ll come home too. Ever hear of vacations? And I could conjure up meetings every couple of months back here in Boston.”
“Look around you, Kassie. I moved here for you. And then I lost you. But I stayed. And then I traveled halfway around the world to find you again. I’d be crazy to let you go.”
“I won’t let you let me go. You’ll see we can make it all work. It has to. I already told Tom and Mimi I would do it.”
Kassie stood and massaged the backs of her knees. “Where are those damn pills?”
They showered separately. They spoke sparingly. They dressed—Kassie for the first time that day, Chris for the second—without a glance, a compliment, a brush of an arm.
Kassie texted Annie to let her know they were back in town and that she’d be home, at her house, later that day. Annie asked where she’d be sleeping that night, adding an emoji with a wink. Kassie responded she didn’t have a clue. It all depended. Annie sent back a half dozen question marks Kassie ignored.
How’s Topher?
Purr-fect. There’s a FedEx pkg here 4 u. From Mike. Divorce stuff?
Probably. Thanks. On way to hospital now. Ciao. Au revoir. Whatever.
Chris said he’d meet her in the mailroom.
“Thought you’d have had the post office hold it for you.”
“Forgot. Was too excited about the prospect of you.” He winked and kissed her cheek.
Kassie dumped her purse on the disheveled bed, sorting out travel essentials from everyday necessities. She left her passport, Immodium, mini international charger, and Mimi’s business card on the bed. I’ll straighten this shit up later.
In a hurry to catch up with Chris, she took the stairs to the main floor. As she approached the mailroom, two familiar voices made her slow down. Oh, crap. Karen. What’s she doing here now? She should be at work.
Her first instinct was to turn on her heels and make tracks to the garage. Except Chris expected her to show up in the mailroom. What the hell, she’d have to confront Karen sometime that day. The mailroom was a better option than the hospital room.
“Hey, Karen. How . . . are you?” What’s with the red hair, she wanted to say, but opted to ignore it.
Kassie’s arrival seemed to suck the air out of the mailroom. The overhead lights flickered, as did Kassie’s eyelashes. I’m good here, Mom, thanks.
Karen stepped back from Chris and glared at him. Chris raised his eyebrows as his right shoulder crept toward his ear. Bad Kassie smirked. Gotcha. She’d caught him. He hadn’t warned his mother that his stepmother would walk in any minute.
“Oh. Kassie. What are you doing here?”
Kassie stayed mum. Take it away, Sir Lancelot. Your time to shine.
“She’s with me. We’re headed to the hospital,” Chris said right on cue. Almost.
Well, that was as clear as the Charles River. Kassie fastened invisible duct tape to her lips and jutted her encouraging chin toward Chris. And . . . keep going.
“We got in too late last night to head over there.”
“Got in? From where?”
“Paris,” he said.
“Really? I heard you were in San Francisco with your girlfriend, Lexi.”
33
What’s Age Got to Do with It?
Kassie lifted her purse’s cross-body strap over her head, attempting to buy herself time to think and relieve the pain of the baseball bat she imagined crushed her shoulder blades. She had a choice. If she called out Chris about Lexi, let Karen know the truth—that he hadn’t told her about Lexi—Karen would experience a sense of schadenfreude. She’d get what she wanted—a wedge between the two of them. Or she could wait to see how Chris handled this one.
Rarely Miss Patience, Kassie took the reins. “Well, Karen, you heard wrong. We were vacationing in Europe.” She didn’t want to give Karen the satisfaction of too much information but couldn’t resist adding, “Together.”
“What about Lexi? Chris, what about Lexi?” Karen chirped, following him out of the mailroom to the elevator. Kassie stuck close, enjoying the show.
“Lexi? She’s just great. Nice of you to ask,” Kassie echoed from behind. In the crevices of her mind, Kassie flipped the pages of Chris’s journal to the page with green and purple words. All she could muster was “lovely, lusty, and chesty.” Not what she was searching for, but it’d have to do.
“Lexi’s such a lovely lady,” Kassie said. “I hope to meet her chest-to-chest, I mean face-to-face . . . in person . . . sometime real soon.” It was all she could do not to laugh before Karen huffed and puffed toward the lobby exit. Kassie knew her mother was watching from somewhere up above and would disapprove wholeheartedly if she continued her charade.
Looking befuddled, Chris shifted the pile of magazines and envelopes he’d retrieved from his mailbox to his left arm and grabbed hold of Kassie’s sleeve.
“We’re just going to drop all this off upstairs and then head out. Maybe we’ll see you at the hospital.” Chris pounded the up arrow elevator call button as if it was an emergency. For him, it probably was. Not so much for Kassie, whose emotions seesawed from smugness to utter despair. Her eyes twinkled and filled with water at the same time.
The nanosecond after the elevator doors clicked shut, Chris was in overdrive. “How do you know Lexi? She is lovely, but how do you know that?”
Kassie stepped out of the elevator first and sashayed her way to his door, her butt swinging in sync with her purse, a single tear streaming down her cheek.
