Stepdog

by Nicole Galland

  Dedication

  For “blended families” everywhere

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part 1 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2 Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 3 Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . * About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Also by Nicole Galland

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  So there I was in peril of my life because, at the end of the workday eight months earlier, my lovely brunette boss sacked me (not my fault, I’m great at what I do—it was the funding) and I’d panicked, same as that. I read in the Boston Globe horoscopes that Aries people are supposed to be impulsive and maybe there is something to that, because before I knew it, sitting across Sara’s little cubicle from her on that stupid little plastic chair with hollow metal legs, I’d grabbed her and was kissing that beautiful face, rather than just saying something reasonable like, “But, Sara, if you sack me, I’ll miss seeing you every day.”

  It was an amazing kiss—she had gorgeous lips—but then it was over, and I pulled away and saw her startled green eyes and realized what I’d just done, and I was mortified. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Sara,” I said. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what got into me.”

  Her eyes were practically popping out of her head, and for a moment I thought she would slap me. But she burst out laughing. Took it really well. Especially because then she rolled her chair closer, moved her face in close to mine, and her gaze moved back and forth between my eyes and my mouth, and then fuck me if she didn’t kiss me. So then I kissed her and then she kissed me and then I kissed her and then we slid right off our chairs onto the industrial carpet.

  “Goodness.” She grinned. “I didn’t see this coming. I should have fired you sooner.”

  “I wish you had,” I said heartily. “I’d much rather be snogging the prettiest bird in Boston than fiddling Ravel for a bunch of tossers looking at oil paintings.” She burst out laughing again, charmed by my Irish eloquence.

  So on the heels of that—which honestly took me by surprise no less than her—we obviously had to leave the museum together and figure out what the hell had just happened. I’m not sure which of us even suggested it.

  Well, I suppose, it must have been me, as I’m usually the one does all the talking.

  It was about the last thing I ever would have expected an hour earlier, but there I was nearly skipping up the employees’ exit ramp, next to a gorgeous short-haired brunette with teasing green eyes. I knew those eyes so well. They were my friend Sara’s eyes, my boss’s eyes. I’d always loved their beauty, but somehow now all of a sudden I was mesmerized by them. I was so giddy and in that kind of humor that I left my fiddle behind in her cubicle and didn’t even notice. She slipped off her suit jacket and tucked it under her arm—and suddenly her outfit was no more than a green linen sundress. Sacking aside, the day just kept getting better.

  We strolled through a warm evening breeze past the grand façade of the museum down Huntington Avenue, unspeaking in our mutual delighted shock. We should have been talking about why the funding ran out for the Guest Artist program, or was it possible to find another funding source, or something related to why I had just been let go, but I was too giddy—all I could focus on was that I’d just kissed the most fantastically gorgeous woman who had been hiding in plain sight right in front of me for months, and—far more amazing—she’d kissed me back. What had been a warm, playful friendship shifted, all of a sudden, without explanation, to . . . something else. Like a door had suddenly opened and—bang!—we got to invent whatever was waiting on the other side. I felt tickling in my lower ribs, and under my feet, and down the back of my neck. Like a starting pistol was about to go off for a race I knew I could win. Where had this even come from?

  Oh Jesus, had I just been saying all of that out loud? Or had I maybe not been saying anything at all? Better say something normal and mundane, I decided, just to make sure this isn’t a dream.

  “I’m starving,” I said.

  “Let’s eat,” she said quickly. Decisive. I liked that about her.

  “Italian?”

  “Twist my arm,” she said.

  I was going out to dinner with Sara Renault! I couldn’t wait to tell my mate Danny, he’d met her once and said all kinds of improper things about her sexy backside—he wouldn’t be saying them anymore. Not to my face, anyway.

  We realized that we had floated down Huntington halfway to Copley Square, before we thought to actually stop in front of a restaurant, which happened to be a little Italian bistro called Napoli. Despite being named after (my favorite) Italian football team, it looked romantic—amber walls, candlelight, intimate tables, the atmospheric clacking of the Green Line trains through the open window.

  “Here?” I said, peeling my eyes off her. She nodded, looking as dazed as I felt.

  “Just give me a sec,” she said, suddenly reaching into her purse for her phone. I tried not to stare as she thumb-typed a message with amazing speed and sent it off.

  “Pretty good text-erity you’ve got there,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “At least you won’t be underfoot making those awful puns anymore,” she said, and added, “I just had to ask my neighbor to feed the dog.”

  If I’d been paying more attention, that moment would have held portents for me. But I was never one for portents. Leave portents to the Hamlets of the world; I was more of a Laertes, quick on the draw, slow to reflect, and if you think that’s foolish, even Samuel Beckett said dancing first and thinking later is the natural order. So there. But back to our story.

  Everything about the place—about existence, in that moment—was magical, perfect. The late-afternoon amber light at that perfectly photographable angle, the soft summer breeze, the scents of Mediterranean spices wafting out from the kitchen. A host, dark-haired and sharp-looking, was standing at attention at the door, and seeing us linger, he welcomed us, gestured us in. He looked so pleased to see us I wondered if he owned the place. (I noticed he gave Sara the eye—subtly. Naturally he had to, since he was Italian and she was beautiful.)

