by Mary McBride
“That's good to hear,” the president's mother said. “Well, that will be all, Angela
” “Yes, ma'am.”
Bobby stood at the kitchen sink, sipping coffee, thinking it was a hell of a thing to feel like he had a hangover when he hadn't drunk so much as a drop the night before. This business with Angela was killing him.
Speak of the devil, she came into the kitchen from the dining room, looking happy to see him at first before she put on her “I hate you, Bobby” face.
“I was going to let you sleep in,” she said.
“Gotta get ready for the big bridge game, babe.”
“She wants the card table set up in the living room.”
“Got it,” he said.
“And one of us has to go to the grocery store for bran and molasses for muffins.”
“I can do that.”
“Fine.”
She started pulling bowls from cabinets and utensils from drawers, while Bobby stood there wondering if they were speaking in code, where card table and bran and molasses stood for things that truly mattered, like love and loyalty and desire.
“I just learned something interesting about your pal Bootsie,” Angela said, her head in the refrigerator while she searched for God only knows what.
“I can't wait to hear it.”
She'd been searching for eggs, which she put on the counter alongside her other ingredients and equipment. “Well, two things, actually. She's being treated for cancer, and she was Senator Riordan's girlfriend before Daisy came along. What do you think of that?”
Bobby was about to reply when there was a knock on the back door. A second later, Doug Coulter whispered from the little mud room adjacent to the kitchen, “Is the coast clear?”
“All clear,” Angela said. “Want some coffee, Doug?”
“No, thanks.” He stared at Bobby for a moment while Bobby returned the stare over the rim of his cup. “How's it going?” Doug asked cautiously, as if he expected a bomb to go off in one of the cabinets at any second.
“Great,” Bobby said. “Dandy.” I'm sharing a bed with a woman who hates my guts and wants me out of her life so she can marry some goddamned fairy actor. I don't have the proper equipment to do my job adequately. How the hell do you think it's going?
“Good. Glad to hear it.”
“How about some orange juice, Doug?” Angela asked.
“No, thanks. I just wanted to let you have a look at the latest letter. They faxed it this morning.” He stepped forward to hand the paper to Bobby, then continued, “And I wanted to let you know about some personnel changes. Seems there's been a death in Mike Burris's family, so he's out of here this morning, and his replacement's coming down from Chicago, due to arrive later this afternoon. It's nothing that'll affect the two of you.”
The special agent in charge looked from Bobby to Angela. “So, what's on tap for the old lady … er, Mrs. Riordan today?”
“Bridge,” Angela said, and as she elaborated Bobby studied the cutout words and images on the threatening letter.
Instead of using the word Daisy, the threatener had cut out a picture of the actual flower and pasted it before her last name. It struck him as playful, kind of like a rebus, one of those picture-and-word stories for kids. The guys in forensics claimed it was a professional job—no prints and no salient details in the paper—but it still seemed amateurish to Bobby, intended more to annoy than to harm. He was wondering if Mrs. Riordan might recognize some of the phrasing, such as “see you in hellfire” or “consider yourself warned,” when Doug took the paper back.
“I'll file this in the trailer,” he said. “No sense getting the president's mother all het up about something that's out of her control.”
“Whatever you think,” Bobby said. “Personally, I don't think she'd bat an eye at the news, and she might even appreciate knowing what's going on.”
Doug gave him one of his “I need an antacid and I need it now” looks. “Well, that's already been decided in Washington, hasn't it, Agent Holland? And in the Oval Office, I might add. The woman is not to know a thing about this. She's not to be disturbed.”
Bobby held up a defensive hand. “Hey. No problem.” He closed an imaginary zipper across his lips before giving his boss a little irritating grin. “That's why they call us secret agents, right?”
“You best remember it, too.”
Doug Coulter shambled out the way he had come, muttering to himself. Then it took just about a second for Angela to explode.
