"I've missed you so much." Her voice was low and it cracked on the last word. "Each step along the way, I wondered how it would have felt if I'd had you to share it with me. When we saw each other again at the wedding, I thought, 'Oh God, here's my chance. Here's my chance to make up for my mistakes.'" She shook her head. "You know how well that turned out."
"Yeah," he said slowly. "I know how well that turned out."
"I hated you for a long time after," she said, meeting his eyes. "I used to lie awake at night and think of all the rotten things I should have done to you."
"Such as?"
"Murder."
"Murder?"
"I considered it, Michael."
"If it's any consolation, retribution wasn't all it's cracked up to be."
"And if it's any consolation to you, I understand why you had to do it." What they'd shared had been so deep, so all-encompassing, that his act of passion and anger had been inevitable.
"I'd take it back if I could, Sandy." He held her tight. "It didn't help either one of us, did it?"
"It helped us to make the break," she said, blinking back her tears."At the time, that seemed pretty important."
He pulled away from her slightly and tilted her chin so she could do nothing other than look into his eyes. "And here we are again. We can't seem to get away from each other, can we?"
"Doesn't seem that way." Her heart was pounding so violently that she could feel it at the base of her throat. "Long Island's a big place," she managed. "I think there's room enough here for both of us."
He released her from his embrace. His eyes glittered like chunks of onyx, and like onyx, they were unreadable. She wanted to step back into the protective circle of his arms, but he had closed himself off to her.
"This time it's up to you." He scribbled two phone numbers on the chalkboard that hung over her kitchen counter. One was local; the other, a New York City exchange. "I took the first step. The second one's up to you."
He turned and walked out the door, and Sandra wondered what Ed would say if she told him she wanted to transfer back to Sioux Falls.
Blizzards, tornadoes, and a forest of fallen trees suddenly seemed a whole lot safer than living anywhere near Michael McKay.
#
One great thing about living in a neighborhood with a world-class surgeon and a famous attorney was how quickly things got done.
By the time Michael returned to his house Sunday afternoon, not only had the power been restored, but his phone service was back as well.
There was a message from Annie Gage, one of his friends from work, two messages from neighbors asking if he wanted to come for dinner and one terse request to call his former in-laws in Florida. Just the sound of Art Bentley's voice was enough to set Michael's nerves on edge.
He knew David had the right to be with his grandparents – life had already dealt the kid a tougher blow than most five-year-olds should have to deal with – but, hell, Michael hated the thought of his son learning to be afraid of his own shadow, to be as suspicious and narrow-minded and lost as the Bentleys were.
He flipped off the machine. He didn't want to think about Art, or dinner, or even his job at the cathedral. What he wanted to do was get into his car and head back to Eaton's Harbor and drag Sandra Patterson back into bed.
What the hell was wrong with them that pride was always getting in the way of passion? Hadn't growing older and supposedly wiser done them any good at all?
Once again he'd made a grand macho-man exit. Stuff like that was terrific in movies, but proving to be hell in real life.
He looked out the window, and the sight of Jim Flannery clearing his walkway of hurricane debris caught his eye.
Maybe he couldn't jump back into his car and sweep her off her feet again, but there was one promise he'd made that he could do something about.
It wasn't much, but damn it, it was a start.
He went out to help his neighbor.
#
After two hours of trying to make sense of both her emotions and her account ledgers, Sandra finally gave up and got dressed. She was tugging on her favorite old jeans when she heard the noise in the yard.
Two young men in work shirts and sweatpants were stretching a huge canvas tarpaulin out on the lawn, while a third dragged an aluminum ladder up the driveway.
She pulled her sweater on and hurried out the back door.
"Are you here about the roof?" she asked, squinting into the sun.
"Yeah," the tallest of the three answered. "Your pal's got a lotta pull, lady. We had to move back four other jobs to do yours."
The wind was biting, and she wrapped her arms around her chest. Ed Gregory might not be the most physical of men, but when it came to getting a job done, he had no equal.
"Do me a favor," she said. "If you see Mr. Gregory tonight, tell him thanks."
"Gregory?" The young man looked puzzled. "Who's Gregory?" He pulled out a pile of crumpled work tickets from his back pocket and sifted through them. "Some big shot named Mike McKay put in the order."
"A big shot named Mike McKay?"
"Yeah. You want we should thank him for you?"
"No," she said. "Just tell him I'll call him tomorrow."
As if she'd ever had a choice in the matter.
Michael never did play fair.
It was nice to know some things never changed.
~~
Chapter Five~~
The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Divine dominated the skyline of upper Manhattan, no mean feat in a city famous for buildings that soared higher than most people dreamed.
Not even the Monday morning traffic – a hideous, Byzantine maze of tangled vehicles and snarling drivers – could dim the rush of sheer joy Michael experienced each time he saw the church.
That morning, it was almost enough to wipe away the bone-crushing fatigue caused by a sleepless night spent waiting for the phone to ring. He'd considered staying home from the site and doing some hurricane repairs, but he knew it was useless.