  He escorted us to a little table by the window, and then sent over the waiter, also pretty sharp-looking, who introduced himself as Mario and pulled out his pad.

  “And would you like something to drink on this lovely evening?” he asked with a whisper of an Italian accent.

  “I’d like a burgundy, if you have one,” said Sara.

  “We have only Italian wines, but if you like burgundy, I recommend a Barbaresco.” She nodded, and he jotted it down. “And you, sir?”

  I supposed if he was Italian, he knew his football. “Are you a Napoli fan?” I asked him.

  He froze, pen on pad, grinned briefly as he realized what kind of bloke he was serving, and then f
rowned to cover it. Sara glanced between us, uncertainly. “No, no,” he said firmly. “That’s the owner’s team. I’m for A.C. Milan. Of course.”

  “A.C. Milan? Ah, yeah. Pickin’ the club with all the money?”

  He focused intently on his pad, but a twitch in his lip let me know he could handle the slagging. “I suppose you, sir,” he replied, “are for Liverpool?”

  Even Sara knew to cringe at that one.

  “Would you like to take this outside?” I slapped the table. “I’ll tell you, Mario, your tip’s getting smaller by the minute.”

  “What is this cultured and beautiful lady doing with such a man?” Mario asked the ceiling, then winked at Sara, who beamed, and looked even more beautiful for it. Thank Jesus for Aries impulsiveness, I thought—that kiss was the best move I have ever made.

  Off Mario went to get Sara the Barbaresco, and myself a cranberry soda with a twist of lime. It’s not what you’re thinking—I’m not an alcoholic, I just have a cultural predisposition toward overindulgence in social settings. I never drank alone, or to cure my sorrows. It was purely for sport, and when I drank I was a live wire; you should’ve seen me when I had a skinful. I was everyone’s friend, the life of the party, the fella literally dancing on the tables at the pub . . . but it was a horrible feeling waking up in the morning with no memory at all, hoping I hadn’t hurt anyone’s feelings or said anything stupid, then getting a phone call from someone I hardly knew: “So when can you come over to read my play?” So about a year earlier I’d decided to back off. Funny how quickly my phone stopped ringing, but I didn’t miss those days.

  Sara’s phone binged. She glanced at the screen, and smiled. “Oh, good, she can do it.” Off my questioning look: “Feed the dog. That means I can stay a while.” Again, there was the portent I should have picked up on, but I didn’t, because she went on to say, “Let’s split some dishes, what do you say?”

  That made it feel like a date. (And did I mention it was a gorgeous evening?) At Mario’s recommendation, we chose a calamari fritti app with aioli, followed by something called Seafood Brodetto, with a house speciality, on the side, of asparagus cooked with cracked pepper and Parmesan. The food was all succulent, a mouthwatering orgy of Italian secret ingredients.

  But even better was Sara’s company, the energy between us . . . Fantastico. Perfectly simpatico. You never know how people are going to eat, do you, if they’re going to be the sort to pick the food out of their molars right in front of you, or be fussy about how to hold a fork. Sara and I were on the same page—tastefully relaxed and prone to treat asparagus as finger food. Although she didn’t especially go for my using two asparagi as antennae to demonstrate I was an alien.

  “I’m aware of your immigration status,” she said drily. “But those things don’t match your eyes.”

  All the exposition and confessions that must usually get said on first dates—family background, professional life, major failed relationships, hopes, dreams, hobbies, select idiosyncrasies you’re willing to cop to—these things, we’d already shared with each other over the past months, between school groups, summer camp groups, and tours, under the chaperoning eyes of George Washington, Paul Revere, Madame Cézanne, van Gogh’s Berceuse. I knew she used to be a landscape painter. She knew my ma had died when I was young. I knew she adored her dog (don’t all Americans?). She knew I was having immigration issues, and I was pretty sure she knew what I was planning to do about it, but I didn’t think it worth reminding her at the moment. It might interrupt the flow.

  So our evening’s conversation was just a continuation of our friendly workday chats, only with my dizzying new acute appreciation of how luscious her lips and fingers were, how striking was her dark spiky hair against her pale skin—and how badly I hoped she was noticing equally favorable things about me. As usual, she continued to “educate” me on American politics (Irish political corruption had rendered me a cynic); for my part, I continued to vainly expound the merits of football (the real kind). We considered the virtues of Debussy versus Ravel, neither of whom actually deserved our endorsement, especially with Joplin around. I’m wired to associate people with certain music, and Sara’s sound track was, to me, the “Maple Leaf Rag”—precise yet playful, controlled yet offbeat, just like her. I always banged out a fair version of it on the guitar for the turn-of-the-century part of the Americas wing. Or always did until today, I suppose.

  We had a very earnest discussion about crunchy chocolate biscuits versus chewy ones, debated who was the second best New York Times crossword puzzle editor, and there was a cracker of a punning contest, which I won, although her refusal to play may have given me a leg up. Mario was the soundest waiter in the history of Italian bistros, even though he did mention to Sara he thought she “could do better than this,” meaning me.