“You really are trying to get us fired, aren't you? God, Bobby.” She picked up a mixing bowl and thumped it on the counter for emphasis. “It might not hurt your career because of your seniority and the agency's whole macho good ol’ boy thing, but my career's likely to disappear with a big, giant flush.”
He poured another couple inches of coffee into his cup, then leaned back against the counter. “I wouldn't worry about it, darlin’.”
“Don't you ‘darlin’ ‘ me, you son of a bitch. I'm not one of your honky-tonk floozies, Bobby Holland. I'm your—” Her mouth snapped closed.
“My wife,” Bobby said softly, not taking his eyes off her angry face, feeling his heart kick in an extra few beats, wondering if she'd slug him if he told her she was beautiful when she was mad, wondering if she loved him anymore, way too afraid to ask. “You're my wife.”
Her eyes flashed. “I was going to say your partner, dammit. We're in this together, and that means that if you screw up by disobeying a direct order, you take me down with you.”
He watched her rake her hair back with enough ferocity that the gesture nearly amputated her ears. A sudden lump formed in his throat that even a swig of coffee couldn't dislodge. His face felt strange, numb and almost out of his control, and he couldn't quite breathe right. If he lost Ange, his life wouldn't be worth living, job or no job. If only there were a way of making her know that. If only the words would come. The right words.
He swallowed hard and cleared his throat.
“Well?” Angela demanded.
His words and feelings weren't going to match. Bobby knew that as soon as he opened his mouth. “Will you quit worrying about this, for God's sake. You know Doug. Hell. He just feels obliged to growl every once in a while to show he's still in charge.”
“But he is in charge, Bobby, so don't you dare say a word to Mrs. Riordan. Not one word. Even though you think she already knows. You promise me.”
He lifted a hand with two fingers raised. “Scout's honor.”
“Okay, then.”
With another little crisis averted, she drew in a slow, calming breath, then chewed on her lower lip as she studied her bowls and cooking paraphernalia. It was too late now, Bobby realized, for whatever it was he'd wanted to say about loving her and dying if he lost her. Another moment of truth and reckoning had come and gone. Another opportunity to slap his goddamned heart on his goddamned sleeve had eluded him.
“How soon before you're ready to leave for the store?” she asked.
He drained his coffee. “How ‘bout right now?”
It was a beautiful September morning with a clear, crystalline sky and just a little bite in the air. Bobby opened all the windows in the Taurus wagon and pressed his foot to the floor, sampling McCray's souped-up engine. It wasn't often that he missed Texas, but every so often, on mornings like this, he craved a road straight as a ruler and nothing in the distance but distance.
He remembered the morning when he was sixteen and his old man had pulled him over on the blacktop between Wishbone and Hectorville. Tom Jessup had punched on his lights and siren and floored his big Crown Victoria until he just about drove up the tailpipe of Bobby's rusted-out Datsun.
“Goin’ a little fast, aren't you, boy?” His father had bent and braced his meaty, tattooed forearms on the driver's window, squinting in at Bobby. “It's too early to have a hot date, ain't it?”
“Yes, sir.” He'd stared straight ahead, refusing to meet the eyes identical to his own, once
again limiting his speech to “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” because if he ever said what he felt, he'd wind up killing the son of a bitch and spending the rest of his life in Huntsville, and then where would Billy be?
He blew by cornfields now, only easing off the gas when he reached the train tracks, the big blue Kiwanis billboard, and another one that cheerfully proclaimed, “Hassenfeld, Home of the Valkyries, Welcomes You.” Well, it was nice to feel welcome someplace.
It took him half an hour in the Save Mart because Angela's list had multiplied from a single box of bran to an entire page of highly specific items. After all, a woman who always ordered a steak “medium rare but more medium than rare” and a salad with dressing on the side couldn't be expected to write a simple dozen eggs on her list. It had to be a dozen extra-large eggs, and the milk had to be 2 percent, and the salt iodized, and the pound cake Sara Lee. Christ. Maybe that was why he loved her so much. After living with Treena Holland, the queen of indifference, maybe he was hard-wired for loving finicky women.
