More rocking.
“Good.” Vince creaked his way to his feet.
Donny didn’t like being touched, so he gave the kid a mock salute. “I’ll see you tomorrow, kiddo.”
“You said Joanie would come.”
“All right, then. Joan’ll see you tomorrow.”
Vince let himself out of Donny’s house, locking the door behind him. He had his cell phone out and open before he got into the car, calling back Donny’s doctor to give him the thumbs-up for that new prescription.
Joanie, he knew from experience, would be a little harder to reach.
NINE
JOAN DACOSTA WAS all right.
Sam had always thought that Muldoon’s taste in women leaned slightly toward grim, whip-cracking Nazi types, but Joan spent most of her time out on the boat laughing. She wasn’t afraid to let the salt spray whip through her hair, tying it back only to keep it out of her mouth. In fact, once or twice he’d caught her lifting her face to the wind, to get a good, solid noseful of ocean air.
She wasn’t pretty, not by a long stretch. Her cheeks were too round, her mouth too wide, her chin too pointy. And her nose—he didn’t know what the deal was with her nose. It looked like maybe it came from someone else’s face entirely.
Yet, somehow, when she smiled, she was beautiful. It was pretty freaking weird, but within two minutes of meeting her, Sam knew exactly why Muldoon was dogging her.
Not that Muldoon was capable of getting into any woman’s face far enough to call it dogging. He was more like casting wistful glances in her direction and kind of pathetically hoping she would notice him.
The good news was that she did notice. She played it really cool, laughing and joking and teasing everyone, but her female radar was up and working. And part of her was monitoring Mike Muldoon at all times.
She thanked them all after they pulled back into the dock, after the demonstration was over, calling each of the men by name and shaking his hand.
“Thanks for taking the time to do this, Lieutenant Starrett,” she said as she shook his. “I think I’ve probably made you late for dinner.”
Any reason not to go home was a good enough reason to stick around.
“No sweat,” he told her. Just as he’d expected, she had a nice, solid grip. “Dinner’s not that big a deal at my house.”
Mary Lou usually ate early, with Haley. She saved a plate for him and heated it in the microwave when he got home. And then she sat there and watched him eat. It was weird eating with an audience like that. Every time he tried to make conversation, he was reminded of just how incompatible they were, which depressed the hell out of him. So he always just sat and ate as fast as he could.
He’d taken to arriving home minutes before she had to leave for her nightly AA meeting. That way she’d leave, and he’d heat the plate himself.
Of course, then he’d eat standing up, chasing Haley around the house. He hated the playpen that Mary Lou had bought and put front and center in the living room. Sometimes, if Haley was particularly energetic, he’d put her in there, but climb in, too, and just sit cross-legged while he ate his dinner, careful to keep his plate out of range of his daughter’s grasping little fingers.
After dinner, he’d heat a bottle of milk in the microwave, then sit with Haley on the couch and watch hockey or baseball until she fell asleep, a warm little lump of life on his chest.
Lately, his timing had been off, and Mary Lou took Haley with her to her AA meetings. Which meant Sam got to come home to an empty, responsibility-free house. Which was what he missed, wasn’t it?
“Regardless, I do appreciate your spending all this time with me,” Joan told Sam now with a smile.
The sun was setting and it was about as romantic as it could get there by the water. Muldoon was hovering nearby, ready to walk her back to the parking lot.
“What time’s that phone call you’re expecting?” Sam heard him ask her.
“Ten o’clock eastern time, which is…help me out here. All of my already pitiful math skills completely vanished at the shock of watching you guys get lassoed out of the water at top speed by a guy with a rubber noose. I still can’t believe necks don’t get snapped when you do that.”
“That’s generally why we need to get an arm up in there, too,” Muldoon told her.
“You can’t be like normal people and stop the boat so the guys in the water can climb on? I mean, sure, it’s not as flashy, but…”
“Stopping the boat can be a major liability.”
“Why?” Joan asked as Sam gathered up the last of his gear.
“There’re a lot of reasons, the biggest being that stopping can be bad for everyone’s health if the enemy’s shooting at you.”
“Aha!” she said. “Civilian versus military reasoning. I wasn’t thinking about any enemy or any shooting, because in my world, I get up and go to work, and occasionally I’ll stop at a store on my way home, and there’s never anyone shooting at me. But that’s what you do when you go to work, right? Get shot at.”
“Actually most of the time we don’t get shot at, because the enemy never knows we’re there,” Muldoon said. “We usually sneak in and sneak back out. What you saw today was an extraction technique that pulls us out of an area quickly. Once the enemy does know we’re there, we tend to use speed instead of stealth. I think I mentioned earlier that this technique was first used during World War Two.”
No, no, no, boy wonder. Save the lecture for the classroom. Ask her about herself. Confess a secret. Make this sunset conversation count.
But Muldoon was an idiot. “See, Navy frogmen would swim all the way to the shore of an enemy-held island to find out what kind of underwater barricades had been constructed,” he continued. “They’d do readings on tides and coral reefs and all that other stuff that really matters when you’re about to attempt a full-scale invasion, right? The frogmen would check everything out, then swim way back out to a point where they’d be picked up. The idea was to get them out of the water without the boat being hit by enemy shells, and without the enemy catching on that there were swimmers out there being picked up.”
