One Good Friend Deserves Another (18 page)

“I hope this rain doesn’t mess up your schedule too much,” she said, wincing as if she’d been pelted by shards of china. “You wouldn’t have happened to have brought a book or something?”

He shook his head.

“Not even
The Sound and the Fury
?”

He paused, a rag hovering just above the glass.

“It was in your tool box,” she explained. “I couldn’t help noticing you were reading it. It’s one of my favorite books.”

“My sister gave it to me. She said it would help me better understand my son.”

Wendy tried to puzzle that out.
The Sound and the Fury
was a difficult book. She couldn’t quite make the connection between it and a young boy. She stood in confused silence, acutely aware that he was continuing to fold and unfold the rag.

“My son,” he said softly, “is autistic.”

She paused in her wiping. She turned toward him. Not once in the last month had he said anything about his son having any sort of disability. She thought about all the comments he’d made and suddenly remembered the special school his son attended on the weekends, and his comments about how difficult his son could be to handle, about how grateful he was that his mother-in-law lived nearby.

“And not mildly autistic,” he continued into the silence. “Not even close. He’s not an easy boy to understand, in any way.”

Wendy remembered that the main character in
The Sound and the Fury,
Benjy, was mentally disabled, and that whole first difficult stream-of-consciousness, time-warped section was written in his distorted point of view.

“I guess,” she said, thoughtfully, “that the character of Benjy could be considered autistic.”

“Hell if I know.” Gabriel tossed the rag on a pile of paintings and leaned a hip against the table. “As a baby, he spent most nights screaming. We thought he had food allergies. But later, there were other signs. Miguel can spend hours spinning the wheel of a toy truck. It took a while to have him diagnosed. My sister thought the book would help me understand how his mind works.”

“Oh, God, Gabriel. This must be impossibly hard, for both you and his mother.”

“For me, yes. For my
ex
-wife, not so much.”

Ex-wife.

“She couldn’t handle Miguel.” He crossed his arms and eyed the roof of the tent, now bowing under the weight of moisture. “The first time she found him banging his head repeatedly against the bars of the crib, she bought a one-way ticket back to Brazil.”

Her knees went a little weak, thinking about how his young son handled the loss of a parent. “You’re doing this alone?”

“My mother-in-law lives here. She takes her daughter’s place in my son’s life. And I’ve got him in a school—a very good school. They say there’s a window for autism, a period of time when you can pull him through.” He shrugged, a great roll of movement, as if he were forcefully shouldering off a thirty-pound pack. “My wife and I, we were just kids. Neither one of us knew what we were getting into. And Miguel would be a challenge for anyone.”

“You must have the patience of a saint.”

“No.” He made a humorless, strangled laugh. “That’s just the problem. With me as his father, poor Miguel is doomed.”

“I don’t believe that. You’re doing an incredible thing, raising him alone at home. There’s no teacher, no doctor, no therapist, better than family.” She turned back to the easels, wiping blindly, as he tilted his head in growing curiosity. “I mean, being alone must make every little decision so hard. Whether to take him out to a park, face the curious looks of strangers—”

“I gave up caring about that a long time ago.”

“And the routines.” She twisted the rag, letting the water drip onto the ground. “I know how important they are to kids who struggle to figure out the world. You must feel like you’re walking on a high wire trying to keep that in balance. I can’t imagine.”

“Sounds to me like you can.”

She’d said too much. She was dangerously close to bringing up Birdie, and all the turbulent emotions that went along with her. Then, just as suddenly, she didn’t give a damn.

“I have a sister. Her real name is Sarah Catherine Livingston Wainwright. But when I was six, I called her Birdie, for the way she flapped her arms when she got excited.”

Birdie loved to swim, she loved to fold paper, she loved to paint with her fingers. Wendy’s job, for most of her youth, was to get Birdie ready for bed. She’d done it every evening until she went off to boarding school.

Gabriel shifted his weight against the table. Quietly, as if afraid to upset the paintings or stop her from speaking.

“She has Down syndrome, and not the kind you see on daytime TV. She also has what’s called an endocardial cushion defect in her heart. She has trouble with her kidneys and hearing problems. She’s mostly deliriously happy, but sometimes she becomes frustrated with her limitations and expresses this in ways that most of the world would not consider socially acceptable.”

