“Okay.” Allison lifted a plate from the stack at one end of the table. “I’ll give you a pie—” she placed a mini-quiche on his plate “—and would you like some rice?”
“I like rice,” he said agreeably.
“I’m in love with your son,” Allison murmured to John as she spooned some of the vegetarian casserole onto Michael’s plate and passed it across the table to where Molly was arranging his portable booster seat on an empty chair. Michael climbed up onto it and immediately got to work picking all the greens out of his rice. “How about you, Gail?” Allison asked. “I bet you’d like pie, too, wouldn’t you?”
Gail attempted a weak smile. “I’m not really that hungry,” she said. “I’ll just have a few of those shrimp puffs.”
“What’s the matter?” Molly asked, handing Allison an empty plate as she scrutinized Gail. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m feeling fine.” Gail prayed that her sister wouldn’t interrogate her. “I’m just not that hungry. I’ll try some the crab quiches later.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling all right? You didn’t catch a cold rolling around in the wet grass today, did you?”
“You do look a little pale,” Allison concurred, scrutinizing Gail closely.
Gail pursed her lips and squared her shoulders. “I’m perfectly fine,” she declared in as robust a voice as she could muster.
“Would you like a beer?” Jamie offered, reaching for one of the bottles and placing it before her on the table.
“No, thank you. Really.” The last thing she wanted was to be the focus of everyone’s attention.
“She’s in love,” Grammy announced in a resounding voice.
Everyone, including Gail, turned to stare at Grammy.
She shrugged, apparently untroubled by the stunned silence that greeted her pronouncement. “It’s obvious. When a woman has no appetite, it can mean only one of three things: she’s ill, she’s pregnant, or she’s in love. Gail’s already told us she isn’t ill. You aren’t pregnant, are you?” she asked, her uncannily clear eyes zeroing in on Gail.
“No!” Gail shouted. “And I’m not in love, either. As a matter of fact—” she turned back to Allison “—I’ll try the chicken in wine and tarragon sauce. And I’ll try one of the quiches, too. How’s is that pie, Mike? Is it a good pie?”
He poked at it with his thumb. “No. I like ap-poo pie. There’s no ap-poo in this.”
“So,” Allison said, handing Gail a plate heaped with chicken, shrimp puffs and mini-quiches, “who is it that you’re not in love with?”
“No one,” Gail retorted, hoping her appetite would revive enough for her to fake enjoyment of the assorted delicacies.
Jamie eyed John. “If they’re going to discuss touchy-feely stuff, I’m going to make myself scarce. You want to fix yourself some grub and join me in the den? The Yankees are playing the Red Sox.”
John glanced hopefully around the table. “Would you ladies mind...?”
“Actually, we’d be relieved,” Allison told him. “Go watch the game.”
“I go watch the game, too!” Michael bellowed, climbing down from his booster seat. “I don’t like this pie. It has no ap-poos.” He eagerly chased his father out of the dining room.
Allison sighed. “Uncouth boors. Why do we marry them?”
“Because they make us feel so superior,” Grammy suggested.
“I don’t know about you,” Molly remarked, “but I love my uncouth boor.”
“I love mine, too,” Allison confessed. “I must be out of my mind, but I love him.” She and Molly simultaneously aimed their gazes at Gail.
“Don’t look at me,” Gail protested, then defiantly popped a shrimp puff into her mouth. “I don’t love either of your uncouth boors.”
“I’m telling you, she’s in love,” Grammy insisted.
“What makes you think so?” Allison asked.
Grammy smiled defiantly. “Takes one to know one.”
“You’re in love?” The serving spoon Allison had been holding hit the table with a loud clatter. “Grammy! What happened? Who is he?”
“His name is Stanley Bronstein,” Grammy placidly replied. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about him. I’d like to bring him to the wedding with me, if that’s all right with you.”
“Of course it’s all right.” Gaping at her grandmother, Allison sank into a chair. “Who is he? When did you meet him?”
“He’s Marilyn Bronstein’s widowed brother-in-law. She introduced him to me last week, when I was playing bridge at her house.”
