by Nancy Martin
“She looked good, though, didn’t she?” Libby unlocked the minivan and got in. As we fastened our seat belts, she said, “I don’t suppose she’d like any Potions and Passions gadgets. Emma probably has scads already.”
As Libby drove me home to Blackbird Farm, we both thought privately about Emma, whose life was more of a bonfire of insanities than our own. Our little sister had a tendency to self-combust when things went bad, and I always felt the need to step in. But as the headlights swept the bleakly leaning fence posts and finally flashed squarely on the bright blue tarp that flapped on one corner of the roof where a major leak had burst through, I realized my own home sweet home looked more like a derelict ruin every day. And in just a few more weeks I owed another installment on my tax repayment plan. Unless the Publishers Clearing House crew showed up soon, I had more problems than Emma on the loose.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” I said to Libby.
“I know you want to kidnap her,” Libby said. “You’re thinking we shall capture her and take her back to rehab. Well, I have handcuffs now. They’re fur-lined, very comfy.”
“Do you think that’s what we should do, Lib?”
“No,” she said. “Emma’s an adult.”
“But she needs help.”
“Nora, I may not be the world’s best mom, but I know when my kids need to figure things out for themselves.”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll be able to think more clearly then.”
“The lights are on in your kitchen,” she said, suddenly observant.
Hastily, I got out of the minivan. “I hate coming home to a dark house.”
“Is somebody inside?”
“Good night!”
I dug my house key out and waved to her. Hugging myself against the biting air, I hurried up the slate sidewalk. The porch was still Christmas-swagged with hemlock boughs trimmed from the trees out near the old canal.
On the porch steps I found a neatly wrapped package tied with a holiday bow. Another fruitcake from one of the neighbors, I assumed. I picked it up and carried it inside.
I didn’t need to unlock the door.
But I stepped into the kitchen and yelped.
“Sorry,” growled the thug in front of the open refrigerator.
“Who are you?”
“Me? We met once before.” He took a beer from the top shelf. “I’m the evil minion. At least, that’s what the boss calls me. I’m Danny.”
He wore a snug leather jacket over a hooded sweatshirt and jeans. A stringy ponytail straggled out from underneath a navy ski cap with a Nautica logo, a touch of class for the aspiring Mafia wiseguy.
I closed the door, but kept my distance. “What are you doing here? There’s no car parked outside.”
He opened the beer with a twist. “Boss told me to leave it next door.”
“Next door” was now a used-car lot. Michael and I first became acquainted when he purchased five acres of Blackbird Farm, a transaction that had helped me stabilize my tax situation, but ruined the riverfront view as Michael erected Mick’s Muscle Cars on the spot. Complete with plastic flags and Muzak, the sales lot despoiled two hundred years of Blackbird family history and also provided a steady parade of Michael’s merry band of employees. They usually didn’t venture into my house, though.
This one took a slug of beer and looked me up and down. “That’s some getup you’re wearing.”
Involuntarily, I checked to be sure the coat was fully buttoned. “I see you’ve made yourself at home.”
He grinned and lifted the beer to indicate the hospitality of the house. “Thanks.”
The kitchen at Blackbird Farm was built under the impression that George Washington and his troops might drop by for breakfast before crossing the Delaware. Large enough for a skirmish to break out, it was decorated by a long-dead Blackbird with a love for baronial melodrama. The high ceilings were perfect for hanging game birds or sharp weaponry. The ancient stove, as big as an iron forge, was capable of baking pies, simmering cauldrons of stew, warming stacks of dinner plates and keeping baby chicks alive all at the same time.
“Where, exactly, is your boss?” I asked.
The man in question made his entrance at that moment, simultaneously shrugging into his coat and terminating a cell phone call. He moved with quick purpose—a man with a mission. Nonetheless, I felt the seismic event that shook me to my molten core every time I saw him.
Tall and looming, Michael said, “Rough night?”
