by Delia Rosen
Robert excused himself to go to the bathroom. While he was gone, I opened the slender black case and noticed he’d left a very generous tip.
Was there anything wrong with this guy?
He took a little longer than Grant used to, but I guessed that the amenities here were a little better than in the Kentucky Fried Chicken loo.
We led ourselves to the ground floor, and as Robert opened the door for me, I noticed a framed certificate boasting “Voted Best Fine Dining 2011 by the Nashville National.” Robert saw me looking at it and gave a sly smile that revealed a sexy dimple, which I’d never noticed.
It was a gorgeous night out. The music poured out onto the street, and there was a slight breeze coming from the nearby Cumberland River.
“What should we do now?” Robert said.
“I may have to walk off that gnocchi.”
“Fair enough,” he said and grabbed my hand.
Suddenly I was out of my body and looking at us holding hands and strolling down the Nashville streets. I could not wipe the stupid grin off of my face. We came up on the Hermitage Hotel, where a group of people was huddled around, taking pictures and listening to a tour guide tell what sounded like a ghost story.
“Oh, this is great!” Robert said. “Have you ever been on the haunted history tour?”
“No. I just recently heard about it, though.”
We tagged along with the group, but by our third stop my feet were killing me. Stupid heels. I explained the situation to my date, who grabbed my hand and led me around the corner to Printer’s Alley. Before I knew it, we were in the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar.
“Wait here,” he said, putting me at a table for two and tipping the waiter.
“Robert, wait—”
“Just stay there.” He smiled, running out the door.
I looked around the room, avoided making eye contact with the single men—or the married men pretending to be single or not caring, because they were in Nashville for a convention and a good time. I was tipsy, I was tired, I was swooning, and I was surprised when Robert came back holding a white plastic bag.
“Give me your foot,” he said as he kneeled down.
I placed my foot on his knee while Robert pulled out a pair of fluffy white spa slippers with HOTEL INDIGO sewn on them. I felt like a fairy-tale princess.
As if reading my mind, Robert looked up at me and said, “A perfect fit, Cinderella.”
Chapter 9
The next morning I was a little hungover and a little grumpy.
Robert hadn’t asked me to go home with him or driven me back to my charming abode or done anything after whistling for a taxi that someone was just getting out of, putting me in it, and handing the driver a twenty.
I spent the entire ride and part of the rest of the night wondering if I’d done something wrong.
Maybe he’s just a gentlemanly Southerner, I told myself. Or maybe he went back to hang with that hostess. Or maybe he had someone waiting for him at the Hotel Indigo. Or maybe he had to go to the office. He had just taken a call on his cell. It could be anything.
None of which, not a stitch of it, is any of your business, I reminded myself. He took you to a nice dinner. Be grateful.
For what? my angry girl brain asked. He took pity on a lonely lady and had some time to kill. Obviously, the money meant nothing to him.
It went on and on like that till I fell asleep. The cats woke me up to eat. I fed them carelessly, spilling part of their kibble on the floor. They left it there. They had their standards, and they were probably higher than mine.
You threw yourself at him, I chastised myself as I dressed.
No, you didn’t. You initiated the kiss good night. Nothing else.
Right. That obviously didn’t have enough pizzazz to get him to go further.
The last thing I needed was to run into a conflict at the deli. So, naturally, that was the first thing that happened. It was Dani again. I fought through a larger than usual crowd waiting to get in and ran right into the needle I had managed to find in the vast haystack of the unemployed.
“Oh, Nash, I want to tell you, but I can’t,” Dani blurted.
“Okay, fine. Then why are you standing in my way?”
“Because I have to,” she said. “I did something.”
“What?”
I noticed Thom’s hands were washing themselves with imaginary water. That was something she did only when she was really, really anxious. This time I stopped to listen.
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“Nothing, really. I’m not sure. Maybe it did, but it stopped. Mostly.”
“Dani, start making sense!”
“The newspaper,” she said.
“What about the newspaper? Dammit, what did you do?”
“I—I posted something. I took it right down, but I—I—”
“What did you post?”
“A picture,” she said.
Oh, shit, I thought. “Of?”
She made a squirmy face and answered sheepishly, “The truck.”
“The bread truck,” I said. There was disbelief in my voice, my expression, in every part of me.
She nodded once. The rest of the staff was looking on, like the gawkers outside the other day.
“Inside or outside?” I asked.
“Both,” she said, then added quickly, “I thought it would drive traffic to the site, and it did! We have over two thousand fans!”
“You took pictures of the truck,” I said.
She stood still, like I was Medusa. To tell the truth, I felt like a Gorgon right then.
“You put them on Facebook,” I went on.
She still didn’t move.
“People saw them and became fans of the sight. And?”
Thom rapped on the counter. She held up the front page of the Nashville National. The photos were there, on the front page.
“What time did this happen? The Facebook thing?” I asked Dani.
“About seven o’clock,” she said. “They were down by nine. Just a couple of hours.”
That happened to fall right in the middle of my dinner. Dani’s post was what had ended my evening. Someone had called Robert and told him. They’d copied the photos. He wanted to get there and decide what to do—either to screw me or to screw me.