He put the groceries on his credit card, kept the receipt for his expense record, then crammed the paper bags into the back of the Taurus and slammed down the hatch. He wasn't quite ready to go back to the Riordan place and take up his role as emotionally stunted bodyguard, so he parked on Main Street, got a cup of coffee at the little café, and sat in the town square awhile, pondering the granite memorial and communing with the long-dead veterans of various wars.
Maybe he should have stayed in the army, he thought, happily ensconced in one BOQ after another. He'd probably be a colonel by now, which would make Billy a major. It would have been something, going back to Wishbone for Tom Jessup's funeral in their dress uniforms, all that brass blazing in the Texas sunshine. As it turned out, Bobby had been in the Netherlands with the president, and Billy had been knee-deep in training in Georgia when their father died, and they'd missed his funeral completely. Not that they would have been welcome, anyway.
For the very first time, he found himself wondering what their old man would have thought about Billy's death if he had lived to see it. Would he have been secretly pleased that his offspring showed courage and devotion to duty and was buried with full military honors at Arlington? Or would he have been relieved that one bastard boy was down, with only one to go?
Angela had asked him once if he didn't want to go home just one more time to at least make sure his mother's grave was the way it ought to be. Grave sites were big in the Callifano family. Angelo and Rose already had their side-by-side plots picked out. They bugged the groundskeeper regularly about the health of the maple tree that would eventually shade them, and the kids all had to promise that they would make sure the stones stayed clean.
“No way,” he'd told her. He didn't much care whether his mother's grave was up to snuff or not. He'd done his filial duty by making sure they got the wrong date on her marker. Treena had always lied about her age, so Bobby had made sure the stone was inscribed 1949 instead of 1947, the actual year of her birth.
“She's lucky I didn't have a six-pack bronzed in her memory,” he had added.
“That's pretty heartless, Bobby,” Angela had said.
Maybe so. Hell, maybe he didn't even have a heart, he thought now. Or if he had, maybe it broke eleven months, three weeks, ago and he was just surviving on the remnants. Any way he looked at it, this whole thing just struck him as a losing proposition. Ange just wanted more than he was capable of giving. He could no more wear his heart on his sleeve than he could wear a goddamned dress.
He crumpled his empty cup in his fist and tossed it in a trash can on the way back to the car. Then, just as he was sticking the key into the door, something caught his eye across the street. Wedged in between Boechler's Pharmacy and Hagemann's Real Estate was a little place called the Tattoo Parlor, and in its window hung a big red paper heart just above a sign that said “Come In. We're Open.”
Son of a gun.
Daisy Riordan came downstairs at eleven, determined not to find fault with whatever Angela had done with the refreshments, even if it meant biting her tongue until she drew blood. The young woman wasn't a trained domestic, after all, and she seemed to be sincerely attempting to do her best. Anyone who peppered a tuna salad with raisins was certainly making a genuine effort at being creative, if nothing else.
Actually, the trays she'd laid out on the kitchen counter didn't look too bad. The heavily embossed silver wasn't what Daisy would have chosen for the little Italian cookies, but that was all right. The Quimper serving plate was fine for the macaroons. Lord knew Muriel and Norma and Adele weren't coming to be impressed. Norma and Adele were coming to play cutthroat cards, and Muriel was coming in order not to swill sherry alone, and to irritate her ancient friends in the process.
Daisy did a little rearranging of crackers around a cut-glass bowl of dip, then licked a dab of it from her finger. It needed more Tabasco. Young people failed to appreciate the inevitable decline of taste buds after a certain age. She wasn't sure when she had passed that invisible barrier, exactly. The day after Charles's funeral, she had awakened a crotchety old woman. She'd always been crotchety, though she preferred to consider it discriminating, but she'd never been old—really, really old—until that morning. Dear God. She'd taken one look in a mirror that morning, then climbed back into bed, and hadn't left it for the next two weeks.