“Last week? And you’re already in love with him?”
“It doesn’t take long to figure these things out.” She sent Gail a pointed stare. When Gail refused to respond to Grammy’s unspoken goading, the older woman returned to the subject of her own new-found love. “Frankly, at our age, we don’t have time to waste. He took me to Moise’s Fish House for dinner Tuesday night. We both had the fish chowder. It’s like a stew, the way they make it. You need a fork and knife to eat it.”
“Grammy!” Allison bristled with excitement. “We’ve all had the chowder at Moise’s. We know how thick it is. Now tell me more about Stanley. You had dinner with him once and that convinced you you were in love?”
“Well, no.” Grammy reached across the table and helped herself to a crab quiche. She nibbled it slowly, refusing to rush even when Samantha began drumming on her high chair tray and issuing a primitive chant. “I’ve had dinner with him three times since then,” she said. “He’s very charming.”
Allison sent Gail a doleful look. “You’re a lawyer. Tell me how to protect my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother has never needed protection from anyone,” Gail said, delighted to focus on Grammy instead of herself. She smiled at Grammy. “Don’t marry him without a prenuptial agreement,” she advised. “Don’t let him anywhere near your pension.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake—he’s Marilyn’s brother-in-law. The one who made a fortune in the ball-bearing business. He doesn’t need my pension to make ends meet. He owns three houses and charters his own plane.”
“And he fell in love with you?” Allison’s jaw went slack.
“You seem to find that hard to believe.”
“I don’t,” Molly said, roaming behind Grammy’s chair and reaching around to hug her. “He’s probably head-over-heels about you.”
“As a matter of fact, he is. He’s already asked me to marry him, but I thought it would be prudent to introduce him to your mother first,” she told Allison. “If I can bring him to the wedding, we can get everyone acquainted.”
“Absolutely,” Allison said weakly. “I’d better call Mom and give her some warning, though.”
“The hell with that. Let’s surprise her. Meanwhile, maybe you and Jamie ought to meet him. And Samantha.” She smiled at the little girl, who appeared to be conducting an invisible orchestra in a performance of Brahms’s First Symphony with her spoon. “If he and Sam don’t hit it off, I won’t marry him.”
“Sheesh,” Allison mumbled, exchanging a bemused look with Molly.
“All of this explains,” Grammy continued, “why I know the look of love when I see it. And I’m looking at three young women—” her gaze circled the table, lingering briefly on Allison, then Molly, and then, for a long, hard minute, Gail “—and I see the look of love times three.”
“I think your own situation is clouding your vision,” Gail argued amiably. “I’m not in love.”
“Who’s the gentleman?” Grammy asked, as if Gail hadn’t spoken.
“There is no gentleman. There’s just an obnoxious lawyer I’m at war with over a case. It isn’t love. It’s one big hassle.” She sank in her chair, miserable now that Grammy had deprived her of a distraction. “Molly knows about him. She knows he’s a pain in the ass. Him and his kids.”
“He’s got kids?” Allison asked.
Gail groaned. “Seven-year-old twins. If the guy had his child-care act together
, I wouldn’t have had to deal with them. And believe me, if I’d never had to deal with his kids I would have been very happy.”
Allison’s curiosity was obviously whetted. She leaned forward, grinning. “Why should his child-care arrangements have anything to do with you?”
“It’s so stupid.” Gail sighed, then shoved her plate away and grabbed the bottle of beer Jamie had left within her reach. She yanked off the cap and took a fizzy sip. “We were supposed to have a meeting to negotiate a settlement,” she related. “And all of a sudden his kids called his office and said their nanny had walked out on them. And I got stuck having to go to his house, because he didn’t have anyone to watch his kids. They were monsters.” She eyed Molly dolefully. “Don’t you think they’re monsters?”
“You’ve met his kids?” Allison asked Molly, her curiosity growing by the minute.
Molly must have read Gail’s look accurately, because she didn’t elaborate on the Daddy School bet Gail had gotten sucked into by Murphy. “I know who they are,” she said vaguely. “And they aren’t really monsters. Just typical kids. A little too smart for their own goods, maybe.”
