All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  “I bet I know what you want,” she said.

  He put his hand under her dress.

  “She thinks she knows what Tommy wants?” he said. “What does she think he wants?”

  She squirmed a little as he touched her under her dress, and she giggled again.

  “You want to fuck me,” she said.

  “Tell Tommy what that means.”

  She told him carefully, and explicitly, reciting it as he’d taught her, anatomically, saying all the dirty words carefully and clearly. She knew he liked to hear them. While she talked he continued to touch her.

  “Will you do that to me?” she said when she was through.

  “What do we say?”

  “Please?”

  “Please what?”

  “Please fuck me?”

  He smiled then, and picked her up in his arms and carried her into the next room to the huge canopied bed. It too was cluttered with stuffed animals and clothing, food wrappers, magazines, and tissues. He shook his head with annoyance and put her on the bed on her back. She lay limply as he’d placed her, with a dreamy little smile on her face, and let him undress her, and lay quite still while he had sex with her. He had sex with her for a long time, trying to ejaculate, until finally he got tired and rolled off of her. They lay together quietly, on their backs, beside each other, looking up at the paislied canopy above them.

  “You didn’t come,” she said.

  “Tommy’s got a lot on his mind,” he said.

  He felt frustrated, unfinished.

  “Are you mad at me?” she said.

  “No.”

  There was a pair of white cotton underpants on the coverlet near him. He brushed them angrily to the floor.

  “She doesn’t keep Tommy’s house too nice for him,” he said.

  “I hate always picking up,” she said. “Why can’t I ever have a maid?”

  “I’ve told you before, this is our secret place. Nobody else can come here.”

  She nodded silently.

  Chris

  Chris’s office was down two corridors from Flaherty’s, and looked out onto the big vacant brick plaza that had seemed so good an idea on the drawing board. You could have war games on it, Chris thought, and no one would notice. Behind him the door opened. He turned. It was Flaherty, with his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled. He had a newspaper in his hand.

  “You seen this fucking Cityside column today in the Globe?”

  “Just the headline,” Chris said. “I didn’t read the piece.”

  “Didn’t read it?” Flaherty said. “Fucking guy eviscerates us and you didn’t even read it?”

  “Why would I want to read about my own evisceration?” Chris said.

  Flaherty stared at him. Then he began to read aloud.

  “‘The good Dr. Sheridan from Hahvad appears to be just another bit of window dressing in the five-and-dime store that Hizzoner runs out of our City Hall. Appointed two months ago with great fanfare and a lot of photo ops, Dr. Sheridan has kept unblemished the city’s record of ineptitude. The son of Boston Homicide Commander Gus Sheridan, he has stayed dead even with his father. Neither has made any progress whatsoever in ending the Townie Gang Wars.’ You want more?”

  Chris shook his head. “Where would columnists be without moral outrage?” he said.

  “Don’t give me a lot of intellectual Cambridge bullshit,” Flaherty said. “What kind of progress have you made?”

  “We got phone taps on both Butchie and Pat,” Chris said. “We’ve got a bug in Butchie O’Brien’s liquor store. We haven’t heard anything useful. We’ve interviewed everybody connected to either the O’Briens or the Malloys and no one has said anything useful. Sergeant Cassidy and I have reinterviewed everybody who can be called a witness. And we got, in the words of the poet, Katz-an-goo.”

  “Well, do something else.”

  “Like what? You think I’m Philo Vance? Run around with a magnifying glass, discover some heretofore unseen pecker tracks?”

  “I didn’t appoint you to tell me you couldn’t do it,” Flaherty said.

  “There’s this problem with evidence,” Chris said.

  “Don’t evidence me,” Flaherty said. “Find some. Manufacture some. I don’t give a shit. You may as well be working for your fucking brother-in-law.”

  “He’s not my brother-in-law,” Chris said.

  “Girlfriend-in-law. Whatever,” Flaherty said. “Don’t get distracted—November’s coming.”

  “I didn’t know I was working on your campaign,” Chris said.

  “Well, you do now,” Flaherty said. “Everybody’s working on my campaign. That’s the current business of this administration, ya unnerstand, working on my fucking campaign.”

  “What about the part where you tell me you’ll take care of me after you’re elected?”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s how it works. I take care of everybody. You know that. What the fuck do you think we do this for? Christ, you sound more like your old man every time I talk with you. I never saw two guys said less and mean more.”

  “It’s probably better than the other way around,” Chris said.

  “Not in politics,” Flaherty said. “I can’t fire you right now, make me look like an asshole. But I want something to happen, and it better happen quick. I go down on this issue, I’m going to take you with me.”

  “I guess that’s a commitment of sorts,” Chris said. “These days I’ll take it where I can get it.”

  “Read the fucking column,” Flaherty said, and dropped the newspaper on Chris’s desk and walked out.

  Chris picked up the newspaper, rolled it carefully, and put it in the wastebasket.

  “Fuck you,” he said out loud, and heard himself and laughed briefly.

