Flirting With Pete: A Novel

by Barbara Delinsky

  That changed everything.

  Stepping back from the desk, she faced the shelves of books again. There was more to the journal. There had to be. But where?

  She went shelf by shelf, book by book, but there was nothing that remotely resembled an envelope like the one on the desk. Meg had dusted here, but if she had found something, she would surely have left it. Casey didn’t think she was bold enough to clean things out and dispose of random papers.

  She moved to the side shelves and studied those with the same care. When she found nothing, she went into the den. There were bookshelves here, too. Again, she stood before each, raising her eyes higher and higher, moving from one shelf to the next. Realizing that she needed to push books aside, pull some out, and look behind, she glanced around for a chair to stand on, but everything here was large and too heavy to move.

  Not so in the office. The desk chair was on casters.

  She was returning for it when something she had seen earlier registered. It took her a minute, standing with her hands on her hips in front of the side shelves, before she spotted what she wanted. Without the protrusion of cabinets to stand on, she pulled the chair over and stepped up with care. Holding the edge of a shelf for balance, she reached as high as she could and grasped several books. She felt the desk chair slide out a smidgen and shifted her weight accordingly. She was in the process of lowering both the books and herself when the screen door opened fast.

  “You’re going to fall,” Jordan warned.

  She could hear him approaching. “No. Don’t touch. I’m fine.” Seconds later, she managed to get a hand on the arm of the chair and lower herself the rest of the way. It wasn’t a particularly graceful move, certainly not ladylike, but she did it herself. That was important to her.

  Smoothly, holding the books in one hand and her robe closed with the other, she got her feet out from under her, lowered them to the ground, and stood. Jordan was taller than she, so much that she had to look up. Her smile was broad enough— triumphant enough— to compensate for it.

  “There,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad.” She held up the books. “And I got what I wanted. This must be my day.” Mustering as much dignity as she could under the circumstances, she slipped around the gardener and headed up the stairs.

  *

  Little Falls was in the atlas all right— once in Minnesota, once in New York, and once in New Jersey.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, where Jordan wouldn’t see her, Casey located each on the map. She immediately ruled out New Jersey; the Little Falls there was too close to metropolitan areas to be as rural as Jenny Clyde’s Little Falls. The ones in Minnesota and New York were possibilities, since they were more remote. She guessed there were others as well, places where the population of the town was so small that it didn’t appear on the map, and then there were hamlets that weren’t quite towns. Little Falls could be a pocket of South Hadley Falls in Massachusetts, River Falls in Wisconsin, or Idaho Falls in Idaho. It could be a corner of Great Falls in either Montana or South Carolina. Or it could be a name that was made up by the author of the journal for the sake of privacy.

  The Sierra Club publications that she’d taken down with the atlas focused on northern New England, but she checked the index anyway. When she came up with a blank, she refilled her coffee and went to the window.

  Jordan was still down there, visible between the boughs of the trees, planting impatiens. He was working between the flats and a bag of loam, alternately sitting back on his heels and leaning forward. For a tall man, he seemed perfectly comfortable on the ground. He seemed perfectly comfortable with his plants, period.

  She admired that. Gardeners, carpenters, outdoorsmen— she appreciated people who could use their bodies that way. They didn’t have to run for the sake of exercise or do yoga to relieve stress. She envied them the simplicity of their lives.

  He glanced up in her direction. She might have shrunk back to keep from being seen. Instead, she raised the mug in a small salute, and sipped the hot brew. She could look if she wanted. She was the boss.

  She was still watching Jordan when the garden door opened again and Meg came through. She talked with him for a minute, shot a surprised look at the house, then hurried in, but not through the office. Casey watched her disappear into a corner of the garden. Seconds later, there was the slam of a door, then footsteps running up the stairs.

  Casey waited at the top until Meg was in sight. “How did you get in?” she called down.