“An interesting one,” I replied.
In the light of the kitchen, I was reminded that Michael was not a handsome man. In fact, his looks—brutal and blunt, with a nose broken numerous times and jaw that looked almost cruel—often frightened strangers. He was also very tall, with threatening shoulders and a certain manner that bespoke years of hanging around career criminals. But he could melt me into a puddle of hot hormones with the tip of his tongue, and his body had enough strong planes and curves to keep a woman interested for hours.
I had a bad history with men, of course. All the Blackbird women did. We were blind to their faults or drawn to their dark sides or maybe just plain foolhardy. I’m not sure which, but I knew I was attracted to Michael, and he wasn’t Prince Charming.
But he was very sharp. He pocketed his cell phone. “Let me guess. One of your sisters has committed a crime. Or both of them this time?”
“If they had, they’d be safely in jail.” I dropped the neighborly gift on the kitchen counter. “No, it’s nothing that easy. I thought you went out earlier.”
“I got held up. I’m going now. Anyway, somebody had to babysit your dog while you were out.”
“Where is Spike?”
“In the basement, digging his way to China. While he’s busy, I’ll make my escape.”
I knew he was joking. Michael liked my new puppy, and Spike adored Michael in return. They were two of a kind. Scoundrels at heart.
Part of me really wanted to know where Michael was going in the middle of the night. His evil minion looked as if he’d lost one fistfight and didn’t need another. He had a scratch across his cheek and he held the cold beer bottle against his face as if it hurt.
Michael smiled into my eyes while I considered what they could be up to.
“Want to come along?” he asked.
“Would you let me?”
He laughed like an adventuring buccaneer. But he didn’t answer my question.
Instead, he tilted his head at his companion. “You remember my cousin? Danny Pescara.”
“Another of your cousins?”
“Well, sort of. Say hello, Danny.”
“Hey, baby.” Danny sipped more beer, absorbing the vibe, then made a decision. He swaggered for the door. “I’ll wait outside.”
“Nice to see you again,” I said, unable to sound convincing.
When the door was closed behind him, Michael said, “Danny’s in a jam tonight. Needs my guidance.”
“Does he call you Obi-Wan?” I asked.
He came over and pulled me close, smiling. “You like me a little dangerous.”
Michael didn’t have a lot of free time between secret forays, but when he did have a few hours to spare these days he seemed to spend them at Blackbird Farm, sometimes cooking astonishing meals, sometimes babysitting my obnoxious dog, sometimes causing a commotion in my bed.
I let him kiss me and felt the now familiar heat of his body against mine. I kissed him back until my brain softened and my toes curled.
Dangerous? Probably. Had he put his life of crime behind him? I fervently hoped so. But my big fear was that for Michael, bending the law was what drug addiction had been for my husband, Todd. It was a natural urge he could not fight for long.
“Stick around,” I whispered, holding his shoulders.
“I’ll be back before you’re out of the bathtub.”
“The tub is big enough for two.”
“Yeah, but that bubble stuff smells better on you.” He smoothed the finge
rs of one hand into my hair and looked deeply into my eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Ruefully, I sighed. “It’s ridiculous. My sisters are adults, and I should stop taking responsibility for them.”
He nodded. The discussion wasn’t new. “But?”
“But Emma went AWOL from rehab. Not only that, she appeared half-naked on horseback in front of several hundred people at a fashion show tonight. And there was a whip involved.”
Michael smiled. “That’s Emma.”
“If I’m any judge of showstopping finales, she’s going to New York tomorrow for a repeat performance. God knows what she’ll get into there.”
“Some guy’s pants, no doubt,” he said. Then, “Sorry. Was she drinking?”
“I couldn’t get close enough to find out.” I slid out of his arms.
“You were doing so well with the Emma’s-the-master-of-her-fate stuff. You decided you’re not her keeper, right?”
“Right.”