He also knew that every time a phone within a five-block radius rang, his stupid adrenaline would start flowing hot and fast, and he was afraid that sooner or later some innocent person soliciting for the American Heart Association would be sent into a coronary by his uncensored language.
No, it was better he went in to work. He needed something bigger than himself, larger than his own chaotic world, to think about.
The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Divine was certainly that.
Except for a break after the Second World War, the cathedral had been under construction for more than a hundred years, and would still be under construction well into the next century. In an age when ecclesiastical projects ran a distant second to trendy restaurants and pricey boutiques, funding for a project of such scope and duration was difficult to come by.
They were currently coming to the end of a major chunk of funding, and the cathedral staff was beginning to wonder if construction would actually continue much past the first of the year.
Michael was the master stonecutter on the project, a position of honor inherited from George Wallingford, the genius behind the renewal of interest in the medieval art. Just when it had seemed that stonecutting had gone the way of the dinosaur, Wallingford had finished work on the cathedral in Liverpool, England, and had come to America at his own expense to teach a new generation.
Michael knew Wallingford from his own days as an apprentice in Rome and Liverpool, back when he was just beginning to understand how much this work meant to him. Being asked to join Wallingford at St. Matthew's was the second best thing that had ever happened to him. Wallingford had wanted to bring in apprentices from abroad to work on the north tower and the finials and the gargoyles and everything else that had yet to be done, but Michael had surprised himself by voting that idea down.
There was something unsettling about the notion of investing millions of dollars in a work of art that rose amid the painful poverty of the city streets, streets that n
ot so long ago had been his own home. A hundred years ago, when the cathedral's foundation had been laid, this part of Manhattan had been farmland, pastoral and lovely.
Times had changed.
The city had sprawled northward; the church now rose above tenements and street-corner hustlers hawking their games of three-card monte.
It hadn't been hard for Michael to figure that resentment, ugly and dangerous, could halt the progress of the cathedral as surely as a lack of funds.
The strange and wonderful craft that had captured Michael's soul had, oddly enough, proved financially lucrative, and Michael, who'd never given much thought to the power of money, found himself with more than he'd ever dreamed. He wasn't rich, but he was a lot better off than the street punks who hung out on the corners looking for a way out.
It occurred to Michael that he could provide it.
So, after wheeling and dealing and bucking against the system for three dead-end months, he managed to convince the powers-that-be that the best place to find apprentices for the stonecutting work was right there in front of them.
Slowly the neighborhood was beginning to come back to life.
It didn't matter to Michael that the cathedral was unfinished; it didn't even matter that the cathedral wouldn't be finished in his lifetime or even during the lifetime of his son.
The completion of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Divine was a project larger than Michael, or Wallingford, or any of the hundreds of other craftspeople who would leave their mark in the stone. What they were building would still stand a thousand years from now.
What they did and who they were mattered.
St. Matthew, with its spires and turrets and two missing towers, was a testament to faith in the future, and for the first time in years, Michael was beginning to think his future might include the one thing that had eluded him all these years.
Love.
There was no denying that he and Sandy were still on shaky ground; no two people with as rocky a history as theirs could possibly come together after seven years and expect clear sailing.
Providence, in all its divine wisdom, had seen fit to bless their reunion with the worst hurricane to come sweeping up the Atlantic coast in the last seventy-two years.
Make that the worst two hurricanes.
And somehow it had seemed fitting.
There had been anger in their reunion – anger, and rage, and a bone-shaking sense of rightness that had taken the simple movements of sex and transformed them into something as magnificent as a piece of marble in the hands of an artist.
If she didn't call him by that night, he was going to go back to that house of hers by the water and –
A messenger whizzed past him on a sleek Italian bike and Michael slammed on the brakes, then turned onto Amsterdam Avenue and whipped into the vacant lot the construction crew used for parking. The parking area was the corner of what was by Manhattan standards a huge piece of property that currently did triple duty as a parking lot, storage area and baseball diamond.
Five years ago, when he had first begun piecing together his crew, it had seemed that every low-life sleazebag in Upper Manhattan would find his way to that corner lot, and Monday mornings the ground would be littered with used hypodermic needles, razor blades and other weapons of self-destruction. Michael still had to navigate through a mine field of beer bottles on occasion, but the change was happening. It was real.
And the work going on at St. Matthew's was largely responsible for it.
On those mean streets, it was miracle enough to turn one life around. The apprentice program he'd initiated had managed to turn thirty young lives around.
If a miracle like that were possible, was he crazy to begin to wonder if maybe, just maybe, he and Sandy might make it over the long haul?
Leon's mock-up of a gargoyle for the western turret was propped up on top of the gate, a snarling, fanged demon adorned with Michael's unmistakable head of hair and ever-present Walkman. When it came to gargoyles, each stonecutter was given free rein, and it wasn't unusual to see a lot of fire-breathing demons with the McKay look about them.
The soaring sound of Marvin Gaye rang out from the construction shed near the employees' door to the cathedral proper, and Michael grinned.