“I know it was dumb, sort of,” she said, “but I did it for the deli. I really did. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
“Well, how about if I think it’s a really big deal?” I yelled. “Get out.”
“Huh?”
“Get. Out. You were hired to help me, and all you’ve done is trip me up!”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” Dani protested. “I gave you good ideas!”
“Get out!”
Thom came over. “Nash, she messed up, and she knows it. Let it go. We need her today. We can look at this fresh tomorrow.”
I turned. “Thom, the bloody truck is on the bloody front page of the newspaper! Probably on its Web site, too.”
“Yup!” Luke said.
Dani shot him an angry look.
“Bad call,” Thom said. “We all make ’em sometimes. That’s how we learn.”
I exhaled loudly. I looked back at my office. “Do what you think is right,” I said. “You know where I’ll be.”
I left and shut the door and sat heavily and cried. I didn’t know why or about what, exactly. It was just something I needed to do. When I was finished, I looked up the committee list on my computer, got the number for the Nashville National, called, and asked for Robert Reid.
He took my call. I was impressed.
“There’s just one thing I want to ask you,” I said. “Is that why the night ended so suddenly?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Well, that’s a relief,” I told him.
“Gwen, I didn’t really have a choice—”
“Give me a big fat break,” I said. “You’re the publisher.”
“Exactly! I’m a m
ember of the fourth estate first and foremost. Always have been. Our Web editor found it. I couldn’t kill it. That would have been suppressing news.”
“What happened to your mission of projecting a certain family-friendly image for Nashville?”
“Sometimes a story has to take precedent. It’s always a tough call.”
“Sure. Sales had nothing to do with it.”
“Truthfully, they don’t. A one-day bump doesn’t mean much to our bottom line or to our advertisers,” he said. “And that’s all we’ll get from this. You’ve got to believe me. It would have been irresponsible not to run something everyone was going to be talking about.”
“Responsible yellow journalism,” I said. “I like that.”
“Call it whatever you want,” he replied. “We’re just a part of the dissemination process. It will be all over the Web and local TV today.”
“Aw, great.”
“Thank your page administrator.”
“It’s not my goddamn page!” I snapped. “I didn’t authorize it.”
“You didn’t take it down.”
He was right about that. And there I was, just the other day, laughing about how scandal is entertaining in the third person. I suddenly felt like Angelina Jolie, but without the kids, money, or Brad Pitt.
“For the record,” Robert went on, “your non-page is doing insanely well.”
“Among lurid, perverted thrill seekers,” I said.
“Maybe. But even lurid, perverted thrill seekers have to eat. And in this economy, be glad you’ve got that.”
“Thank you, Father Reid, for the beatitude.”
“You should thank me.”
“For what? Are you glad for your bank account in this economy? Does that make all your troubles go away?”
“I’m grateful every day, you bet,” he said. “That’s why I give so much time to the community. And obviously, it doesn’t make my troubles go away. I have this one now. I’ve had it for about fifteen hours. It’s like a knife in my chest.”
I was silent. He was making sense.
“Gwen, you can stay mad or get madder, but I’ve gotta tell you this ‘poor me’ act is getting tired. You know, I knew your uncle pretty well. Ate there when I’d come home from college. I interviewed him in my cub reporter days. He had some setbacks when he first came down here. A hate incident involving swastikas and paint. Windows broken on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Thom was mugged for what her attackers called blood money. That was just the first few weeks, before he had any kind of client base, but he toughed it out. He understood that the people who did this were freaks, morons on the fringe of decent human society. He realized that running handed them a victory. My dad reported on those stories, too. Front page. Helped find the three idiots who were responsible and put them away.”
“I wasn’t comparing you to those kinds of people,” I said feebly. I didn’t know any of that about Uncle Murray or Thom. I felt small and ashamed.
“I know you weren’t. The ‘beatitude’ is about gratitude for surviving when all around you are hurting, but also about not letting yourself be intimidated. Not by rubberneckers, not by the media, not by the police, not by Brenda Silvio, and not by me.”
Ridiculously, stupidly, the crime-solving corner of my brain raised its hand. “You know Brenda?”
“Quite well. McCoy’s has been a fixture in this town for a lot of years.”
“What kind of person is she?”
“Hard worker, pretty good businesswoman.”
“I mean off the clock.”
He hesitated. Like someone trying to say something nice about someone who wasn’t. “She came to the family business after a failed stab at acting in New York and then Los Angeles. Got the looks for it. Don’t know if she had the talent. I saw her in a community theater production of Sweeney Todd, as Mrs. Lovett. She wasn’t bad. But ‘wasn’t bad’ doesn’t cut it in the big leagues.”
“Bitter?”
“I wouldn’t say that. There’s a kind of disappointment around her, I guess you could say.”
I wondered if she had a dog. I didn’t ask. Robert would know what I was hinting at, and that would rev him up all over again. Besides, he probably wouldn’t know if she had one or not. Though I was curious.
“You okay?” he asked after a long silence.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m sorry I ragged on you, but this is just one more spotlight I didn’t need.”