“How did you meet them?” Allison pressed her. “Did this guy—this pain in Gail’s ass—make a point of introducing you to his family?”
“It’s too involved to go into. Suffice it to say, they aren’t in love.” Molly shot Gail a look that said, you owe me.
“None of this would even be an issue if his nanny hadn’t disappeared in the middle of one afternoon, leaving his kids to fend for themselves,” Gail added. “He and I would have finished our negotiations and gotten on with our lives if the damned nanny had been doing her job.”
Allison clicked her tongue. “What is it with nannies these days? One of the nurses in pediatrics at the hospital just had to fire her nanny because the woman was a thief.”
“A thief!” Molly looked aghast.
Allison nodded. “In the three weeks she had the nanny working for her, her camera, her PDA and a cell-phone mysteriously vanished. The nanny swore she didn’t take anything, but when Cathy fired her, the nanny issued not a peep of protest. It’s so weird—a nanny sacrificed a good, steady job just for a few hundred dollars’ worth of electronic gadgetry.”
“Assuming she actually committed the thefts,” Molly pointed out.
“If she didn’t, why would she have taken getting fired so calmly?”
Molly pursed her lips. “Has your friend reported it to the police?”
“Yeah. Like she’s ever going to see those items again.” Allison snorted.
“Electronic gadgets are hard to recover,” Molly conceded. “John said there’s been a lot of that kind of crime going on lately. Small thefts, the kinds of items you could stick in your pocket. Cell-phones, hand-held games, really petty stuff.”
The kind of petty stuff Leo Kopoluski was arrested for stealing two years ago, Gail contemplated. The kind of petty stuff still being stolen by the crime ring of which he was alleged to be a leader.
Of course, the current rash of thefts had nothing to do with him. He’d been implicated only because he had a prior conviction. But these recent thefts were apparently the work of a sticky-fingered nanny—at least in the case Allison had just described. Why didn’t the Arlington Gazette splash the nanny’s name across the front page, instead of Leo’s?
“It really stinks,” Molly said. “You trust your babies, the most precious people in your life, to these people. And one of them robs you, and another walks out and leaves the children behind. I can’t imagine it. The irresponsibility, the danger... When you think of what might have happened to those kids...”
“Yi, yi, yi!” Samantha screeched, as if to remind everybody of the real stakes—not a few gizmos, but real, live children.
“We won’t leave you with an irresponsible nanny, Sam,” Allison cooed, kissing the crown of Samantha’s head. “The only nanny you’ll ever have is your daddy. In another year, you’ll be old enough to go to Molly’s school.”
“I can baby-sit, too, you know,” Grammy offered, “as long as she doesn’t interfere with my love life.” She set down her fork, having polished off everything on her plate. “I didn’t like the rice dish—no real flavor to it. The rest is fine. But make sure you’ve got lots of red meat on that wedding menu. A wedding without red meat is like a honeymoon without sex.”
“I’ll remember that, Grammy,” Allison said with a laugh. “I’d better order double the amount of prime rib. Given the kind of honeymoon I’m hoping for, Jamie and I are going to need all the red meat we can get.”
***
AT TEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT, halfway through the ninth inning of the Red Sox-Yankees game, Dennis’s phone rang.
He had sent the twins to bed a few minutes ago. They’d kicked up a protest about having to go to bed before the game was over, but even if they weren’t tired, he was. And anyway, the game wasn’t so great. The Red Sox were playing as if they got paid bonuses for striking out, and the Yankees were gloating over their lead, congratulating each other over walks. Getting a phone call before the game sputtered through the final inning spared him from having to watch the Sox humiliate themselves further.
He hoisted himself up off the sofa’s deep cushions and hurried into the kitchen, hoping to grab the phone before it rang a second time and roused the kids. “Hello?” he said, cradling the cordless receiver in his hand.
“Murphy?”
It was Gail. She sounded a bit distant, a bit uncertain...but her voice was as welcome as a sip of sweet bourbon, smooth and intoxicating, heating him from the inside out.