  “The service entrance,” Meg said as she ran up the rest of the way. “It’s on the side. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were staying over. I’d have come earlier. I picked up fresh bread. Can I make you something for breakfast?”

  Casey shook her head. When Meg’s face fell, she turned the headshake into a nod. “I would adore the following: one egg over easy, cooked with very little fat; one slice of toast, dry; and more coffee. How’s that?”

  Meg beamed. “Easy as pie,” she said and set off.

  Casey went up to the bedroom for her clothes, fully planning to wait to shower when she got back to her condo. But the bathroom was too tempting— everything new, everything clean, everything just begging to be used. She found soap. She found shampoo. She found body lotion. She even found a toothbrush and toothpaste in its own little travel pack.

  Twenty minutes later, all scrubbed and clean, albeit in yesterday’s clothes, she left the bedroom. She was about to go downstairs when she heard a low murmur coming from Connie’s bedroom. She paused, listened. She crept to the door and was trying to make out words when the murmuring stopped.

  Seconds later, Meg emerged and smiled. “Just cleaning up after the night. You look beautiful. I have breakfast ready for you. Would you like to eat in the kitchen? Or on the patio? Dr. Unger always had breakfast outside in weather like this. Jordan certainly doesn’t mind. He’ll just work right along. You can sit there and read the newspaper. It was out front. I brought it in with me.”

  “I have a better idea,” Casey said. “I need to check something on the Web. Can you bring breakfast down to the office?”

  *

  While she ate, Casey searched for information on Little Falls. She found references to those she had already discovered, but none of them felt right to her. Connie was from Maine; he claimed Jenny Clyde was kin. Casey searched through information on Maine, but found no reference to a Little Falls. She found Island Falls, Lisbon Falls, Kezar Falls, and Livermore Falls. In theory, Little Falls could be a hamlet of any one of them. She tried a second search engine, then a third, but came up with nothing definitive, and by then she was out of time.

  Back at her condo, she put on makeup, secured her hair in a marginally professional twist, and changed into a pair of linen slacks and a silk blouse. She was halfway out the door again when she returned for running gear. As an afterthought, she dropped makeup and a change of clothes into the gym bag. Then she returned to her car.

  Jordan’s Jeep was gone when she drove down the narrow alley and pulled in at the back garden door. She didn’t have time to feel disappointment, though, because as soon as she was down through the garden and into the house, her first client arrived.

  There was no dwelling on thoughts of Little Falls then. Nor could she dwell on the oddness of seeing clients in what had been her father’s office. There was a flicker of thought from time to time— the image of a little girl playing grown-up sitting behind this very big desk— but the truth was, she was with her clients mostly in the sitting area, a far more relaxed place to be.

  She saw clients at eleven, twelve, and one— spending fifty minutes with each and ten minutes entering notes. Between two and two-thirty, she nibbled on a sandwich while she made phone calls. Then came another four clients.

  The first of those was Joyce Lewellen. Casey had always liked Joyce. She was a precise woman, and while she did make a tailored appearance and liked her life neatly shaped, she fell far short of being obsessive-compulsive. She communicated well and w
as insightful enough to easily identify a problem. Casey had always suspected that Joyce used their sessions simply to air her thoughts to an unbiased ear.

  Joyce was in her early forties. Eighteen months before, her husband had died of complications from what should have been a routine hernia operation. Unable to accept his death, much less explain it to their children, Joyce had needed to find someone at fault. She had gone the route of a medical malpractice suit. Her case wasn’t strong; she’d had to talk with three lawyers before finding one who would represent her.

  Casey had seen her weekly for several months at one stretch. Joyce’s major issue was anger. It was keeping her up at night, distracting her during the day, making her a one-issue woman. Her therapy had been focused on letting go of the anger.

  “It’s been a while,” Casey said when they were seated opposite each other, Joyce on the sofa, Casey in a chair.