“Gee, and I thought it was just something you did to show off.”
Muldoon laughed. “No. Well, today it was.”
She laughed, too. “It worked. I was impressed.”
“There’s probably not enough time to get dinner before you have to take that phone call, huh?” Sam heard Muldoon say.
Sam rolled his eyes. Amazing ineptitude. Way to give her an excuse not to share a meal with you, Mike, you flipping genius.
“Actually, I’m still reeling from lunch,” she said. “I think I’m just going to get a salad from room service while I watch some CNN.”
That sounds good. Mind if I join you? Come on, Mike. She obviously likes you, she’s friendly…This was not that hard to do.
“The news is on all the time in my office,” Joan continued as they started walking toward the parking lot. “I go into withdrawal when I’m away from D.C. because out in the real world, nobody’s got the news on.”
Sam didn’t catch exactly what Muldoon said, but Joan answered by saying, “I’m having lunch with Commander Paoletti and his fiancée.”
Obviously Muldoon, the fool, had given up on seeing her again that evening and had moved on to tomorrow.
“She’s not in town for that long, blockhead,” Sam muttered. “So make your move before it’s too late.”
“And you would be talking to…your invisible friend?”
“Shit!” Sam turned to see WildCard standing behind him. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“I am like the wind,” the Card intoned. “I move silently across both land and sea.”
“Fuck the wind. You up for getting a beer, Chief?” Sam asked.
“Since Savannah’s in New York, yes, sir, I am.” WildCard fell into step with him. “So. You’ve started talking to yourself, I see, Captain Queeg.”
“I was talking to Muldoon. I wasn
’t talking to myself.” Although Sam knew that if he could go back in time just a few years, he’d hunt himself down and start talking to himself in earnest. And he wouldn’t stop until he was convinced that his younger, dumbass self wouldn’t make the same stupid mistakes all over again.
Christ, speaking of mistakes, what the hell was he going to do about Mary Lou?
Sam finally called at 8:30.
Mary Lou waited for two rings before picking up the phone. It was an old habit from when she was a teenager, an attempt to come across as if she wasn’t desperate, as if she wasn’t eagerly waiting by the phone. Which she always had been. Which she still was even now—a pathetic thought since she was married. “Hello?”
There was a pause, then Sam’s voice. “I thought I’d get the answering machine. I didn’t expect you to be…Didn’t you have a meeting tonight? It’s me,” he added, as if anyone else might ever call her.
“No, I, um, I didn’t go tonight.” Mary Lou looked over at the dinner table. She’d gotten out a linen tablecloth—a wedding gift from Sam’s sister Elaine, who lived near Boston—and even put out a candle. The steak she’d finally decided on cooking for this “special” dinner was still marinating in Italian salad dressing—a trick Janine had taught her back before she hooked up with Clyde-the-vegetarian and moved to Florida. Lord, she missed her sister.
“Is everything all right?”
“Yeah,” she said. Haley was watching her, sitting in her swing, chewing on her plastic keys, so she forced herself to smile. “Are you still at the base?”
Another pause, apparently while he decided whether or not to tell her the truth. “No, I’m, uh, over at the Ladybug with Ken.”
He’d gone for truth—at least partial truth. The big question was, who else was at the bar with him?
“We were helping Muldoon wrangle this public relations person from the White House,” he told her, “and the maneuvers went kind of late. I figured you’d be at your meeting, and, you know, Savannah’s out of town so…”
She hadn’t known that Savannah, Chief Karmody’s wife, was out of town. The only time the other SEALs’ wives called her was if there was some kind of disaster. Like when that helicopter had gone down in Pakistan. Mary Lou had been glued to CNN, desperate for any news at all as to who might’ve been on board. Meg Nilsson had finally called to say she’d just heard from her husband that Team Sixteen wasn’t even in Pakistan at the time of the crash.
That time, it was someone else’s husband who had died.
“I just wanted to let you know where I was, and that I grabbed some dinner with Ken, so don’t worry about me,” Sam continued. “And don’t wait up, okay?”
“Okay,” Mary Lou managed to say. Her husband was spending the evening at the Ladybug Lounge—the meat market, low-rent, pick-up joint of a bar where she’d first met him. She could tell from the broadening of his Texas drawl that he’d already had a beer or two.
Oh, Lord, what she wouldn’t do for a beer…
“Sam,” she said, “I was thinking. You said you had relatives in Sarasota, you know, where Janine lives now, with Clyde?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I have a bunch of cousins there.”
“I thought maybe we could take a vacation. Go east and visit them all. Janine and your cousins, too.”
Sam was silent.
“You still there?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I just, uh…I don’t think that’s a very good idea. I don’t think you would, um, like my cousins very much. But if you want to go see Janine, then definitely you should go.”
Yeah, he’d like that, wouldn’t he? To have Mary Lou and Haley go to the East Coast for a while while Alyssa Locke was in town. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Think about it,” Sam told her. “I’ll see you later.” He cut the connection.