People seemed to think her abnormal for staying home as much as she did. Little did they know what a temptation it was to stay in bed with the covers pulled over her head, day after day. When she awoke, if she didn't immediately bathe and dress, there was always the danger of just not getting up at all. Suicide by bedsores. How cowardly was that?
“I didn't hear you come in the kitchen, Mrs. Riordan.” Angela appeared from around the corner, looking young and lovely, with hair freshly brushed and lipstick newly applied.
“Everything appears in order,” Daisy said, gesturing to the trays on the counter. “The sherry glasses are in the breakfront. I wonder if you'd—”
“I've already washed them and put them on the liquor cart in the living room,” she said. “I was just getting ready to set up your card table in there.”
“It's rather heavy. Perhaps you should have your husband see to it.”
“Bobby's not back from town yet.” Creases of annoyance dug in between the young woman's eyes and at the corners of her mouth. “I'm sure I can handle it. Maybe you could just show me where you'd like it set up?”
“Yes, of course.”
Daisy made her way toward the living room, wondering if Robert was actually being derelict in his official Secret Service duties or if his being in town had something to do with her own protection. She refused to even contemplate that he was having some lurid assignation with the little tramp in the turquoise truck who'd come sniffing around the day before.
“The card table is in the hall closet, Angela, and I'd like it right over there.” She pointed to the open space behind her blue-and-beige floral sofa. “I always use the chair from the cherry secretary over there. Dining room chairs will do for the others. I wouldn't want them to get so comfortable that they overstayed their welcome.”
The doorbell rang, then rang again immediately. Muriel. God in heaven, the woman couldn't do anything simply. Daisy looked at her watch and scowled to see that the silly old bag was ten minutes early. If she said, “The more, the sherrier” as she crossed the threshold, cancer or not, Daisy was going to throttle her.
“I'll get that,” Angela said.
“That isn't necessary.”
Despite a forty-some-year disparity in their ages, Daisy and Angela arrived at the front door simultaneously, and their hands collided reaching for the knob. Angela, intelligent young woman that she was, drew back, and Daisy opened the door.
“Surprise!” Muriel exclaimed.
She might as well have said “Trick or treat!” for the fright mask of wrinkles on her face and the spiked orange hair that reminded Daisy of an electrocution in pr
ogress.
“You're early,” Daisy snapped, stepping back to let her old friend and nemesis in.
“Yes, I know I'm early, but I didn't think you'd mind, considering what I've brought with me. Norma called me this morning. She's down with a sinus infection, poor baby, so I invited someone very special to join us.”
“Who?” After all these years, Muriel knew damn well that Daisy didn't like surprises, particularly when they were human.
Muriel reached behind her, pulling at somebody's sleeve. “Come, come. Daisy won't bite, in spite of what you might have heard. Or if she does, I assure you, Gerald, she's had her shots.”
From the look on the gentleman's face as he stepped forward, Daisy couldn't tell if he was inherently shy or merely horrified to find himself in the presence of, indeed the grasp of, Muriel “Bootsie” Rand. He was tall, with a fine head of silver hair framing a quite handsome face that time had chiseled rather than ravaged like her own. His eyes were the deep blue of a much younger man. And one of those eyes winked at her, not like a lascivious old man, but like a young and hopeful suitor. Daisy's heart blipped oddly, enough for her to imagine for a second that she was suffering sudden angina.
“Daisy Riordan,” Muriel cooed, “I'd like you to meet Professor Gerald DuMaurier Gerrard.”
Daisy grudgingly extended her hand in greeting. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
“Well, let the poor man in, Daisy,” Muriel said. “He's already been checked over by your goons, dear. Head to toe. He's perfectly safe.” She angled her spiked head toward two young men on the sidewalk. “I offered to let them frisk me, but they declined. I must have an honest face.”
“Either that, or they didn't want to touch you without latex gloves, Muriel,” Daisy said. “Won't you come in, Professor?”
10
It was a little after noon when Bobby pulled into the driveway and saw Angela with her hands on her hips, standing in front of the garage, looking like a human auger just waiting—dying!—to take a bite out of him.