Oh, he understood all about artistic integrity and freedom of expression within the boundaries of his medieval craft, but when it came to music, he was one mean mother.
If it wasn't Smokey or Marvin or the Four Tops, with their sweet, sweet harmonies about love and longing, it just didn't play. Michael wasn't a man given to philosophical musings, but he knew that the songs you grew up with, the music you cut your sexual teeth on, was the music you turned to when life was good – and especially when it wasn't.
He was whistling "Shop Around" when he swung open the door to Altar Ego, the cathedral's design workshop, which was run by Annie Gage.
As usual, Altar Ego was a whirl of motion and sound and riotous color. He stepped around a bolt of fabric waiting to be silk-screened with the workshop's logo, dodged a Hispanic boy and a black girl who were setting up an enormous loom, then peered around the partition shielding the potters.
Rap music and Madonna vied with Placido Domingo and Vivaldi, and he upped the volume on his whistle. He was preparing to launch into a rousing version of "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" when a raucous laugh rose over the din.
"What are you doing here, McKay?" Annie Gage's distinctive voice floated across the room. She was a small, delicately made brunette whose stature belied her strength. "I thought you suburbanites were still digging out after the hurricanes."
He walked over to where she was supervising a trainee on the intricacies of silk-screening.
"I have the fastest shovel in the east. Besides, I lucked out. Not too much damage to my property." He told her about the severe damage to most of Long Island, which still included loss of electricity.
"I told you not to move out there east of no-man's land," Annie said. "No civilized person moves to the other side of the East River."
"I was born on the other side of the East River. As far as I remember, Queens is still part of New York City."
"Barely." She adjusted the screen, then gave her trainee the sign to start work. "I think you were crazy to leave Manhattan."
"You've been telling me that for three years now."
She brushed her hands on the sides of her khaki pants and led him toward her office, where the seemingly bottomless coffeepot awaited. "It bears repeating," she said as she grabbed their mugs from the shelf over the refrigerator and handed him his. "Sooner or later, you'll come to your senses."
It was old territory, but since they both enjoyed a good argument, he plunged right in. "I came to my senses the day I moved out of the city."
Annie grunted her thanks as he poured the coffee. "Interest rates are good right now. I bet you could turn a decent profit on that barn of yours."
"What about that shoe box you call home?" he asked, taking a gulp of pure caffeine. "Why don't you put it on the block and find out what it's like to have some land to call your own?"
Her narrow shoulders shuddered in horror. "Wash your mouth out."
He lifted his coffee mug. "Can I use this?"
Annie took a sip, made a face, then added sugar to her cup. "Do I seem the type to spend my Saturdays pushing a lawn mower around the south forty?"
"Live dangerously," he said, settling himself in the swivel chair behind her desk and putting his feet on the windowsill. "You might find you like the great outdoors."
"No chance," she said, perching on the edge of the rusty lateral file cabinet adjacent to the fridge. "I only like the great outdoors when there's a picture window keeping it where it belongs."
"I'll be damned. You're a coward!"
She shot him as fierce a look as a woman who barely topped five feet could muster. "I brave the IRT every night, McKay, while you're on your way home to your own private Stepford. You tell me who's the coward."
He reached for one of the bagels stacked on a chipped blue plate that rested atop the file cabinet. Amenities like cream cheese were too good for the cathedral staff.
He made a production out of biting off a chunk. "Stale."
"So get your butt in earlier and you can pick them up at Bagel Master."
"I'm a commuter. That gives me certain rights. You city dwellers have to do the donkey work."
"I must say you're in a disgustingly easy-going mood for a Monday morning. David must be home."
"Almost," Michael said. "His plane gets into Newark at three."
"Hmm." She narrowed her eyes. "Is that happiness I see, or relief?"
"Both. Art is beginning to talk about longer visitation rights again." He stopped. Talking about it would make his vague fears seem to real.
She put her hand on his forearm for a second. "Listen, McKay, you've already been nicer to them than they deserve. David is your son. Another man might not have given them any visitation rights at all."
Michael's sympathy for the Bentleys had vanished not long after Diana's death, when they had suddenly refused to part with David and started talking about a custody fight.
"Believe me, Gage, I'm doing it for Davey, not Art and Margaret." His son's world had been shattered twice: first by divorce, then by the death of his mother and stepfather. Michael was going to move heaven and earth to make sure it didn't happen a third time.
"How do you think he'd feel about trying his hand at the potter's wheel?" she asked, pulling a cigarette out of the pocket of her lab coat and lighting it. "You could bring him here from the airport. I promised him he could the last time he was here, but Dominica was working under a deadline. I tried to explain that to him, but . . . " She shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of defeat.
Michael laughed. "Yeah, and you were more disappointed than Davey was." He went to cadge a cigarette off Annie, and then caught himself, remembering his vow to quit. "If you've got the time and the patience, he's yours."
Annie was one of those rare people who were instantly comfortable with children without being patronizing or distant. His mother's death had made David quiet and cautious when it came to forming ties with new people. Annie had instantly been able to get past his defenses and make the little boy laugh.
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