I chided myself for my juvenile romantic fantasies all through breakfast. What had I been thinking?
Whatever intimacies I had imagined the night before had disappeared with the darkness. If we’d been flirting at midnight, we weren’t flirting anymore. Carmen played nothing but business at breakfast, and I ran along next to her, trying hard just to keep up. I returned to the buffet line in the motel’s little breakfast room a couple of times, not just to get more food, but also to get a break from her intensity. The meal wasn’t bad; I ate yogurt and fruit and Cheerios with nonfat milk. After two cups of decaf I switched to regular coffee. If the morning was any indication what our day was going to be like, I was going to need some rocket fuel to match her pace.
My cardiologist would just have to understand.
“What do you know about Sterling and Holly? Their relationship?” Carmen asked me when I indicated I was done eating by pushing the plastic cereal bowl and the plastic spoon away from me. I thought that her saying “Sterling and Holly” was particularly ironic; it managed to make the two of them sound like they were the cute couple that’d been crowned king and queen at the Homecoming Dance.
But Carmen’s question caused me take a sharp breath, too. Or maybe it wasn’t the question; it was the answer I was about to give. “They were having an affair,” I said. Which was exactly what I’d been thinking about doing the night before. I tasted hypocrisy with my next sip of coffee.
I don’t like hypocrisy in others. I hate it in myself. Hate it.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough. When I talked to her yesterday, she was obviously upset that I knew about her and Sterling. If all the two of them did was mess around a couple of times, why would she be so upset? She’s not married, so what did she do that was so wrong, other than show some bad judgment by sleeping with a married guy? That particular sin is committed about a million times a day in this country.”
It couldn’t have been clearer if she’d been shouting at me. Carmen was announcing to me that she’d almost made the exact same mistake eight hours or so before and that she wasn’t feeling particularly good about how close she’d come to yielding to the temptation.
But I didn’t see the issue she was describing with Holly Malone. “I don’t know that it’s that confusing. She’s Catholic. She’s Irish. She has a young kid. She lives in a small town. Maybe she’s the guilty type, or maybe she’s just afraid of scandals. Most people don’t like to be reminded of their indiscretions. Or-wait, better-she met him through her work, right? Maybe there’s a Fighting Irish Sports Information Office prohibition against sleeping with people they’re doing business with. She’s scared of losing her job.”
“That’s possible. It sounds Catholic enough. But I think there’s something more than that going on.”
“Why does there have to be something more than that?”
“There doesn’t have to be, Sam. There just is. I feel it. Who did you call last night?”
“What?”
“The second you stepped into your room, you made a phone call. Why? What was so important? Who was it?”
I sat back and felt my man-boobs jiggle beneath my shirt. It was clear that I wasn’t making much progress on the man-boobs segment of my self-improvement program. I tried to look her in the eyes, but I couldn’t quite corral her gaze. “Are we on those kinds of terms, Carmen? Where you can ask me who I call on the phone?”
She sat back, and her boobs jiggled beneath her shirt a little bit, too-although it was an altogether different phenomenon. “You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry.”
She had been asking me something, but she had been telling me something, too. What did I conclude? I concluded that she was telling me that her songs the night before had been a private concert just for me. I chewed on that. “The shrink who called you about the Storeys? The one you met in Boulder? He’s a friend of mine.”
“I know,” she said.
She knew a lot about me.
She hadn’t looked back at me since her intrusive question about the phone call. I said, “I called him. He has a… problem. I had an idea that I thought might help him with it. So how do you want to play this with Holly later this morning?”
She finally looked back up at me. She smiled. “If you’re up to it, I’d like you to talk to her. Yesterday didn’t go too well on the phone with me and her. You can start fresh. Is that okay?” My eyes were locked on her smile. There was nothing wrong with her teeth. They weren’t crooked. They weren’t yellow. They were just fine.
“That’s okay,” I said.
FIFTY-TWO
She was talking to herself more than she was talking to me.
“Twenty-two pounds. Dinner’s at four. I’d like the bird out of the oven by three, maybe a little after. Eighteen to twenty minutes a pound-that’s because it’s stuffed, otherwise it would be only fifteen. That means five hours, give or take, so I need to get this in the oven-oh my God!-in the next few minutes. Aaaagh.”
Holly Malone was kind of cute. She would be the darling kid in the sitcom-the one you really liked, the one with the charm. Pretty, but not the kind of drop-dead-beautiful that made me nervous. Like Gibbs.
I was enjoying watching her flit around her little linoleum-tiled kitchen searching for utensils and roasting pans and ingredients that it was apparent she hadn’t laid a hand on in months. Or longer. But she possessed enough enthusiasm for an entire cheerleading squad, and her positive energy was better for my heart than anything I’d run across recently.
I was also enjoying being in a kitchen on Thanksgiving morning, getting the opportunity to be a spectator at an event that I’d been privileged to witness almost every year of my life since I was old enough to remember. I was surrounded by tradition; the countertops in Holly’s kitchen were upholstered with celery and onions and broth and butter and parsley and dried bread crumbs and a big fat naked turkey, and for a moment all was right in my world.
I looked at the clock that hung on the wall by the door that led from the kitchen to the living room, which was where Carmen Reynoso was waiting while I was doing my best to bond with Holly. The clock read ten-fifty. I did some arithmetic, considered for a moment the consequences of keeping my mouth shut, and said, “Relax, Holly. Dinner won’t be until six-thirty or seven. Maybe later. You have all day.”
“What are you talking about?” she said playfully. She thought I was teasing. “Everyone’s coming shortly after two. Dinner’s at four, promptly. My sister’s husband Artie would have a fit if he thought his meal would be even a minute tardy.” Holly had a trace of an accent of some kind that caused her to elevate the last syllables of her words as though she really, really liked them. The accent was cute, too.
I was having a very good time.
Reluctantly, I explained the turkey dilemma. “Twenty-two pounds at twenty minutes a pound is exactly seven hours and twenty minutes of cooking time, not five hours give or take. That sounds like a long time to me, but what do I know about turkeys? If you stick it in the oven right this second-and you and I know that’s not going to happen-then that bird won’t be coming back out of the oven until almost six o’clock this evening.”
She froze and stared at me as though I had screamed at her not to move, she had a tarantula on her nose. I could tell she was using the interlude to check my facility with numbers.