In one corner of the large expanse, a leather sofa and two leather wing-backed chairs formed a sitting area around a heavy wood coffee table. He often met with clients there. Removing the barrier of the desk lowered defenses and in many cases, fear. In the opposite corner and closest to the door, a conference table that comfortably seated eight crouched beneath a crystal chandelier. His huge desk, especially designed and customized to accommodate his large size, filled the other half of the room. It sat in front of a picture window that overlooked the water and the financial skyline. He purposefully picked the location of his offices for an easy walk to the courthouse. Credenzas on either side of his desk held the customary law journals and business books. He rarely opened them. He much preferred the ease of research using the slim laptop that he pulled out of his briefcase when he reached his desk.
Along with the half dozen messages she’d left on his cell phone and home phone voice mails, his mother had called here twice. He needed to go ahead and call her and get that out of the way. As he picked up the receiver of his phone, he sorted the messages between personal and business. The business stack was very small compared to the personal stack.
He quickly dialed his parents’ home and his mother answered on the first ring. “Hi, mom,” he said, sitting in his chair and swiveling it around to look out over the water.
“Barry.” She made the word a whole sentence. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’m just fine, mom.”
From her end, a deep breath punctuated a long pause. “As long as you are. Do you need anything?”
Barry closed his eyes and felt an unfamiliar rush of emotion. He needed something. He needed to erase the last twenty years and hit restart. “I just want to get the next few days out of the way so that everyone and everything can go back to normal.”
Another long pause. “Okay. Fair enough. Do you want to come to dinner Sunday?”
“I would, but I’m going to the game. How about Saturday?”
“Your sisters will be here.”
With a short laugh, he thought of his three older sisters and shook his head. “Might as well get it all over with at one time.”
He could hear the smile in her voice. “Saturday it is then. See you at six.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed as he hung up the phone. He scribbled a note on the message slip which would later go into his laptop calendar just to ensure he would not forget. He knew that absolutely no excuse, no matter how grand, would allow him to duck out of that dinner.
Feeling a huge weight lifted by walking into his offices and then that simple phone call, he ignored the stack of personal calls and started making his way through the business calls. As he ended his third call, he pulled his laptop out of the briefcase and docked it, connecting it to its various plugs and ports, connecting the battery to power and the network card to hard wired connectivity. He didn’t yet trust wireless networks to keep his client’s information totally secure.
While concluding typing in the notes from the last call, his office door flew open and Tony Viscolli marched in. At his heels, Elizabeth looked surprised and a little bit angry. Tony turned around and gave her a smile. “Don’t worry, Liz. He’ll be fine with the interruption.” He shut the door in her face and came all the way into the room.
Tony always looked like the cover model of a men’s fashion magazine, whether he was going to a business meeting in some handmade Italian silk suit or sailing in the harbor in white Dockers and a cable knit sweater. This morning proved no exception. His gray suit, light blue shirt, and dark blue tie authoritatively announced confidence and business acumen. His dark hair and Sicilian features perfectly complemented the light fabric.
Barry didn’t stand. Instead, he leaned back in his chair. “Good afternoon.”
Tony sat in one of the chairs opposite Barry. “Is it?”
Barry rubbed his face with his hands and sat forward. “Not particularly.”
“Didn’t think so.”
Tony rarely came to Barry’s office. Barry typically went to Tony, which was fair since Tony paid him. He pretty much only came when there was a third party meeting on a legal level that required a neutral environment. “Are you here on business?” Barry asked hopefully.
“What gave you that idea?” Tony answered, leaning back in his chair.
Barry grinned. Anyone else, even a client as important as Tony Viscolli, he would have dismissed at that point. Of course they shared business interests. He and Tony, though, had a relationship much more like brothers than close business partners. Around his ironic grin, he asked, “Why are you here, then?”
Tony cocked an eyebrow and tilted his head as if to look at Barry from a different angle. “Because I love you.”
Barry nodded. “So my not calling you back didn’t tell you that what I really need is some time alone and some emotional space?”
“Well, you’ve been pulling away from me for weeks now. I think I’ve given you all of the space you can handle.”
Barry felt a little tickle of annoyance. “What does that mean?”
Tony sat forward. “It means that when I gave you the space you so clearly projected you needed, I watched you withdraw from everything normal and become quite rude in the process.” As Barry prepared a retort, Tony held up a finger. “Maybe rude is the wrong word. Abrupt? Terse? I think the stress Jacqueline constantly brought to your doorstep contributed to that. But you have also been pulling away from church and men’s groups, and that greatly concerns me.”
Barry started feeling a little antsy. He slowly drummed his fingers on his desk. “Why?”
“Because I wonder if you’ve pulled away from your relationship with God the same way you’ve pulled away from everything else.”
Defensiveness surged through him in a hot, painful flicker of flame. He wanted this conversation over and he wanted Tony out of his office. “Is that any of your business?”
Tony’s eyes hardened and his mouth firmed. “Barry. What is wrong? What happened?”