Once inside the apartment, Chris plunked the mail on the counter and continued his twenty questions without stopping to offer an explanation. Kassie excused herself in search of a tissue—instead of turning the tables on him and asking the most important question: Who the hell was Lexi?
The time it took her to find something to wipe away her insecurity was enough for her to gather herself. An old saying of her mother’s saved her. Something about when you say nothing, you’re really saying more than you realize. Okay, Mom, I’ll keep my mouth shut.
Which Kassie did until Chris collapsed on the couch in a heap, and she had to save him from himself. His face flushed red as a pomegranate rash—she should know—and his hair screamed for a good combing. It was unfair of her to let him continue his mental gymnastics when he’d never find out how she knew about Lexi without a little help.
She scanned the living room; locked suitcases rested pretty much where they were dropped twelve hours before. Their carry-ons perched open on the dini
ng table, the jackets they’d worn on the plane draped alongside. She found his journal under his jacket and remedied the situation they were both guilty of perpetuating.
Opening to the page with the green and purple doodles, Kassie handed Chris his journal. “I met Lexi yesterday on my way over to meet with Mimi.” She picked Chris’s jaw up from his chest, kissed his forehead, tapped his cheek twice. “Seems like you’ve got some ’splaining to do.”
Chris tried to open his mouth. Kassie shook her head and put two fingers over his lips. “Later. We’ve got all the time in the world. I’m not heading back to Paris until Labor Day.”
Checkmate.
Kassie interlaced her hand with Chris’s as they left the apartment for the second time that morning. This time they kept walking to the garage.
On the drive to Boston Clinic, Kassie didn’t interrogate him about Lexi, though she itched to find out about the relationship he’d had after they’d split. A year ago they had no future, so he’d moved on. Could she blame him?
They passed a highway billboard that read, “You Too Can Make a Temporary Job Permanent.” Of course. That’s what Lexi was, a temp, a passing thing. She breathed a sigh of forgiveness. Though it hurt all the way down to her belly button, she wouldn’t let Lexi . . . or Paris . . . destroy their reunion. Nevertheless, when the time was right, she’d drag out of him all the skinny about the lovely, lusty, crusty, no chesty, young Miss Lexi. She assumed she was young, at least younger than she.
Kassie was relieved Chris didn’t challenge her about Paris in the fifteen minutes it took to drive to the hospital. Maybe he’d thrown in the towel. Careful, girl. Don’t let your guard down. This could just be a short-lived cease fire. After all, she’d misread his initial reaction.
In the excitement of the moment yesterday, she assumed he’d be as thrilled as she about the opportunity for her to manage the Paris office at such a critical time as a merger. A merger! Nothing is more complex. Leading it to a successful conclusion could be a career game changer. Yet, once Chris explained why he didn’t want her to be three thousand miles away, she kind of understood, but gee whiz, it would only be for nine or ten months, hardly a lifetime.
Chris took her right hand, kissed her new ring, and led the way to the hospital lobby.
“Gosh, Chris, what the hell do you think happened around here while we were gone?”
“What do you mean?”
“Karen’s a redhead and Mike’s had a heart attack. Do you think they’re connected in some perverted way?”
“Parents acting like children, perhaps. Maybe they were doin’ it when he had his attack.”
“Eww, gross.”
“You should talk. Your sex drive doesn’t seem to be fading with—”
“With what . . . age?” She gave him a solid poke in his arm. Note to self: Find out how old this Lexi person is.
Kassie didn’t have enough fingers to count the many times she had visited the hospital in the last fifteen or so months, starting with Easter weekend, ugh, the beginning of the big reveal and the unraveling that split Chris and her up. Then there was the kidney swap. And now, they were at the hospital again. This time hand in hand—engaged to be engaged—to check out her husband’s, his father’s, ticker. You really can’t make this shit up, can you?
As they rode the elevator up to the cardiac unit, a nightmarish vision of Mike in the emergency room last year flashed through her mind. Why wouldn’t it? Same hospital, just different floor. She remembered his face, pale and gray as the smoke that billowed from his cigarettes. A few days in the hospital had restored his energy and his color. Wouldn’t it be the case this time? According to Bill, Mike had been there two days already. She figured there was no way he’d look as gruesome as he did back then.
They decided to walk into his room together. If gossip queen Karen had beaten them there, she would’ve already spilled the beans.
Kassie was wrong on all counts. A young lady, not Karen, sat beside Mike’s bed. And Mike? Well, let’s just say he looked as though he could use some happy news.
34
Father and Son Reunion
“Hey, you guys. Thanks for coming. How come?”
Kassie grasped the foot of the metal bed frame, seeming to almost trip over something on the floor. There was no impediment, that is, except for her chin, which had dropped at the shock of seeing Mike so frail, with circles under his eyes that appeared even darker in contrast to his pasty skin. Where was the cheery guy she’d met recently at Panera’s? Even when he was in the hospital that Easter weekend a year ago, he had more zing. And could he have been crying? No, surely not the Mike she knew.
“You mean, how come we’re here together?” Chris pointed to himself and Kassie as he swooped in to rescue her and the conversation.
