“See you around, Sunny Randall,” he said.
And the door closed behind him. Rosie sniffed vigorously at it, her tail wagging fast, as Brian went down the stairs.
CHAPTER 59
I sat back down at the counter in my kitchen and looked at the empty coffee cups for a time. Millicent got off the bed, left the newspaper in a disorganized pile, and came and sat down at the counter beside me. Neither of us said anything for a bit. Rosie joined us, looking up from the floor, and thumping her tail.
“Cathal Kragan is dead,” I said.
“Brian told you that?”
“Yes.”
“Who killed him?”
“Albert Antonioni,” I said.
“Good.”
We sat quietly some more. The loft was quiet.
Finally Millicent said, “You broke up with him.”
“Yes,” I said. “Could you hear?”
“Some,” Millicent said.
“I hope it didn’t embarrass you,” I said.
“No,” Millicent said. “I’m glad I heard.”
“Because?” I said.
“Because it was so nice. You didn’t yell at each other. You were both nice to each other even if it wasn’t working out.”
“You understand why it wasn’t working out?”
“You’re still in love with Richie.”
I wanted to say no, it’s more complicated than that, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that’s all there was to it. Which was a lot.
“I guess,” I said.
“It’ll work out,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “who’s looking out for whom?”
“Whom?”
“Yes,” I said. “Whom.”
We both smiled a little.
“What about me?” Millicent said.
“What about you?”
“Well, you got rid of Brian,” she said. “And that man Cathal is dead. What are you going to say to my father and mother about me?”
“Your father has agreed to fund a trust for your support and education with me as trustee,” I said.
“Explain that to me,” she said.
“I decide how much money you can have and for what. He has no say about it.”
“He wouldn’t do that. Why did he say he would?”
“Because your mother and I can ruin him if he doesn’t,” I said.
“Would you?”
“You bet.”
“Would she?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to go back and live with them?”
“No,” I said. “There’s no them, anyway. Your mother has left your father.”
“Really?”
I nodded.
“Good,” Millicent said. “Can I stay with you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But here’s how I’d like to see it work. My friend Julie will get you an appointment with a good psychiatrist, and you’ll see him or her for as long as we all think you should.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me, you, and the shrink,” I said.
“You think there’s something wrong with me?”
“You can’t have lived the life you’ve led without needing to fix some things,” I said.
“Like what?”
“That’s for you and the shrink to decide,” I said.
“Maybe you and Richie ought to go,” Millicent said, and the shadow of a smile passed across her small face.
“Probably,” I said.
“What about my mom and dad?”
“Your father’s job is to fund the trust. He does that, we have no need to see him further, unless you want to.”
Millicent shook her head.
“Your mother will also see a shrink,” I said.
“Same one?”
“No.”
“I gotta see her?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“But remember that, in the end, horrible as she has been, when she understood that she was putting your life in danger, she came down out of the trees.”
Millicent nodded. There was no warmth in the nod.
“I don’t like her,” Millicent said.
“I don’t blame you. What I’d like, though, if you could, would be that you’d agree to let her visit you maybe once in a while for an hour.”
“No.”
“With me present,” I said.
Millicent shook her head.
“Okay. Maybe later you’ll change your mind.” I smiled. “It’s supposed to be our prerogative.”
“Who?”
“Women,” I said.
“Like us,” Millicent said.
“Yes.”
She sat for a long time staring at the countertop.
“I guess I’ll do it if you think I should,” she said.
“I do,” I said. “But sooner or later you’re going to have to decide things because you think you should.”
“How can I do that,” Millicent said. She raised her head and stared straight at me. Her eyes were glistening with tears. “I don’t know anything.”
“You know one of the hard things about being a woman,” I said, “is having some built-in compass that doesn’t depend on others.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Millicent said.
“When you’re talking to a male,” I said. “And you want to urge him to do the right thing you can say, ‘Be a man.’”
Millicent nodded. Her eyes still shiny. No tears ran. But they didn’t go away either.
“That implies some rules of behavior that come from inside,” I said. “But if I tell you that maybe your goal is to be a woman, that implies what? Being compassionate? Being a good caregiver? Being sexually attractive? Cooking well?”
I was surprised at what I was saying, and how strongly I was saying it. I felt like Simone de Beauvoir.
“Being a woman implies being in a male context,” I said. “Being a man implies being fully yourself. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I don’t know,” Millicent said. The tears that had filled her eyes were running down her face now. She bent over and picked Rosie up and held her in her lap and hugged her. Rosie lapped Millicent’s face. Yum. Salt.