  Gus

  Still in workout clothes, Gus stood with his son on the Larz Anderson Bridge in the late afternoon, with the sun warm on his back, leaning his forearms on the low brick wall, looking at the Charles River curving below them, watching the racing shells tended by motorboats beating upstream against the languid current.

  “Grace and I are separated,” Chris said.

  Gus felt the sadness flicker in his stomach.

  “You happy about that?” Gus said.

  “No.”

  “Her idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody else?”

  “She says no.”

  Gus nodded, staring down at the slow water.

  “You have your doubts?” Chris said.

  “People like backup,” Gus said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Just happen?” Gus said.

  “No. Happened a while ago, before Flaherty offered me the job.”

  “You know where she is?”

  “No. Not exactly. I know she is in Boston somewhere. She calls me regularly. We try to meet once a week and talk. She says she doesn’t want to lose me.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I say she won’t.”

  “You want her back,” Gus said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you need to not quit,” Gus said. “You need to be tough enough not to quit.”

  “You’re the tough guy,” Chris said.

  Gus shook his head.

  “I quit,” he said.

  On the bridge, people passed them walking dogs, joggers, people riding bicycles, people on roller skates, people in cars. Below them the eight-man crews drove the long shells along rhythmically.

  “You gotta break the chain,” Gus said. “My father, me, now you.”

  “Unlucky in love?” Chris said.

  “Luck’s probably not involved,” Gus said.

  “We do badly at love,” Chris said.

  “Yeah. Very.”

  “Family tradition?” Chris said.

  “Whatever,” Gus said. “You got a chance to break the chain.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because maybe you’re the one hasn’t fastened onto the wrong woman.”

  “
I think I may have fastened onto her in the wrong way, though.”

  “You can change that,” Gus said.

  “And if I can’t?”

  “Life goes on,” Gus said.

  The light changed at Memorial Drive and the traffic moved forward across the bridge.

  “I’m not sure I would want it to,” Chris said.

  “I know,” Gus said softly. “I know.”

  Laura

  Grace and Laura Winslow sat together at a white wicker table in the atrium off the kitchen. The sun coming in through the glass roof enriched the polished flagstone floor. They were drinking tea.

  “Has he been faithful to you?”

  “Chris?” Grace smiled slightly. “Oh, I’m pretty sure he has.”

  “That’s no small thing,” Laura said softly.

  Grace stared at her mother, and started to speak. “You—” Grace said, and stopped. “It isn’t about anything like that.”

  “Sex?”

  “We have enough sex,” Grace said.

  “That’s no small thing either,” Laura said.

  “It isn’t perfect, but it’s frequent and it distracts us from our problems.”

  Laura gazed at her daughter for a long moment, and smiled—more to herself than at Grace.

  “It’s nice to have a distraction, I imagine.”

  Grace shrugged. Laura waited, her whole self focused on her daughter, this second self, grown up before her.

  “But,” she said, “it’s imperfect.”

  “Chris is so fierce,” Grace said. “Our relationship seems so all-important, there’s no fun to it. He loves me so … grimly. I like sex”—she smiled at Laura—“if a daughter may say so to her mother.”

  “Her mother is very interested,” Laura said.

  “But Chris puts so much weight on it. On everything. Everything is hugely important. Nothing is frivolous.”

  “If someone never had experienced that,” Laura said, “one might think it desirable.”

  Again Grace looked at her mother and paused. They sipped some tea. Outside the atrium, the garden, still wet from the night, glistened in the sunshine.

  “Are you talking about you and Daddy?”

  Laura smiled.

  “Probably,” she said. “And we should be talking about you.”

  “Christ, I don’t even know him,” Grace said. “With me he’s always stayed a hundred miles away.”

  Grace waited a moment as if Laura would comment. Laura didn’t speak.

  “It’s very tiring,” Grace said, “being the basis of someone’s life.”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “I’m sure it is. Is it out of fashion to ask if you love Chris?”

  “No, it’s the right question,” Grace said.

  “And?”

  “And I think I do,” Grace said. “And I think I’m not going to give up on him, and I’m not going to let him boil his life away like his father did.”

  The sun brought out the red tones in her daughter’s auburn hair. Not a little girl anymore.

  “But you can’t marry him.”

  “No. He can’t marry me.”

  “But he needs to be with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s a difference.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Do you want to marry him?”

  “I might if he wanted me as me, and if there wasn’t always this love-hate thing under the surface that I don’t understand.”

  “You want unconditional love.”

  “Absolutely,” Grace said. “I am, and deserve to be, a Goddamned love object. Not some kind of functional necessity.”

  “I never quite thought of it that way,” Laura said, smiling.

  Grace grinned back at her.

  “Well, it’s time you started. You’re still a good-looking woman.”

  “I could have done without the ‘still,’” Laura said.

  “Sorry, but you are. And you deserve some affection. Daddy appears to have no interest in you.”

  “Perhaps I too am some sort of functional necessity.”

  “Do you love him?” Grace said.

  Laura was quiet, thinking about the question. She knew the answer, she was speculating on what to say to a child about her father.