He’d been thinking about her all afternoon. Just hours ago, he’d stood on the sidelines at the soccer field, cheering his fool head off as the Fireflies—Erin’s team—trounced the Tornadoes, while simultaneously reminiscing about the feel of Gail’s mouth on his. Driving home from the game, he’d listened as Erin ranted about how the Tornadoes’ halfback deliberately tripped Amanda and the ref didn’t call it, and Sean loyally suggested that the ref was a butt-head, and Erin scolded Sean for using gross language...and Dennis had recalled the strength of Gail’s legs sandwiching his, her body arching against him, her heat and breath and spirit filling him the way he wanted to fill her. He’d taken the kids out for pizza and ice-cream, brought them home and played Parcheesi with them, with the televised baseball game droning in the background, and then hustled them off to bed...and all the while he’d remembered the sublime pleasure he’d felt seducing Gail on her front porch.
Now she was calling him. At ten p.m., late enough to make him think about bed. “Hi,” he said, carrying the cordless back into the living room and sprawling out across the sofa’s plush upholstery. He used the remote to switch off the TV, then leaned back and closed his eyes...and relived every precious minute he’d spent with her on her porch that afternoon.
“I’m sorry to call you so late.”
“It’s not so late.”
“I just got home from...well, it doesn’t matter. I just...well, I thought I should share something with you.”
He wondered if she’d been on a date. It was Saturday night, after all, and gorgeous single women—even headstrong public defenders—went out on dates on Saturday nights. But she’d come home and called him, which meant her date couldn’t have gone too well. If it had, she’d still be with the guy who’d taken her out, not on the phone, wanting to share something with Dennis.
He wanted to share something with her, too. He wondered if he could lure her to his place so she could share what he wanted to share. He’d be willing to go to her house, but there was no way he’d be able to scare up a baby-sitter at this hour. So she’d have to come here, to his broad, comfy bed, to his ample supply of condoms, to his firm mattress and his four down pillows, and his steaming, seething imagination.
“One of my friends told me about this woman, a nurse at Arlington Memorial who had nanny trouble,” she said.
Dennis took a deep breath and blew it out slowly,
trying to keep from swearing. Here he’d been reveling in all sorts of X-rated thoughts, and she wanted to talk to him about nanny trouble. “A nurse,” he said.
“She had to fire her nanny because the nanny was stealing things from her.”
“Uh-huh.” Was he supposed to care? File a suit?
“Maybe it makes no sense, Murphy, but my friend was telling me about her friend’s nanny, and I thought about you and your nanny who disappeared.”
The urge to curse abandoned him. He sat up straighter, mentally gathering the evidence and assembling it into an interesting new possibility. Gail hadn’t called him to review their encounter on her front porch. She hadn’t called him to make war or to make peace or to make love. She’d called him because she’d been thinking about him in the most domestic, most mundane, most remarkably personal way. And that was just as good. Maybe even better.
“Tell me more,” he said. “I like hearing about other people who’ve had nanny disasters.”
Her voice took on strength. “I didn’t realize nanny problems were so common. Maybe they aren’t common at all. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that you and this friend of my friend both had nanny problems at the same time. Do you think it’s a coincidence?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he answered. “It’s hard finding the perfect baby-sitter. My ex-wife had problems with a baby-sitter, too.”
“That bank robber,” Gail recalled.
“Right.” He grinned, even though she hadn’t said anything funny. It pleased him that she’d paid that much attention to him and his children, that she cared enough to remember. “So this friend’s nanny stole things?”
“That was the oddest part,” Gail said. “The nanny didn’t steal money or jewelry. She stole electronic gadgets.”
“Really.” Dennis kicked his feet up on the coffee table and stretched his legs. He wished Gail were seated next to him. He wanted to see her, to talk to her without two miles of fiber-optic cable stretching between them. He wanted to be able to turn to her, and listen to her, and bounce ideas off her about such matters as child-care, nannies. and electronic gadgets.
“The nanny stole a cell phone, an electronic organizer and a digital camera,” she told him.
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