“I guess,” Millicent said with her voice shaking, “I just want to be like you, Sunny.”
For a moment I thought I might cry, too.
“Excellent choice,” I said.
I leaned forward and put my arms around her. It gave Rosie a chance to lap both our faces. Which she did.
CHAPTER 60
We were naked and profoundly contumescent. In the darkness, in Richie’s bed, we lay together with his arm around my shoulder and my head against his chest.
“A long time coming,” Richie said.
“Nice choice of words,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where do we go from here?”
“I wish I knew.”
“I know some things we don’t want to do,” Richie said.
“Like?”
“Like rush out and get married.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t want to do that.”
“Doesn’t mean we won’t do it again someday.”
“Well,” I said. “We did it once.”
I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but I could feel Richie smile.
“What would you like?” Richie said.
I was quiet. I felt the way Millicent must have. What in God’s name did I want?
“I want to live the way I do,” I said.
“Alone?”
“Alone, paint, be a detective, take care of Rosie, get my degree.”
“Okay,” Richie said.
“I don’t need your permission,” I said.
Again in the dark I could feel him smile.
“No,” he said. “You don’t.”
“I can’t imagine a life for me,” I said, “that doesn’t have you in it.”
“Good.”
I remembered it all as I lay there. How his skin smelled, how the hair on his chest felt, how his beard scraped a little even if he had just shaved. I felt the stillness in him.
“I can’t imagine,” I said again.
“I could be your boyfriend,” Richie said.
“Exclusive?” I said.
“Why don’t we let each of us decide how we want to be,” Richie said.
Jesus Christ. He had never said anything like that before. I was very careful.
“You mean I could date somebody else?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I could, too.”
I felt the shimmer of jealousy tingle through my chest.
“I don’t know if that will work,” I said.
“If it doesn’t we’ll modify it,” Richie said. “Be good to start this time with no rules.”
“You were the one with the rules last time,” I said.
“Now I’m not,” Richie said.
Richie’s place was on the waterfront. In the stillness I could hear the movement of the ocean outside the picture window.
“Remember how we used to go out every Wednesday night?”
“Yes.”
“We could do that.”
“Yes.”
“And spend the weekends together,” I said. “Like we used to?”
“That would work for me,” Richie said.
“And what happens other days?” I said.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“Think this will work?”
“We’ll make it work. I can’t imagine life without you either.”
I rolled up onto his chest and put my lips so they brushed his.
“You’re smart for a gangster,” I said.
“I’m not a gangster.”
“You’re smart anyway,” I said.
“Smarter than I was,” Richie said.
Then I kissed him and closed my eyes, and the darkness was all there was.
Keep reading for an exciting excerpt from the next Sunny Randall novel, ROBERT B. PARKER’S BLOOD FEUD.
CHAPTER
One
I SAID TO said to Spike, “Do I look as if I’m getting older?”
“This is some kind of trap,” he said.
“I’m being serious,” I said. “The UPS kid ma’amed me the other day.”
“I assume you shot him,” Spike said.
“No,” I said. “But I thought about it.”
We were seated at one of the middle tables in the front room at his restaurant, Spike’s, formerly known as Spike’s Place, on Marshall Street near Quincy Market. It had started out as a sawdust-on-the-floor saloon, before there even was a Quincy Market. It was still a comedy club when Spike and two partners took it over. Then Spike bought out the two partners, reimagined the place as an upscale dining establishment—“Complete with flora and fauna,” as he liked to say—and now he was making more money than he ever had in his life.
It was an hour or so before he would open the door for what was usually a robust Sunday brunch crowd. We were both working on Bloody Marys even though it was only ten-thirty in the morning, being free, well past twenty-one, and willing to throw caution to the wind.
Spike took a bite of the celery stalk from his drink. I knew he was doing that only to buy time.
“Would you mind repeating the question?” he said.
“You heard me.”
“I believe,” he said, “that what you’ve asked is the age equivalent of asking if I think you look fat in those jeans.”
I looked down at my favorite pair of Seven whites. Actually, I had no way of knowing if they were my favorites, since I had four pairs in my closet exactly like them. When any one of them started to feel too tight, I doubled down on yoga and gym time, and cut back on the wine.
“You’re saying I’m fat, too?” I said.
“You know I’m not,” he said. “And in answer to the original question, you always look younger than springtime to me.”
“You’re sweet,” I said.
“That’s what all the girls say. But, sadly, only about half the guys.”