Pushing the negative feelings aside, Barry leaned back again in his seat and covered his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I don’t know what happened, Tony. I spent two decades trying to do the right – the Christian thing – with Jacqui. I stayed faithful. I stayed loving. I prayed for her. I prayed a lot. You prayed with me on more than a few occasions. I never gave up on her.”
“I know…”
Barry sat forward quickly and slammed a hand on the desk. “No you do not know, Tony. Don’t even try to say you know. You don’t know what it was like. You don’t know what she was like. You don’t know how I felt.” He let out a breath and felt energy drain from his body. “Toward the end she didn’t even pretend to hide her lovers anymore. Then she met this guy and was suddenly in love.” He felt his lip curl. “As if that makes everything okay.”
“Bear…”
Barry closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose with his giant fingers. “I just wanted to do the right thing. I just wanted to get to heaven one day and have God say to me, ‘Good game, Barry. You played well. Head to the locker room.’” He opened his eyes and looked at his best friend, someone from whom he’d shielded all of this misery. Or tried to, anyway. “Then she got pregnant.”
Tony waited out the silence, then finally said, “Why did you never say anything?”
“What is there to say? You wouldn’t understand it. You and Robin have this magical perfection, and here I am, married for eighteen years and my wife gets pregnant by one of her many lovers. How do I talk about that with you? How do I talk about that with anyone?”
“There’s someone you could have talked to, who always understands.”
Barry barked out a laugh. “God?” Unable to contain the energy anymore, Barry surged to his feet. He turned his back to Tony and looked out over the expanse of water below. His very view screamed success, but in his heart he knew he had no real accomplishment to stand upon. What would his legacy be? To whom could he leave it? He pu
t both of his hands on the glass and pressed against it with his body. “You want to know what I said to God?”
“Yes, I do,” Tony answered quietly.
“For years, I said to God, ‘Please fix whatever’s wrong with my wife. She’s sadistic and evil.’ Years and years went by. Then she came to me all weepy and pregnant asking me to help her. It took me a while to finally agree to it.”
Tears burned his throat, but he would not give in to the emotion. Pushing it back, finding the balance of feeling absolutely nothing, he continued his story. “Then Jacqui didn’t want that anymore. He’d left his wife, filed for divorce, and asked Jacqui to marry him. He asked my wife to marry him.” Barry stared out the window, at the business of the street far below, at the people going through their lives like nothing different had happened in the world. “So then, I hit my knees and I said to God, ‘Please, God. Spare me this embarrassment. Spare me the humiliation. Spare me from the world finding out she’s pregnant by another man.’”
He heard Tony get out of his char. He heard the tap of Tony’s shoes on the wooden floor. He felt the comforting hand on his shoulder but he didn’t turn his head to look at his best friend as he continued, “Last week, on a trip to celebrate her finally feeling better, their coming nuptials and baby, she tumbled down a slope in the Berkshires, and broke her neck.”
“Amico…”
Barry formed both hands into fists and punched at the glass. The safety glass didn’t break, but it shook with the force. “No! Don’t even try to hand me platitudes. I’m quite over it. I don’t know what I did. I don’t know how I’ve gone into every single situation in my life, including my marriage to that woman, in prayer and supplication and still managed to have what I had. Then the only prayer in eighteen years about her that gets answered ends up killing her and taking an innocent life. Spare me whatever it is that you’re about to say, Tony. I don’t care about any of it.”
He turned around and fully faced Tony. “I love you. You’re my best friend, and my brother. But if you’re going to tell me you’re praying for me or God will fix it or whatever it is that you’re about to tell me, please just don’t.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “I was simply going to say, mi amico, that anything you need at all, you can call me. You need to vent, you need to play a game of chess, you need a boxing partner – just call me. Don’t shut me out of your life, because I need you in mine. You are my best friend, and my brother, too.”
Barry stared at Tony for several seconds then felt his hands unfist. He rubbed his face and nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”
Tony looked at his watch. “Now I must go, Bear. Robin has an ultrasound this morning.”
Clearing his throat, Barry shoved his hands in his pockets. “How’s she feeling?”
“Very large.” Tony smiled. “But anticipatory. She is ready for the next few weeks to come and go.”
“And you?”
“I could not be better. God is awesome.” Tony held up both hands in a defensive move. “And before you take me up on that boxing, I will leave.”
“Hey.” Tony paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned to look directly at Barry. “Thanks,” Barry said, swallowing emotion.
“Sei benvenuto.” He started to leave, but stopped. “Robin will be occupied with her sisters tomorrow night. She is doing thank-you cards for her shower gifts. Do you want to get dinner?”
Barry paused, but then nodded. “That sounds great. Sure.”
“One more thing, Barry. Think about this. You prayed for God to spare you from the world learning that your wife had been faithless, that she was carrying another man’s child. You are angry that God answered your prayer. But Barry, everyone in your world knows. Did God really answer your prayer?” Tony held up a hand to forestall any answer. “Just think about it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Long after the door shut behind Tony, Barry stood at the window, looking out over the buildings in his field of view. He watched the birds swoop and dive over the water, watched snow spit in the rain. Finally, he shook his head as if to clear it and turned back to his desk, to his work, to the one area of success in his life. He opened his laptop and shot Elizabeth an instant message asking her to bring him water when she had a free minute. Then he pulled up a client file and reviewed some notes before he picked up the telephone again.