  “No,” Laura said. “I don’t. I guess I never did.”

  “Well, the hell with him,” Grace said. “Find someone to love. You deserve to have someone to love you.”

  Laura nodded slowly.

  “What will you do?” she said.

  “I have done it already. I left.”

  “Though you love him,” Laura said.

  “Though I think I love him. It scares me. I’m so worried about him that I feel like I can’t breathe. But something has to break the logjam. We can’t be happy if something doesn’t; and I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  “That seems very brave to me,” Laura said.

  “I know what I want and I know it is okay to want it, and I will get it. If not with Chris, then with someone else. That’s up to Chris. I can live without Chris. He has to be able to live without me. Then maybe we can live with each other.”

  There was a light wind outside, and it tossed the budding flowers in the garden and riffled the leaves of the low shrubs. Two sparrows splashed in the bird-bath.

  “What about Daddy?” Grace said.

  “He’ll barely notice.”

  “How do you think Cabot will feel?” Grace said. “The election and all.”

  “Cabot wants to please his father,” Laura said. “For himself, he would be happy to play tennis, drink martinis, and fuck every woman who walks erect.”

  “Mother!”

  “It’s true, Grace. Your brother is a lovely boy, but his interests are simple.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear before.”

  “I always tried not to in front of you.”

  “Cabot’s just doing it for Daddy?”

  Laura nodded.

  “So why doesn’t Daddy run himself, if he is so hung up on the Senate?”

  “He feels that there are things in his past,” Laura said.

  “What things?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “You don’t know?” Grace said.

  Laura shook her head again.

  “I never asked,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It seemed to me that a good wife shouldn’t ask,” Laura said. “Though I know that is not the current correct definition of a good wife.”

  Grace held her teacup in two hands and took a small sip. She kept the cup there at her lips and stared at her mother over the rim.

  “Maybe not,” Grace said. “But you’ve been a hell of a mother.”

  “I have wanted to be. It has been what mattered.”

  “Only that?”

  Laura was quiet as she thought about the question. Then she nodded.

  “Only that,” she said.

  “Oh, Mother,” Grace said, and put her hand across the table. Laura took it and held it in both of hers.

  “We’ll be all right,” Laura said. “We’ll be fine.”

  Gus

  Gus met Laura Winslow for a drink in the bar at the Ritz-Carlton. They sat in the window that looked out onto Arlington Street, with the Public Garden beyond. She ordered a glass of merlot. Gus had Scotch and soda.

  “I love this room,” Laura said.

  Gus nodded.

  “But I don’t get here often,” Laura said.

  “Me either,” Gus said.

  The waiter brought them a small bowl of nuts. Gus pushed the bowl closer to Laura.

  “Oh, God,” Laura said. “Save me from myself.”

  Gus smiled and took some nuts. Laura glanced around the bar.

  “Are you wearing a gun?” Laura said.

  Gus smiled again. “Always,” he said, “except with my jammies.”

  “Probably not many other people in here wearing one,” Laura said.

  �
��No,” Gus said.

  There was a pause. Outside the window was a steady coming and going of taxicabs.

  “We don’t know each other very well,” Laura said.

  Gus nodded.

  “But our families are so intertwined,” Laura said. “And I’ve always—I’ve always thought we liked each other, even though we didn’t know each other very well.”

  Laura’s face was smooth and well made up. Her blue eyes were unusually large, and wide apart. There were small pleasant crow’s-feet at the corners. Her mouth was wide, and carefully done, framed with faint parenthetical smile lines. She was trim and looked healthy, like someone who exercised a lot out of doors. Gus had always thought that her lower lip was sensuous.

  “I like you, Laura,” he said.

  “And I like you.”

  “Perfect,” Gus said. “Let’s elope.”

  Laura smiled.

  “What about the kids, Gus?”

  “Let them elope on their own,” Gus said.

  He felt lighter with Laura Winslow than he ever felt. He always thought of bubble bath when he thought of her, and silk lingerie and high-priced perfume. The joke about eloping teased him.

  “That doesn’t seem to be their plan,” Laura said.

  “Not at the moment,” Gus said.

  “It’s why I wanted us to talk.”

  Gus nodded. His drink was gone. So was hers. He signaled the waiter.

  “Tommy can’t talk about such things,” Laura said, “And I don’t seem really to know Peggy.”

  How kindly put, Gus thought. The waiter brought their drinks.

  “So I thought maybe you and I should talk.”

  Gus nodded. He sipped some of the Scotch. Outside the window, across Arlington Street, tourists with children were trailing through the Public Garden toward the swan boats. He leaned back a little in his chair. The Ritz bar. The elegant face across from him. The perfect Scotch and soda. The unhurried late afternoon still waiting. He felt the tight coil of himself loosen.

  “About my son and your daughter,” Gus said.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s to say?”

  “Does Chris love her?”

  Gus was quiet, thinking about it. This beautiful woman was talking to him about the one thing that mattered to him.

  “I think he does, but I don’t think I know enough about love, Laura, to make much of a judgment.”