  “Four months,” Joyce acknowledged. She was outwardly composed; the only sign of tension was her hands, which were tightly clenched in her lap. “I’ve been okay. So have the girls. They’re back doing their usual stuff— soccer, scouts, ballet. They’ll be starting summer camp in another week.”

  “And you? Are you working?”

  Joyce had designed store windows prior to her marriage. She had done some freelancing after the girls started school, but had let that go when Norman died. Casey and she had discussed her returning to work if not for the money, which she could use, then for its therapeutic value.

  Now she wrinkled her nose. “No. I’ve wanted to be available for anything the lawyer needed. I know, I know. You said that was only keeping the anger alive, but I can’t help myself. I need to do this for Norman. But I’ve been okay with it, really I have. The lawyer’s working. My anger’s under control.”

  “Are you going out with friends again?”

  “Well, for lunch. Not evenings yet.”

  “You’re still wearing black.”

  “It seemed appropriate while the lawsuit went on. Last month, there was a hearing before a judge. Both sides presented affidavits and legal briefs. The other side filed for a summary judgment, claiming that we could not prove the case to a jury. The judge’s decision is due at the end of the week.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I’m a basket case,” Joyce said in a high voice. “That’s why I’m here. Yes, I need the money, but it’s more than that. It’s the principle of the thing. Norman shouldn’t have died. He has two little girls who miss him. He’ll never see them become teenagers or get married or have kids. And me, I depended on him. We were supposed to grow old together. Now we can’t. Someone ought to pay for that.”

  Casey heard the same old anger. Back at the start, they had talked about bad things happening to good people. Joyce hadn’t accepted it then, any more than she was accepting it now.

  “Our chances of winning aren’t good,” Joyce went on. “My lawyer said it when I first hired him, and he said it again at the end of the hearing. There were things that the judge did and questions he asked that didn’t bode well for our cause. So what am I going to do? What if he rules against us? I mean, this doesn’t have to be the end. We could take the case to an appeals court. But my lawyer won’t do that. He says we have to abide by the judge’s decision now, and maybe he’s right. There are times when I feel so sick of all this that I just want it over. Then I get a second wind and I want to win; I just do.”

  “If you do win, what then?”

  “I’ll have proven something. I’ll be able to put all this behind me and move on.”

  “And if you don’t win?”

  Joyce was slower in answering. “I don’t know. That’s what’s making me nervous. We keep talking about anger, you and me. But what do I do with the anger if there’s no one left to blame?”

  *

  Three client sessions later, Casey was still thinking of Joyce’s words. It had been easy to sustain anger while Connie had been alive; as long as he was living and breathing, he could pick up the phone, send her an e-mail or mail her a note, even pass her a message through an intermediary. Now that he was dead, those avenues were gone. And her anger?

  Heading for the garden now, she couldn’t sustain it. She tried. She thought of moving the patio table and chairs to another spot, simply to do what she wanted. Three steps out from under the pergola, though, and she couldn’t think of a better spot for the table than where it already was.

  The garden was a black hole when it came to negative thoughts, sucking them right in, making them vanish.

  The sky was overcast, the air more humid, but the place didn’t suffer for the absence of sun. If anything, the diffuse light gave it a plusher feel. The trees were delineated from each other by color, rather than the texture of their boughs. The flowers were muted, the stones softer.

  The instant she unclipped her hair from the wide barrette that had kept it contained, it began to curl and swell. Combing her fingers through sped the process. She lifted the mass and closed her eyes, only to open them seconds later when, with the slide of the screen door and the patter of footsteps, Meg emerged from the house. She carried a bottle of wine and a plate filled with mini skewers of grilled beef and veggies. Casey was wondering how she was going to make a dent in the pile when company arrived to help.

  “Just took a chance you’d be here,” Brianna explained gaily as she quickly dug in. “I could get used to this.”

  Casey was thinking she could, too.

  “So what’s it like, practicing where he practiced?” Brianna asked.