Spike was big, bearded, built like a bear that did a lot of gym time, and able to beat up the Back Bay if necessary. He was also gay, and my best friend in the world.
“Only half?” I said.
“I’m the one who’s getting old, sweetie,” he said. “And probably starting to look fat in my own skinny-ass jeans.”
My miniature English bull terrier, Rosie, was lounging on the floor in the puppy bed that Spike kept for her behind the bar, thinking food might be available at any moment, the way it usually was at Spike’s. Spike called her Rosie Two. The original Rosie, the love of my life, had passed away the previous spring, far too soon. My father had always said that dogs were one of the few things that God got wrong, that they were the ones who ought to be able to live forever.
I’d asked Spike not to call her Rosie Two, telling him that it affected a girl’s self-esteem.
“I love you,” he’d say, “and by extension, that means I love your dog. But she’s still a goddamn dog.”
At which point I would shush him and tell him that now he was just being mean.
There was a sharp rap on the front window. Rosie immediately jumped to attention, growling, her default mechanism for strangers. There was a young couple peering in at us, the guy prettier than the woman he was with. They looked like J and Crew. Spike smiled brilliantly at them, pointed at his watch, shook his head. They moved on, their blondness intact.
“Where were we?” Spike said.
“Discussing my advancing age.”
“We’re not going to have one of those dreary conversations about your biological clock, are we?” he said. He trained his smile on me now. “It makes you sound so straight.”
“Pretty sure I am, last time I checked.”
“Well,” Spike said, sighing theatrically. “You don’t have to make a thing of it.”
“You make it sound like we have these conversations all the time,” I said.
“More lately now that you and your ex have started up again, or started over again, or whatever the hell it is you two are doing.”
My ex-husband was Richie Burke, and had long since turned Kathryn Burke into his second ex-wife. He’d finally admitted to her that he not only had never gotten over me, he likely never would.
At the time Spike said it was shocking, Kathryn being a bad sport about something like that, and racing him to see who could file for divorce first.
Now Richie and I were dating, as much as I thought it was stupid to think of it that way. But “seeing each other” sounded even worse. When we did spend a night together, something we never did more than once a week, we always slept at my new apartment on River Street Place so I didn’t have to get a sitter for Rosie. So far there had been hardly any talk about the two of us moving back in together, something I wasn’t sure could ever happen again. It wasn’t because of Richie. It was because of me.
The one time Richie had asked if I could ever see the two of us married again, I told him I’d rather run my hand through Trump’s hair.
“I keep thinking that maybe this time you two crazy kids could live happily ever after,” Spike said.
“I’m no good at either one,” I said. “Happy. Or ever after.”
“I thought you said you were happy with t
he way things were going?” Spike said.
“Not so much lately.”
“Well, shitfuck,” he said.
“‘Shitfuck’?”
“It’s something an old baseball manager used to say,” he said.
Spike was obsessed with baseball in general and the Boston Red Sox in particular. He frequently reminded me that in Boston the Red Sox weren’t a matter of life and death, because they were far more serious than that.
“You know baseball bores the hell out of me,” I said.
“I can’t believe they even allow you to live here,” Spike said.
We both sipped our drinks, which were merely perfect. I used to tell friends all the time that they could call off the search for the best Bloody Mary on the planet once they got to Spike’s.
“What’s bothering you, really?” Spike said. “You only have to look in the mirror to see how beautiful you still are. And having been in the gym with you as often as I have, we both know you’re as fit as a Navy SEAL.”
“Remember when Richie told me it was officially over with Kathryn? He said it was because he wanted it all. And that ‘all’ meant me.”
“I remember.”
“But the problem,” I continued, “is that I’m no better at figuring out what that means to me than I was when we were married. Or apart.” I sighed. “Shitfuck,” I said.
“You sound like the dog that caught the car,” Spike said.
I smiled at him. “That’s me,” I said. “An old dog.”
“I give up,” he said.
“What you need to do is open up,” I said, “and send me and my gorgeous dog politely and firmly on our way.”
“You could stay for lunch,” Spike said.
“And have Rosie scare off the decent people? Who needs that?”
“What you need,” Spike said, “is a case. A private detective without clients is, like, what? Help me out here.”
“You without a cute guy in your life?”
“Some of us don’t need men to complete us,” he said.
We both laughed and stood up. I kissed him on the cheek.
“Go home and paint,” he said. “We both know that is something that actually does complete you. Then get up tomorrow and somehow find a way to get yourself a client.”
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