“I hear you. I don’t blame you. This is a tough situation and a tough case. Just so you know, our crime reporter has come up with zilch, and he’s got sources the police don’t have. They’ve also come up with nada.”
Which was probably why Officer McCoy was frustrated and Grant was frustrated, and that was all going to get worse before it got better. Like it or not, this was going to be on a low burn for a while.
I had to think about what Robert had said. I told him I didn’t feel like talking any more right now, and he said he understood. We hung up not enemies, though I wasn’t happy that I’d had to set a bonfire to the logs that could’ve been used to build a new relationship. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him later; I knew that.
I rolled my rickety chair to the door, stuck my head out from the office, and called Thomasina in.
“Favor?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Can you do the Reid gig tonight without me?”
“I told you, we can manage.”
“Maybe A.J. Two can come in—”
“Already had her on notice, just in case.”
“In case what? I flipped out?”
“Or fired someone.”
I grinned. “I love you. You know that?”
“You should.”
“I do.”
“I’m takin’ Dani.”
“I thought you might.”
“You thought right.”
“Hey, Thom? You never told me you were mugged in the service of my uncle.”
Her good humor seemed to ebb, momentarily leaving her face a silent mask. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Make an exception?”
She shifted her weight, like a boxer dropping his defenses. “I was closing up, and three guys pushed their way in. Called me names, took my purse, and slapped me to the floor. I called the police when they left. Your uncle met me in the hospital. Just a few cuts, nothing serious. The worst of it was while he was trying to comfort me, I was trying to explain to him that this wasn’t Nashville. This wasn’t even the South. It was just three losers. He understood. Made us strong, together. Nothin’ beat us after that. Not slow times, not weeks when neither of us took our wages . . . nothin’.”
“Thank you for sharing that,” I said. “And for what you did.”
She smiled warmly. “What doesn’t kill me—”
“Makes me stronger,” I said, finishing.
Ironically, it was a saying of Nietzsche, the philosopher beloved by the Nazis. Though I knew it from the Schwarzenegger movie Conan the Barbarian, which was a favorite of Phil’s. Maybe Robert was right. In the heart of that mess—the divorce, not the movie—I had felt I’d never see daylight. And I did. Not where and how I had expected, but it came. All I had to do was put one foot forward, then the other, then the next. . . .
Thomasina straightened and said she’d take care of the two-hour gig. I felt a little guilty dumping this on the team, but then, they were a team, a good one despite the blips that made me crazy, and . . . what the hell. I was the boss. That’s what bosses get to do.
I worked in my office through most of the morning service, paying bills and periodically checking in with the staff and grabbing a few Diet Cokes, mostly for the caffeine. I was fighting the urge to eat a fried bologna sandwich, since I’d made a deal with myself that the generous slice of Johnny Cashew pie I was planning on eating would be dinner. Finally giving in to my craving, I went out and prepared to slap two slices of Hebrew National kosher bologna on the grill. As I stood there, I
happened to glance out the front door and saw the woman again, the very thin one with the big hat, whom I’d seen out here . . . Christ, I couldn’t even remember whether that was yesterday or the day before. Whatever. She wasn’t hovering like a banshee across the street now. She was standing right outside my restaurant, like Death not taking a holiday.
I had a feeling she wasn’t part of the circus that had been playing since the bread man lefteth. As Thom watched me warily, I opened the door slightly and popped my head out.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Gwen? You are Gwen Katz?”
“Yes.”
The woman smiled thinly. She looked like she might have been beautiful once. She still might be, if she put a little meat on her frame and did her nails. Her fingertips were rough. She worked with them somehow. My aunt, who worked in the garment district, had slightly dark, rough fingers like that.
“I saw you on the news, and I had to come down and meet you in person,” she said with a gentle Southern lilt.
“Sorry. I’m not giving autographs,” I told her. I was wrong. Sue me. She was part of the circus.
Or so I thought.
“That isn’t why I’m here,” she said.
And then this woman whom I had never seen or spoken with or heard of said something that caused my sore feet to go numb, all the way up to my hips, and my brain to cloud from my skull to my lower jaw.
“My name is Lydia Knight,” she said softly. “I am your late father’s mistress.”
Chapter 10
All I could do was stare at her, at Lydia, as she sat with obvious familiarity at my desk. She had seen it before, she said, many times. I didn’t want to think what else she might have done on it. She smiled with recognition at the photographs. She even knew which part of me—my ears—I got from my father.
She was in my chair, I was standing with my back against the closed door, and I had warned everyone to stay away. I had warned I would be listening for footsteps. If anyone stopped, I swore I would use my letter opener to stab whoever was there.
I was too stunned to react. In fact, I didn’t know what I had left to react with. I was in emotional dry-heave territory.
Lydia was what they called a handsome woman, with strong cheekbones and white hair pulled tight like that of Peter Parker’s aunt May. In fact, that was who she looked like, only more elegant. She was slender, but she didn’t seem weak. Her slow, deliberate movements were a matter of genteel Southern breeding, not infirmity.