He would come home late, smelling like those really strong mints that came in a little tin box—as if they could somehow mask the scent of beer on his breath. As if that would somehow fool her into thinking that he hadn’t spent the evening in a place where she couldn’t so much as set a foot inside the door without risking her sobriety.
Don’t wait up.
That was easier said than done, when she knew that even if she went to bed, she wouldn’t fall asleep. No, she’d lie there, even after Sam came home and fell instantly and annoyingly unconscious, wondering who he’d danced with and who he’d wished he’d shared a bed with tonight.
As if that was such a mystery.
Mary Lou hung up the phone and plucked Haley from the seat of her swing. Her car keys were on the counter, and she grabbed them and was halfway out the door before she made herself stop.
What was she doing? Was she really going to drive over to the Ladybug Lounge to see…what? If Alyssa Locke was there, too? How would she know? The Bug didn’t have windows. And she sure as hell didn’t know what kind of car Alyssa was driving.
So what good would it do? It would probably only make her feel worse. Hearing the distant music and laughter. Watching people pull into the parking lot, ready to go inside and have a good ol’ time, drinking themselves into oblivion.
She held Haley close, breathing in her sweet baby scent.
If she called ahead, she could probably arrange to drop Haley off at the sitter’s for a few hours. As long as Mrs. U. was home, she wouldn’t mind earning a few extra bucks.
And then Mary Lou could go over to the Ladybug, park her car, and go inside.
It was a bad idea.
No, it was a terrible idea.
She set Haley down in the playpen in the living room, amid a pile of toys and stuffed animals, went to the phone, and dialed Rene’s number.
Answering machine. Shit.
Mary Lou was doing what she was supposed to do—calling her AA sponsor in an attempt to keep herself from doing something really stupid. She was doing everything right, so why, why, why did this have to be so hard?
She called Janine and the line was busy. She dialed again. What, didn’t vegetarians believe in call waiting? Shit.
She called Donny, but he was still in siege mode and not answering his phone. His grandfather had called her earlier to report that he’d stopped in to see Don, who was apparently disoriented from not taking his meds, but safe.
Mary Lou took a deep breath and called her mother—she was that desperate to talk to someone, anyone—and got another machine. Of course, it was much later out on the East Coast. In fact, it was getting pretty close to last call. Even if her mother had been home, she probably would’ve been too drunk to make much sense.
Mary Lou dug through her kitchen junk drawer, searching for her AA blue book—the schedule of all the regular meetings in town. Maybe there was something that started late somewhere in San Diego. Maybe…
A business card poked out from between a half-eaten box of Good & Plenty and the city’s recycling schedule, and she pulled it free.
Ihbraham Rahman.
He’d been extremely nice to her over the past few days.
But why? What exactly did he want from her?
He wanted to fuck her. That was the obvious answer. Why else were men kind to women?
Except she hadn’t even once seen that familiar, male, appraising, sexual edge in his eyes when he looked at her.
And why not? What was so wrong with her? Aside from the twenty extra pounds…Although, didn’t foreign men like women with meat on their bones?
Not that it really mattered to her. Because unlike her husband who was obviously ruled by his dick rather than a sense of what was right or wrong, she’d never hook up with someone who wasn’t white.
She still was in shock over the fact that Sam had actually considered marrying Alyssa Locke. Mary Lou had called him on it once, and she’d seen from his eyes that he honestly didn’t see what was so wrong with that—a white man married to a black woman.
No, Sam couldn’t see past the sex.
And aside from that, everything would be hard. Everythi
ng. All of their choices, all of their decisions. Where they lived, who they chose as their friends, where they went to church.
People would stare. Wherever they went, whatever they did, they’d stand out as different.
And their children…
It was hard enough being a kid in this shitty world and trying to fit in, without being forced to deal with two completely different heritages.
How would Sam, with his Texas white-boy upbringing, be able to relate to a black son and all the issues he would have to face as a young black man growing up in America, land of the free white male?
No, sir. Thank you very much. Jesus himself could come down from heaven, and Mary Lou wouldn’t have to think twice about marrying him if he didn’t have the same color skin that she had.
Life was hard enough without asking for trouble.
She dialed Ihbraham’s number.
From where she stood, she could clearly see Haley happily chewing on Eeyore’s ear.
“Hello?”
Oh, Lord. He was actually there. Unless he had a roommate…She cleared her throat. “May I speak to Ihbraham Rahman, please?”
“This is he. Who is calling, please?”
He sounded so different on the phone. So distant and formal. “Uh, this is Mary Lou Starrett. From next door to the Robinsons…?”
“Ah,” he said. “Of course.”
Of course? What did that mean? That he’d expected her to call him? That she’d seemed so terribly desperate that her calling him was a given?
But then he asked, “Are you all right, Mary Lou?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just…” She closed her eyes. “Actually, no. No, I’m not all right. I’m terrible, actually.”
“Are you sober?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’m so glad you called before you did something that could not be undone. You’re a very strong woman. Very strong.”
It was entirely possible that by calling him she had done something that couldn’t be undone. His musical accent wound itself around her, soothing her in a way that was dangerous.
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” Mary Lou blurted. “I just want to say that up front.”
Into the Night Page 15