CHAPTER 8
“ARE you cold?” Barry yelled against Maxine’s ear to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Maxine grinned and shook her head but didn’t try to speak over the noise of the crowd. Seventy thousand fans cheered the Patriots down the field and she knew her voice would never make it to his ear.
When they sat back down and the noise returned to a better level, he leaned down again. “We can go into the deck if you want,” he said.
She tore her eyes from the field as the teams broke away for a time-out. Looking Barry in the eye, she said, “Why in the world would I want to go into an isolated deck to watch the game? If I wanted to sip a drink from a real glass and eat finger sandwiches, I’d be watching the game from my living room couch.” She narrowed her eyes. “And why are you so worried about me?”
Barry grinned. His face relaxed and he settled back comfortably in his seat. “I totally agree with you. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t expect to go into the lounge and watch from the high life.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
With a shrug he said, “I don’t know. It’s been a while since I took another girl to a game.”
Maxine felt her eyes widen as she realized what he meant. “Don’t worry about me, big guy. Whenever you wonder about what I’d prefer, just go with the opposite of what Jacqui would have preferred. That should cover all the bases.”
For a moment, Maxine felt horror that she’d said that aloud. Then, when a slow smile gradually took over Barry’s face before he threw his head back and laughed, she knew she hadn’t crossed some invisible faux pas boundary.
After that, he relaxed. They shivered in their seats, never realizing they felt the cold, while their team stomped the other team into the ground. They yelled and cheered and talked back to the field until Maxine’s scratchy throat sounded hoarse.
At the end of the game, she wrapped her Patriots scarf tight around her neck and pulled her Patriots hat low on her forehead and followed closely behind Barry, who muscled his way through the crowd. It took quite some time to reach Barry’s Jeep, but they chatted the whole way and she didn’t mind. The crowds and parking lot and traffic were part of the whole package.
When they finally left the stadium parking lot and turned onto a main road, Barry looked over at her. “Where to?”
Maxine had to clear her throat a couple of times to get any sound out at all. “Tony and Robin’s, I guess. We missed lunch. Might as well go graze before church.”
Barry tapped his finger on the clock on his dashboard. “Too late. They’d be gone by the time we got there.”
“Well, hmm,” Maxine said, pursing her lips and tapping her chin. “I guess we could go straight to church.”
“Why don’t we stop at this pub I know and grab a sandwich and watch one of the west coast games?”
It possibly ought to have taken her more than half a second to decide to agree to go. In that half second, she wondered, pondered, contemplated whether she should press the church issue. Her conversation with Robin crept into the front of her brain somehow, and she had a brief moment of worry about Barry’s avoidance of all things normal and typical for him. However, despite Robin’s fears that Barry would pull Maxine away from God with his anger, Maxine didn’t find him angry. She found him happy, even relaxed. An element that always held him back no longer existed, and she’d enjoyed watching him start to unfurl his wings a little bit in the last week.
Barry and Maxine had worked out together four mornings in the last week, and shared breakfast after every muscle searing session. They hadn’t yet found a conversation they didn’t enjoy, and Maxine hated to see the clock s
trike eight those mornings. That’s when Barry lifted his immense frame out of the little scrolly iron chair, pulled a ski cap down over his ears, and smiled at her as he told her good-bye. The smile always made her heart skip a little beat, and the good-bye made her wish the next twenty-two hours would go by really fast.
She had looked forward to Sunday all week, knowing that they’d get back into their football watching schedule that they’d shared for the last few years. When he pulled tickets out of his pocket Thursday morning, Maxine laughed with delight and snatched them from his hand. Friday morning, he had a breakfast meeting and couldn’t work out with her. She didn’t enjoy doing it alone, but the anticipation of Sunday made the time go by much quicker than usual.
They reached the little pub in short order. Once they left the football traffic behind them, they encountered very few cars. Set outside the city limits, more toward Barry’s neighborhood, the little pub had a very full parking lot.
Barry held her door open as she got out of the Jeep and stepped into the cold air. Maxine shoved her hands into her pockets and rushed toward the door while the wind cut through her jacket and fleece pullover. Walking into the welcoming warmth of the building, she pushed her cap off her head and unwound her scarf. Barry stood above her, scanning the room, and nodded in the direction of a couple standing near a booth putting on their coats. “Let’s grab that table,” he said, putting a hand on the small of her back to guide her. Maxine inched forward as much as possible hoping to create a space between his hand and her back.
As they maneuvered their way through the full crowd, a cheer erupted around them. Maxine looked at one of the many wide-screened televisions that seemed to cover every spare inch of wall space and saw the game everyone else seemed to be watching. She noticed that the booth would offer no good view of that game, but it beat sitting at the bar.
Emerald Fire (Christian Romance) (The Jewel Series) Page 7
