They toasted Lucia until dawn, alternately laughing and crying at the impenetrable mysteries of life and death. The cruelty and the beauty of it. Il dolce e l’amaro, as Lucia would’ve said. The bitter and the sweet.
Nell leaned out of the passenger-side window of Vivi’s gaudily painted Volkswagen van the next morning. “Take-out dinner, eight o’clock, my place,” she reiterated forcefully. “Be there.”
“If I can,” Nancy hedged. “I’ve got a million things to take—”
“To take care of, yes. You always do, but you still have to eat,” Vivi scolded, leaning over Nell’s lap from the driver’s side.
“If you’re not there, we’ll think you don’t care,” Nell warned.
Vivi’s taillights glowed in the morning mist until they turned at the corner and were gone. The sky was heavy with bruised-looking clouds. Nancy’s head felt bruised, too. No surprise, considering the port they’d sucked down in their drunken revels. Cathartic, yeah, but this morning she felt like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe.
Too bad. Time to get busy and do all the normal things in her crazy schedule, plus everything that had been put off last week because of Lucia’s death and funeral. Fortunately for her, frantic activity was her favorite coping mechanism, considering her career choice—an agent manager for singer-songwriters and folk bands. Back in college, she’d wanted to be a musician herself. She’d learned, to her cost, that she didn’t have the chops for it, and decided to make the best of it, and help the musicians who did. And that she was good at. Damn good. She had just the detail-minded, dogged determination for it.
She had nudged her handpicked group of folk artists and ensembles out of the pub and coffeehouse concert series circuits and into theaters and more prestigious folk festivals. They were getting better record deals, more airtime on radio stations. Some were poised to break into the big time. If that happened, her hard work would start to pay off. This was the last push toward that glorious day when she could hire a staff, instead of being a one-woman agency. She’d been working sixteen-hour days, sometimes working nights as well, for years.
But that was fine with her. A woman zipping around at three hundred miles an hour, six hands waving like a dancing Shiva, a cell phone in every one of them, did not have time to feel this sour, sucking hole of grief inside her. Or at least, if she did feel it, it would be on the periphery of her consciousness, not smack-dab in the center.
Even so. She pressed her hand against the ache in her middle. It was going to take some crazy scrambling to distract herself from this.
First, something hideous to cover the writing table. She got into her car, zipped down to the dollar store, and stood in the aisle for several minutes pondering the merits of hideous florals or plastic plaid in dull hues of beige and taupe. She concluded that in the understated simplicity of Lucia’s front room, the quietly ugly beige and taupe mumbled “Don’t notice me,” whereas the checks and hideous floral squawked “What’s wrong with this picture?” Or perhaps she was giving the burglars too much credit. As if those drugged-up bottom-feeders were going to be listening to what plastic tablecloths whispered to them.
It was raining when she got back. She held the package that held the tablecloth over her head as she darted up the steps.
“Excuse me, miss?”
The deep voice jolted her, and she let the package drop. It slid down the stoop, landing at the feet of a man who stood there. He stooped to pick it up. Rain sparkled on the spiky tips of his short brown hair. He stood, looked up, and her breathing stopped. Everything stopped. Time stopped. Or seemed to.
“Sorry to startle you.” His words started the clock again.
That’s okay, her lips tried to say, but her lungs were still immobile.
She gave him a jerky nod. Her glasses were spotted with rain. She dried them on her sweater. Even out of focus, he was amazingly good-looking. No, good-looking was too pallid a term. Cut it down to just “amazing.”
She couldn’t focus in on any particular detail. His broad, strong-boned face was wet with rain, but it was his eyes that did it to her. Beard stubble accented all his chiseled planes and angles of his jaw. His eyes were silvery green, the color so bright it seemed to catch the light and reflect it back. Huge shoulders. Fabulous thighs, nicely shown off by faded jeans, although she’d bet money he wasn’t conscious of it. She’d also bet money that he had an ass to match.
He looked solid. Strong. Balanced. Like a rock, an oak, the earth.
He observed her for a timeless moment as the rain pattered down, and she had the sensation that everything important about her was written in a language that he could read in a glance.
She put her glasses back on. In that moment of grace before they spotted up again, she flash memorized every detail. The sweep of the dark hairs of his brows, the grooves that bracketed his mouth.
He wiped rain off his forehead with the sleeve of his wool shirt.
“Are you Nancy D’Onofrio?” he asked.
This epitome of manhood knew her name? She nodded, wishing she hadn’t opted not to wash her hair. She’d slicked it into a tight bun. The peeled-onion look. She was still in yesterday’s funeral black, and her breath must reek of liquor, considering how hungover she felt.
This guy, by contrast, looked clear eyed, clean living. He’d probably gotten to bed at ten and was up at five to meditate, or do yoga or some such. He probably drank something austere, like green tea. Not the sugared-up, high-test espresso she guzzled to get revved for her crazy days. She saw him in her mind’s eye. Shirtless, in a yoga pose.
And, God, what was she even doing having thoughts like this, at a time like this? How freaking shallow was she, anyway?
Distraction, came the answer from a calmer place deep inside. He was eye candy. Fantasy material. Better even than frantic work as a way to not think about the ragged hole in her life. Her eyes were fogging up, and the guy’s mouth was moving, and had been for some seconds already. And she’d just been staring at him.
Mouth open, no doubt.
“…Mrs. D’Onofrio here?”
Ah, God. Not again. Irrational anger flared inside her. Why was it always her goddamn duty to announce it to the world? She’d been the one to find Lucia’s body. She’d called the cops. She’d called her sisters. She’d told the neighbors. She’d told the delivery people. She’d written the obit. Could somebody else please take a fucking turn?
Not his fault, she reminded herself. She shook her head.
“Lucia’s dead,” she croaked.
The man’s face went blank. “Oh, my God,” he said. “When?”
She swallowed hard, rubbed her eyes under her glasses, and tried again. “Last week,” she said thickly. “The funeral was yesterday.”
He was silent for a long moment. “I am so sorry,” he said finally.
There was no good response to that. She’d learned that this week. Painfully. Nancy sniffed and said, “Me, too. Who are you?”
“I’m Liam Knightly,” he said. “I’m the carpenter. I’m here to start the work on the house.”
“Work? On the house? What work?”
“She didn’t tell you about the renovation she was planning?”
“I hadn’t spoken to her for a couple of weeks before she died.”
“Me, neither,” he said. “We set this date weeks ago.”
Nancy shook her head, bemused, and stared at his big truck.
“Not a word?” Knightly wiped rain off his face. “Would it make you nervous if I stood under the awning with you? I’m getting drenched.”
“That’s fine,” she said distractedly. “That is, do you want to come in? For a cup of coffee, or tea? If Lucia has tea. Or had, I guess I should say.” Babbling, again. She hated that. So damn stupid.
His eyes gleamed with a smile he was too polite to allow to emerge. “Thank you,” he said. “One moment. I’ll go tell Eoin to wait.”