The building’s corners looked even more chipped than the last time I’d been there, and when I pulled open the the glass-topped entrance door, I saw it was still etched with his grandfather’s name, ETHAN CRANE, ESQ. Ethan apparently had seen no reason either to change the sign or spruce up the building when he inherited it.
A small vestibule inside the door led to a flight of stairs whose every step had been worn slightly lower in the center from decades of climbing feet. At the top of the stairs, a broad corridor stretched toward Ethan’s office, with another office to the left where a plump secretary with white-streaked hair sat at a desk facing the door. Christmas cards hung on a string in a drooping line across the front of her desk, and a miniature Christmas tree with miniature electric lights glowed on her windowsill. She looked up with raised eyebrows when she saw me, but Ethan’s door was open and I headed straight back without giving her a chance to stop me.
Ethan was standing in front of a bookcase holding a book in his hands, and when he turned and saw me his face registered surprise, annoyance, and pleasure all at one time.
I said, “I wanted to come in person and apologize for being so bitchy this morning.”
Some of the annoyance drained out of his face, but all he said was, “That wasn’t necessary.”
I said, “It was the concussion. A concussion causes mood swings.”
My ears flamed with embarrassment when they heard my mouth make such a whiny, victimized statement. It practically bore a banner demanding that he feel guilty for even a moment of irritation because I’d been so nasty to him.
Quickly, I added, “I don’t mean that as an excuse, it’s just an explanation.”
He grinned. “Does that mean we can try again?”
Okay, that was better. He wasn’t being so reserved now, and I’d got the megawatt smile. I absolutely hate it when people are disappointed in me. I can live with people not liking me from the get-go, but I always feel challenged when they start out liking me and then something happens that makes them think less of me.
His face took on stern lines again and he motioned toward one of the rump-sprung leather chairs facing his desk. “Dixie, tell me again what happened to you.”
“There’s not much to tell, really. I stopped at Kurtz’s house on my way home last night, and when I got out of the car somebody conked me on the back of the head and knocked me out. When I came to, there was smoke in the air and I called nine-one-one. A chemical fire had been set behind the house, and the fire marshal thinks the arsonist hit me to keep me from seeing him. The homicide detective took me to the emergency room and then stayed with me until Paco came home.”
Okay, so I wasn’t telling the whole truth, but the fact of Jessica Ballantyne setting that fire was something I would only tell Guidry.
Ethan said, “Homicide detective?”
“Somebody was murdered at Kurtz’s house yesterday morning. The arson is probably connected somehow, so the detective went to his house.”
Ethan’s dark eyes flashed with some emotion I couldn’t decipher. “Would that be Lieutenant Guidry? The one who investigated the other murders you were involved in?”
I felt my face flame again. “I haven’t been involved in any murders, Ethan, I just happened to get caught in their backlash. But yes, Guidry is the investigating detective. Now, of course, there’s also an arson investigation, but the fire marshal is handling that.”
“You could have called me. I would have stayed with you.”
“I wasn’t up to calling anybody, to tell the truth. I was sort of dazed for most of the night.”
“How’s your head now?”
“I still have a headache, but it’s a lot better.”
“Think you’ll be up to having supper at my place Saturday night? Just the two of us.”
As he scribbled his address on a notepad, time suddenly swirled backward, and for a stricken second I remembered that Saturday nights were reserved for Christy. This year she would be old enough for the two of us to make dough with flour and salt and oil for Christmas ornaments. We might make bells and candy canes and wreaths, bake them until they were like concrete, and then Todd would help us paint them. We would string popcorn and cranberries, too, for our Christmas tree, and on Sunday the three of us would go choose a tree to put all our handiwork on.
Those time warps are always so vivid that when reality snaps into place I feel disoriented. Silent as a rock, I came back to the present, where there were no Christmas ornaments or Christmas cookies or Christmas tree, no Todd or Christy, and when Christmas would merely be a day my heart would break again because they weren’t there with me.
I got up and stuffed Ethan’s address in my pocket. “I have cats and dogs waiting.”
Giving him a parody of a smile, I scurried away, catching a glimpse of the secretary’s curious gaze as I rushed past her office. I wanted to turn around and tell Ethan I had been mistaken, I couldn’t spend Saturday night with him. But I knew if I spoke I would burst into tears, so I hurried down the stairs and out the door instead.
As I ran to the Bronco, the man sitting on the sidewalk with his bag of gifts raised his hand like a beauty-pageant winner and called, “Merry Christmas, pretty lady!”
I managed not to cry until I was in traffic, and the tears had stopped by the time I got to the first traffic light. I considered that a sign of progress. There had been a time when an onset of memories and tears would last for days. Maybe someday they won’t come at all, just an ache in the heart.
On a sudden impulse, I turned toward the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. I don’t believe in planting people, but my grandparents were not the kind of people to be cremated—too much possibility that the fundamentalists might turn out to be right and they’d wake up on Judgment Day with no bodies to reconnect.
The cemetery is a morbidly pretty place with evenly manicured green grass. Except for the flat stone markers, it could be a golf course. Several people were decorating their loved ones’ graves with fake poinsettias and plastic holly wreaths. The best I could do was kneel and scrape a blob of dried bird shit from my grandmother’s marker.
“Gran, I wish you were here. I could use some wise advice. Somebody got killed, and they think I might have done it. And there’s this kitten I’m worried about. They want to declaw it, and you know how awful that is. And then a man has invited me to supper at his house Saturday night, and it’s bound to get romantic. Sexy romantic. I know it’s time for me to start living like a normal woman, but the sex part scares me. If I have sex with a man, I’m afraid it’ll blot out my memories of Todd. If I do that, I’ll be somebody else.”
An egret flew overhead making low gargling noises, but I didn’t think it was channeling my grandmother. She lay in her grave as silent as my grandfather in their double-bed burial site.
I looked out at all the graves and their plastic flowers and wondered if this was what my grandparents had intended as their final statement. I doubted it. They had been too vital, too busy living and loving to want a vast synthetic silence to mark their wisdom.
A little voice in my head said, There’s your answer, Dixie. Don’t be a coward. Throw yourself into life and it will meet you halfway.
Maybe I was really just talking to myself, but I felt lighter when I left.