Recovering and holding back her own tears, Kassie said it was a long story for another time. First, she wanted to know how he was.
Before he could answer, the sweet young thing who held court in a chair alongside Mike interjected, “You must be Mrs. Ricci.”
Chris eased a chair under Kassie at the foot of the bed and guided her shaking body into it. His strong hands squeezed her shoulders as if he was telling her to “just hang in there.” She swallowed hard and prayed Bad Kassie would stifle it and not blurt out something like “Oh my God, you look like shit.” She was grateful for the distraction of someone else in the room.
“I am. And you are?” She appreciated that Chris was rubbing her arms, helping her blood circulate and travel to her brain.
Cecilia stood tall and introduced herself, shaking Kassie’s hand and sporting a huge smile as she greeted Chris. If Kassie didn’t know any better, Chris’s description of Lexi nearly fit Cecilia. At least the lovely, chesty parts. She was way too young, maybe college age, for Kassie to brand her lusty. That would be totally inappropriate for Kassie to do, given she was old enough to be her mother. Although she wondered what words, and colors, Chris would use to paint her.
“Oh, this is Christopher Gaines. My, uh, Mr. Ricci’s son.”
It took Kassie a moment to recall Mike mentioning a young college student named Cecilia who was a hospital volunteer when he was there that fateful Easter weekend. She’d delivered his meals and helped direct him to the chapel and the library. He’d portrayed her as an ambitious idealist . . . and a hottie . . . who had a way with words, just like Kassie at her age.
Kassie’s shoulders loosened ever so slightly. “I remember Mike telling me about you. Looks like you’re still volunteering?”
“Oh, yes. Did he tell you I spend all of my time at this awesome institution of health care whenever I’m not in class or in the library with my nose in a book or sitting by the Charles writing? Did he also tell you I’m going to be a famous writer someday?”
“Yes, I remember Mike being very impressed by your dreams and aspirations. What brings you here today?”
“I was happy—well, not really happy—to see Mr. Ricci’s name on the list of new patients admitted this week. I make it a habit to visit people whose acquaintance I’ve made, when—I mean if—they return to take advantage of the . . . um . . . exceptional doctoring and nursing this monumental hospital provides Bostonians.”
Despite the sadness Kassie witnessed in Mike’s eyes, there was also a slight glimmer as he seemed delighted by Cecilia’s attention and prattle.
“Cecilia is splendid and charming company,” Mike said. “She filled my morning with unceasing humor and effulgent glad tidings.”
OMG, it’s contagious. What the hell does effulgent even mean?
“Look it up,” Mike mouthed to Kassie, able to read what was behind her furrowed brow, as a husband of thirty years naturally would.
“Mrs. Ricci, now that you’re here, you might want to let the nurses know of your presence. They popped in at various intervals this morning asking if you had arrived.”
Before she did that, Mike asked her to wait so he could give her and Chris an executive summary to the ext
ent he could. He started with late Monday afternoon; he’d felt like shit so he tried to reach her, but her phone was turned off.
“Oh, Mike, I’m sorry.” Her mind rewound to Monday night . . . the proposal on the bridge, the rash. Not much she could’ve done had he succeeded in reaching her. She was sorry, all the same.
He tried Bill; no answer either. He was with a client. So he called Amelia. Lucky for him, she and Teresa were at the Millers’ house up the street, so they rushed over. They called the ambulance, and he’d been recuperating ever since.
Wait just a damn minute. Something was out of kilter. He’d called Kassie, Bill, and Amelia, but not Karen? And she wasn’t at the hospital and probably hadn’t been there earlier, or Mike would’ve known that she and Chris had reconciled. Had Chris also noticed Karen was missing in word and deed?
“You had a heart attack, they say,” Chris piped in.
“Just a tremor, not a major earthquake.” Mike tried to laugh but fell short, as did his three visitors.
“Nevertheless . . .” Kassie patted Mike’s arm, the one without the bells and whistles attached.
Mike continued. “Amelia helped me help the hospital administrators complete all the requisite . . .” He winked at Cecilia. “. . . paperwork. You’re listed in case of emergency, but they really wanted your signature too for some godforsaken reason.”
“Probably just insurance related. We’re still coinsured.”
“I hope that’s not why you came back from . . . where were you anyway?”
“Here, Chris, you tell Mike.” As Kassie left to find the nurses’ station, she heard Cecilia say her goodbyes and that she’d drop by to see him each day he was there. Kassie was touched, wondering who’d adopted whom in that odd May-December companionship.
Kassie did her duty as Mrs. Michael Ricci, maybe for the last time; their divorce would be final in two months. It hadn’t occurred to her until then that both of them would have to designate new beneficiaries, new next of kin. Until a week ago, she probably would’ve asked Annie to fill that role for her when the time came. Under the latest circumstances, Chris would make more sense. For Mike, more than likely Karen, eek, would step in and fill Kassie’s shoes—if Karen was still in the picture. She had a sneaking suspicion more had happened over the weekend than red hair dye and a ride in an ambulance.
What’s Not True: A Novel Page 20