To busy my hands, I opened the gift left on my porch steps. I unwrapped the paper and found a squished ham inside. With a note. I read the scrawled signature and said, “It’s from your father.”
“What?” Startled, Michael looked into the package. “Oh.”
“What is it?”
“Prosciutto. He makes it.”
I studied the food prepared by the hand of Big Frankie Abruzzo, godfather of certain regions of New Jersey where even grandmothers carried concealed weapons. “How do you make prosciutto?”
“You cure it, smoke it, age it. Or you go to Parma and buy it. But it’s his hobby. He learned it from Nonna. It’s a big family deal.”
“Well,” I said. “How thoughtful. This is . . . a very sweet gesture. I’m touched.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “That’s how it starts.”
I let him rewrap the ham and went looking for an open bottle of wine in the refrigerator, wondering what had just happened.
“So?” he asked, obviously not yet prepared to discuss his father’s acknowledgment of our relationship. “What else? You’ve got something besides Emma on your mind.”
I sipped the cold wine and I tried to organize the confusion of emotion and events of the night. “I saw a little boy tonight—the son of an old friend of mine. She’s dead now, and he’s . . . well, he’s just ten years old and in the custody of a nutty excuse for a human being. And they had a public argument.”
Michael leaned against the opposite kitchen counter, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, one ankle languidly crossed over the other. “What happened?”
“Orlando ran away. I followed, but—”
“The first problem the kid has is his name.”
I noted Michael’s amused expression. “Orlando comes from two distinguished families, and he’s going to inherit a huge corporation someday. At the moment, though, he’s the saddest-looking rich kid I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen my share.”
“Like the granddaughter of that Greek tycoon. The teenage girl who inherited all the dough, only she’s living in the Alps or something.”
“Well, it’s a similar situation, I suppose.” I swirled the wine in my glass. “Except Orlando is stuck with someone who doesn’t love him—his mother’s brother, who probably washes his hands fifty times a day and could teach the Pentagon a few things about regimentation. He refuses to wear socks more than once and replaces shoe laces every week. The company, Lamb Limited, is a huge international textile manufacturer and exporter.”
“That’s what the kid inherits? Lamb? I hope he watches his step.”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that. He’s just a child who’s miserable. I knew his uncle when we were younger. He has lots of . . . issues.”
Michael shrugged. “Kids have a way of overcoming issues.”
The lousy childhood was territory Michael knew better than anyone.
“I don’t know,” I murmured doubtfully.
“Does the uncle bat left-handed?”
I cast Michael a wry glance. “Is that a quaint New Jersey way of asking if he’s gay? No, he isn’t. Just odd.”
“Odd isn’t life-threatening. So he likes new socks.” Michael shrugged. “What doesn’t kill the kid will only make him tougher.”
“He isn’t tough. Not at all.”
“He’ll develop,” Michael promised, reaching for his keys.
“Michael . . .”
Already at the door, he turned.
Uncertainly I said, “Do you think I should do something?”
“For the kid?”
“For his mother. She was my friend, after all.”
He studied me with a tender sort of doubt. “What would you do?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“He’s got a lot of people in his life already, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, but nobody is his friend.”
“What makes you think he’d trust you?”
“I wouldn’t take advantage like everyone else around him.”
Michael strolled back to me. “And how would he know that?”
I sighed. “I can’t help wanting to take care of him.”
He took my glass and set it on the table. “Nora, I love you. I love this part of you—the woman who wants to save the world. But this boy’s life can’t be fixed with cotton candy and a trip to the zoo.”
“I want to try.”
His smile flickered again, and he slid one arm around me. “Don’t you have your hands full already? Saving your sisters? Not to mention me?”
I let him fit my body to his larger, warmer frame. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“I could keep you busy for a long time, you know,” he said. “If you’d marry me.”
I laughed unsteadily. “You ask me every day.”
“And every day you change the subject.”
“Stay here tonight,” I said. “We’ll talk about it.”