  “Mario, she’s not the one tipping you tonight,” I said.

  “Liverpool fans can’t add up to anything.” Again he winked at Sara.

  “He’s kind of cute,” she said to me slyly, when he’d gone.

  I don’t know what kind of special high you have to be on to enjoy watching somebody else flirt with the girl you’ve just realized you might want to spend the rest of your life kissing, but I was delighted by the whole thing. “See, what’s going on here is that you are so dizzy with your newfound appreciation for me that it’s coloring how you look at everything else,” I explained to her. “Everyone is going to look cute to you now, because that’s how much I’ve charmed you.”

  She laughed again. God, I loved her laugh, it was one of the first things I’d ever liked about her. Sara called herself a reformed watercolorist—she’d spent a few years painting and teaching before her long-term boyfriend (clearly a wanker) pressured her to be a grown-up, which, long story short, had eventually led to her job at the Museum of Fine Arts. She was a funny mix of sassy, offbeat Greenwich Village (she spent her childhood in her great-grandparents’ brownstone, long since sold off) and practical, straitlaced midwestern (post-brownstone, she’d come of age outside Chicago). You had to really earn a laugh from her, but once you’d earned it, you could come back for seconds pretty easily. I earned my first laugh the second week there. I found out she had a soft spot for van Gogh, so I came to the museum the next day with my head bandaged, and left on her desk, in a lovely gift box, a mutilated-ear-shaped sculpture made of Spam and Tabasco sauce. She’d almost wept with the laughing.

  We savored the evening. We were one of the first tables in, we dined slowly through happy hour and the evening rush, and we nearly closed the place down, with mostaccioli for dessert and then a delicious espresso from a true barista. In all that time our bar tab was just two glasses of wine for Sara, but I tipped Mario as if we’d been boozing it up all night.

  By the end of the evening it was clear that we were getting on even better than we did at work—and everyone at work was aware of how well we got on. But despite the buzzing I felt, from my ears all the way down to my Achilles tendons, I wanted to be gentlemanly. And—to be honest—even when you’re certain the attraction is reciprocal, it’s something else completely to act on that certainty. I’m pretty shy beneath all the bluster. So I decided to delicately query her about What Might Come Next, in her estimation. “When Mario finally kicks us out of here,” I said, by way of delicate query, “would you like to be escorted home like the virtuous lady that you are, or would you prefer to sell your body on the streets for bus fare?”

  “I’d hardly be virtuous to invite a man home after a first kiss,” she said.

  “You’d be even less virtuous if you sold your body for bus fare.”

  “Well, yes,” she said, considering. “And you were so well behaved in my office, I’m sure I’ve got nothing to worry about if I let you insinuate your way into my home.”

  “Right, you were a blushing virgin there yourself.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, so po-faced that I actually worried for a moment I’d misjudged the whole even
ing. Till she grinned slyly.

  “Well, just so you know, it was my favorite sacking ever,” I said as I tucked away my wallet. “You sack most excellently.”

  “Do I?” she asked, biting her lower lip so adorably it made me want to nibble on it with her. And in a suggestive tone: “You want me to sack you some more?”

  She said that! She said it!

  I can’t even remember what I said in response, but she didn’t slap me, so it couldn’t have been too crass. I do remember that I pulled her chair out for her, letting my hand brush along her bare upper arm as she rose. I felt the electricity and saw her shiver a bit; she smiled over her shoulder at me and I was the happiest unemployed man on earth.

  We waved to Mario as we left. “Ciao!”

  He beamed a big smile to Sara and, with a grin, gave me the finger . . . Wanker. Sara cracked up. Then he said, gesturing us closer, “Slán leat.”

  I stopped short, amazed. “How the fuck do you know Irish?”

  Mario smiled nostalgically. “Ah, it’s a long story,” he said. “I met a beautiful redhead once . . . but not so beautiful as your lady. Signora, if he doesn’t behave himself, remember I’m here, yes?” And, of course, he winked at her.

  I could have kissed the bastard, because that was a fantastic excuse to put a protective arm around her and pull her toward me. She did not resist, and she fit under my shoulder as if we’d been carved from the same block of wood. I’d never been so happily aware of every atom on the whole left side of me as at that moment.

  THERE WAS A bench at the bus stop; we sat there and let a bus or two go by first, just sitting in happy silence side by side, our shoulders and upper arms pressing against each other in the swampy August night.

  “I’m so glad I fired you,” she said. “If you were around the museum now, I’d get in so much trouble.”

  “I’d sue you for sexual harassment,” I said.

  We finally got on a 39 bus, still shoulder-jostling all the way out to Jamaica Plain, where we hopped off by the Monument. We strolled down Centre Street, toward the roundabout. Anticipation made me silent; she looked at me adoringly but had not yet officially invited me in, and this was all happening so fast. As we approached her building, I made a mental note to myself not to be presumptuous about what would happen once we were inside, but I knew, even as I made the note, I would misplace it. I wondered briefly, again, if I should tell her about getting married, but shelved the idea at once; it had nothing to do with what was going on between us here, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood. I’d tell her tomorrow, if it seemed relevant.