“Want to talk about it?”
“Not now. Sorry. I mean, thanks, but another time. I’d rather talk about anything else than work.”
“Can I make you dinner?”
“You cook?”
“No,” she admitted with a quick laugh. “You’ve had one of my three specialties. But I’m sure Marta left something for you in that haunted kitchen of yours.”
“Haunted?”
“Oh yeah. I met your contractor right when I got here, and I got the lowdown from him.”
“Like why it’s taking his guys forever to put in a kitchen counter?”
“Don’t blame them. You’re driving them crazy, is what I hear. He can’t get signoffs when they need them. Things like that.”
“Too many goddamn decisions. I don’t really have the time for it. And I don’t want to get it wrong.”
“‘Wrong’ defined as what?”
Nick was quiet for a moment. “Laura had very definite ideas of what she wanted.”
“And you want everything to be just the way she’d planned. Like it’s your memorial to her.”
“Please don’t do the shrink thing.”
“But maybe you’re afraid to finish it too, because when it’s over, something else is over too.”
“Cassie, can we change the subject?”
“So it’s like Penelope, in the Odyssey. She weaves a shroud during the day, and unravels it at night. That way it’s never finished. She staves off the suitors, and honors the departed Odysseus.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Nick took a deep breath.
“I think you do.”
“Except, you know, it’s reached a point where I really do want the damn thing finished already. It was her big project, and, okay, maybe as long as it was under way, it was like she was still at work. Which doesn’t make any sense, but still. Thing is, now I just want the plastic draft sheets out of here, and I want the Dumpster gone, and the trucks, and all that. I want this to be a goddamn home. Not a project. Not a thing in process. Just a place where the Conovers live.” A beat. “Whatever’s left of them.”
“I get it,” she said. “So why don’t you take me out to dinner somewhere?” A smile hovered around her lips. “A date.”
75
They walked through the Grand Fenwick Hotel parking lot holding hands. It was a cool, cloudless night, and the stars twinkled. Cassie stopped for a moment before they reached the porte cochere and looked up.
“You know, when I was six or seven, my best friend, Marcy Stroup, told me that every star was really the soul of someone who’d died.”
Nick grunted.
“I didn’t believe it either. Then in school we learned that each star is actually a ball of fire, and some of them probably have solar systems of their own. I remember when they taught us in school about how stars die, how in just a few thousandths of a second a star’s core would collapse and the whole star would blow up-a great supernova followed by nothingness. And I started to cry. Right there at my desk in sixth grade. Crazy, huh? That night I was talking to my daddy about it, and he said that was just the way of the universe. That people die, and stars die too-they have to, to make room for new ones.”
“Huh.”
“Daddy said if no one ever died, there’d be no room on the planet for the babies being born. He said if nothing ever came to an end, nothing could ever begin. He said it was the same way in the heavens-that sometimes a world has to come to an end so that new ones can be born.” She squeezed his hand. “Come on, I’m hungry.”
The lobby of the Grand Fenwick was carpeted in what was meant to suggest an old-fashioned English broadloom, with lots of oversized leather furniture arranged in clubby “conversation pits,” like a dozen living rooms stitched together. Velvet ropes on stanchions partitioned the restaurant from the lobby. The menu offered fifties favorites like duck à l’orange and salmon hollandaise, but mainly what it offered were steaks, for old-school types who knew the names for the different cuts: Delmonico, porterhouse, Kansas City strip. The place smelled like cigars, and not especially expensive ones; the smoke had seeped into everything like dressing on a salad.
“They have fish,” Nick said, apologetically, as they were led to a corner table.
“Now why would you say that? You think girls don’t eat red meat?”
“That’s right, I forgot-you do. So long as it isn’t actually red.”
“Exactly.”
Cassie ordered a rib steak well done, Nick a medium-rare sirloin. Both of them ordered salads.
After Nick ate his salad, he looked at Cassie. “Brainstorm. I always order a salad. But I just realized something: I don’t particularly like salad.”
“Not exactly the solution to Fermat’s last theorem,” Cassie said, “but we can work with this. You don’t like salad. Same deal as with tea.”
“Right. I drink tea. Laura would make it and I’d drink it. Same deal. I order salads. But you know, I never liked tea, and I never liked salad.”
“You just realized this.”
“Yeah. It was always true. I just wasn’t conscious of it, somehow. Like…Chinese food. I don’t really like it. I don’t hate it. I just don’t have any liking for it.”
“You’re on a roll, now. What else.”
“What else? Okay. Eggplants. Who the hell decided that eggplants were edible? Nontoxic, I get. But is everything that’s nontoxic a food? If I were some cave man, and I weren’t starving, and I bit into an eggplant, cooked or not, I wouldn’t say, wow, a new taste sensation-I’ve discovered a foodstuff. I’d say, well, this definitely won’t kill you. Don’t bother to dip your arrowhead in it. It’s like-I don’t know-maple leaves. You could probably eat them, but why would you?”
Cassie looked at him.
“You’re the one who was complaining I was a stranger to myself,” Nick said, tugging on the table linen absently.
“That wasn’t really what I meant.”
“Gotta start somewhere.”
She laughed. He felt her hand stroking his thigh under the tablecloth. Affectionately, not sexually. “Forget eggplant. Give yourself credit-you know what’s most precious to you. Not everyone does. Your kids. Your family. They’re everything to you, aren’t they?”
Nick nodded. There was a lump of sadness in his throat. “When I was playing hockey, I could convince myself that the harder I worked, the harder I trained, the harder I played, the better I’d do. It was true, or true enough. True of a lot of things. You work harder, and you do better. In hockey, they talk about playing with a lot of ‘heart’-giving it your all. Not true of family, though. Not true of being a father. The harder I try to get through to Lucas, the harder he fights me. You got through the force field. I can’t.”
“That’s because you always argue with him, Nick. You’re always trying to make a case, and he doesn’t want to hear it.”
“The way he looks at me, I think he couldn’t care less whether I lived or died.”
“That’s not what’s going on here. Has Lucas ever talked to you about Laura’s death?”
“Never. The Conover men don’t really do feelings, okay?” Nick looked around the darkened room, and was surprised to see Scott McNally being seated a few tables away. Their eyes met, and Scott waved a hand. He was with a tall, gangly man with a narrow face and a prominent chin. Nick saw Scott talking to his dinner companion hurriedly, gesturing toward him. It looked like Scott was deciding whether to do the dessert visit, or to get it over with, and had decided that it would be better to get it over with. The two men stood up and came over to Nick’s table.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Scott said, patting Nick’s shoulder. “I had no idea this was one of your hangouts.”
“It’s not,” Nick said. “Scott, I’d like you to meet my friend Cassie.”