He hesitated.
I unbuttoned my coat all the way. And let it drop slowly to the floor.
“See what I mean?” he asked, touching my bare shoulders, then tracing his fingertips down my arms. “You always change the subject.”
It was wrong of me, I know. But I let him gather the hem of my nightgown in his hands and draw it upward until all I was wearing were my Chanel boots. I kissed his temples and watched his eyes and let the syrupy wave of warmth grow inside. He touched me and told me what we’d do later.
“Now,” I said, catching my breath.
“Later,” he promised. “We’ll make a baby.”
I couldn’t keep him. Not when he was hearing the call of something even more seductive. Michael wrapped me up in the coat and went outside into the darkness. When he whistled for his sidekick, he sounded exhilarated.
I had never been able to stop Todd either. Even now—nearly two years after his death—I was trying to convince myself that no one person had the power to prevent anyone else from plunging down the path of his own destruction, no matter how much love was tangled up in the whole mess.
The sound of Michael’s whistle conjured my dog. From the depths of the basement, Spike appeared at my feet and barked.
“No,” I said, understanding his demand. “You may not eat my coat.”
Spike was a remarkably disgusting excuse for a house pet. Part very ugly Jack Russell terrier and part mongoose, Spike was a gift I couldn’t refuse and now I was stuck. He’d made me love him. He’d been run over by a car early in December, and his hindquarters were supported by a contraption the vet had invented to outsmart Spike’s determined teeth. At least he no longer had to drag his rear end around in the little cart we’d suffered through for three long weeks. He sometimes wore a plastic cone-shaped collar, too, an item of doggy apparel that gave him the look of a cockeyed Elizabethan serial killer.
No medical apparatus could slow Spike down. Only lethal injection could do that, and even then I had my doubts. He had the spirit of a tiger in the body of a circus dog.
I picked him up and
carried him along with my glass of wine to the dining room, where my laptop computer was plugged into the wall. I sat down with Spike in my lap and gave him a blank page of my notebook to shred. While he destroyed it, I proceeded to write my piece about the Brinker Bra show.
When I was finished, I e-mailed the short article directly to the features editor, Stan Rosenstatz. If I was lucky, Stan would okay my piece before Kitty got a chance to order a few dozen rewrites.
“Do it again, Sweet Knees,” Kitty often screamed across the crowded newsroom. “Cut the polite shit and entertain me!”
I checked my e-mail and discovered two notes from friends who had heard about my New Year’s Eve party. Both asked if they could “stop by.”
Reluctantly, I wrote back and invited them for the evening. As long as Lexie was bringing her cousins, a couple more guests wouldn’t matter. But I noted that the guest list for my intimate New Year’s Eve dinner was now up to eighteen.
To Spike, I said, “I don’t think Michael will be pleased.”
Spike growled in agreement.
After the e-mails, I found myself Googling Lamb Limited. I read about Orlando’s board of guardians and how they took care of his business affairs while he grew up.
But who, I wondered, was looking after the boy, not the future owner of the corporation? It certainly wasn’t going to be Hemorrhoid.
When I closed my eyes I could clearly remember the summer Oriana and I hung out at the outdoor pool. We had slurped mango Popsicles and leafed through magazines under the shade trees, trying not to be obvious about watching the older boys.
But Hemorrhoid, Oriana’s squirrelly kid brother, made a constant pest of himself. He kept obsessive track of how many acorns he could toss down our bathing suits and counted how many paces it took to get to the locker room toilet from various locations around the club. He kept his towel immaculately clean and hated to venture off the concrete on days when the lawn was mowed because he didn’t like getting clippings on his feet. Soon he was drawn to the older boys, who had no patience for his behavior and quickly dubbed him with his nickname. He accepted the name joyously, taking it as a sign he’d been made a part of the brotherhood. He tagged after them, imitating their dives, learning their curse words, begging to be a part of the group.