  Setting a cleaned skewer aside, Casey sat back in the patio chair with her wine and tried to process her feelings. “Very, very weird. I kept thinking, What are you doing here, Casey? He wrote at this desk. He talked on this phone. The ideas that came out of this office are read all over the world. And now all that’s left here is little old me.”

  “What’s wrong with little old you?”

  “I can’t begin to do what he did. I identified with my one-o’clock client. She’s a really bright, really successful entrepreneur— owns three upscale restaurants that have absolutely taken off— but she suffers from a severe impostor complex.”

  “What’s it from?”

  “Her father owned a deli. Her mother kept house. They thought she was throwing her life away going to culinary school. They warned her against buying the first restaurant, said she was getting in over her head when she opened the second, and when she opened the third, they took her out of their will.”

  “Why?”

  “They said that she was reckless and that they didn’t want her squandering their hard-earned savings. So here she is, solidly in the black, doing better each year, and still she feels like those restaurants are a deck of cards on the verge of collapse. Her parents see her that way. It’s been ingrained in her.”

  “But that’s not your story. Connie never told you you weren’t any good.”

  “Not in words,” Casey said, rubbing the rim of the wineglass against her lips.

  “Would he have left you this place, knowing you’d practice here, if he thought you were a lousy therapist?”

  Casey shrugged. She had no idea what Connie had thought about her, good or bad.

  “You have a great practice, Casey. Joy and I took the easy way out, going in-house.” Joy worked for the state, Brianna for a rehab center.

  “I wouldn’t call what you do easy.”

  “But we don’t have to worry about getting clients. They’re always there. You do have to worry, and look at the practice you’ve built. Give me a rundown on today’s list.”

  Casey could count on Brianna to boost her morale. “Two phobias, the low self-esteem, three adjustment disorders, and one panic attack.”

  “Yours or hers?”

  “Hers. She couldn’t find the townhouse. She panics when things don’t fall just perfectly into place, and begins to imagine all sorts of things.”

  “Like?”

  “Her husband’s voi
ce. He has abused her verbally for so many years that she actually hears him yelling at her. It sends her into a tizzy.”

  “Has she reached the stage where she knows that he isn’t really there?” Brianna asked.

  “Intellectually, yes. Emotionally, no. There are times when she’s paralyzed by it.”

  “Should she leave him?”

  “Yes— if the issue were simply her own personal development. But it’s more complex than that. They have four children still at home, and the only career she knows is being a homemaker. She considers him her employer. If she quits, where does she go, what does she do, what happens to the kids? No, she won’t leave him. The best I can do is to help her gain perspective— stand back, evaluate what she does well, learn to deal with the things that he says. She really does hear his voice.”

  Brianna was suspiciously silent. She sipped her wine, looked momentarily pensive. Then, quietly, she asked, “How’s your mom?”

  Casey sent her a sidelong glance. “Speaking of hearing a voice.”

  “Do you still?”

  “In my way.”

  “Casey,” Brianna scolded softly.

  “I know. If she’s in the persistent vegetative state that the doctors claim, she doesn’t hear, doesn’t think, doesn’t know. But I feel her there, Bria. I swear I do. I know what she’s thinking.”

  “Is there any improvement?”

  “She had another seizure today. The doctor says she’s failing.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I should be relieved. What she’s living can’t be called a life.”

  “So what are you feeling?”

  “If she’s failing, I know it’s for the best. I don’t cry anymore. After three years, I’m all cried out. I don’t even start shaking like I did then, I’m so used to seeing her this way.”

  “So what are you feeling?” Brianna persisted.

  “Devastated,” Casey said with a hand on the ache in her chest.

  *

  Over three painful years, Casey had learned that the best way to deal with the devastation was to fill her mind with other things. She was fine when she was with clients, when it was her job to feel their thoughts. She was fine when she was doing yoga, running, or playing with friends.