Wendy stopped, the lump in her throat interfering with her ability to speak, remembering how she’d bounded into Birdie’s room after her first break from boarding school, bringing her back a stuffed bear wearing the pink-and-gray school colors, only to find the room empty.

“By the time I was fourteen, my mother chose to send Birdie away to an institution in upstate New York. She was, my mother insisted, at a better place. It is a nice place, at least it seems to be. All I knew was that she wasn’t home anymore, to bring to my house what it lacked the most. Noise. Laughter. Chaos. It feels good to have someone knock over a teapot once in a while.”

She wiped and wiped and wiped, but for some reason, the frames weren’t getting drier. She wiped and wiped, wishing she hadn’t said anything at all. Knowing that Birdie’s situation was far better than Gabriel’s son’s situation must be, as Gabriel struggled to afford a very special school, as he juggled the very difficult and disparate responsibilities of work and being a single father.

She heard him move. She squeezed her eyes shut, for he was moving closer and she didn’t think she could bear him to be so close right now.

“It usually takes,” he said, glancing at his watch, “about three minutes after I make that announcement about my son for a woman to find an excuse to say good-bye.”

She glanced past him, toward the folded flaps. “It’s pouring out. Maybe I don’t want to ruin these shoes.”

“Helen Vivian Livingston Wainwright might give a damn about the shoes,” he said softly. “But I know Wendy doesn’t.”

Wendy ducked her head. She’d once read a tell-all article about a washed-up reality star who admitted that she hid her old identity from anybody she met, having learned, during her long decline, that admitting to her erstwhile celebrity always triggered the same set of awkward personal questions and then changed the relationship in some irrevocable way. But with Gabriel, her money, her standing, her name, didn’t seem to mean anything.

“You are a puzzle to me, Wendy.”

She lifted her eyes only enough to see his sneakers, spattered with mud, and above them, his long, long legs.

“Just when I think I’ve got you figured out, you tell me something like that, and I’ve got to rewrite the whole book on Wendy.”

It was too much to have all six foot something of him standing next to her, stealing all the oxygen. She was wedged in this corner, barred by the waving canvas sides and the leaning pile of easels and frames. She lifted her gaze a little higher and saw his strong arms and the dusting of dark hair upon them. Saw, when she dared, the clean cut of his jaw. She smelled the sugar in the coffee he must have drunk not too long ago, and even noticed a single crystal in the corner of his mouth.

Her heart pounded. She should get a hold of herself, tell him she needed to leave, find an excuse strong enough to send her out into the rain. His breathing was too loud in the small space. She should just push past him, push him away. She was engaged to Parker, rock-steady, oh-so-familiar Parker. Parker was a good man. Parker deserved loyalty. And she shouldn’t make the same mistake with Gabriel as she’d made with so many free-spirited artists who only played at love.

But even as that thought passed through her mind, her heart whispered,
Gabriel is not like the others
.

His voice, a soft rumble. “I didn’t think you’d come here today.”

“I lied to my mother.” Her voice sounded strangled. “I was supposed to choose the wine. A Sancerre and two pinot noirs, maybe a California sauvignon blanc. I told her I had a summer cold.”

“You said good-bye to me at the museum.”

“I did. I thought I did.”

“I can’t get you out of my mind, Wendy.”

“Gabriel.” Her heart tripped. “Don’t.”

“I’ve been trying to. God knows I’ve been trying. But since the day I first laid eyes upon you, I’ve wanted to ask you to a picnic in the park, just so I can see the way sunlight plays on your hair.”

She made a sound, a strangled sound—part gasp, part denial; she no longer knew.

“Here’s the problem,” he said. “You’ve got that promise on your finger. And I can’t rip it off you.”

Beyond the cocoon of their tent, lightning flashed, and as it faded, a blue evanescence lined his face. His hand engulfed her jaw. His palm rasped against her skin. He tilted her face up, forcing her to look him directly in the eye.

“I know you’re taken,” he said, his voice fathoms deep. “I know I should leave you alone.”

“No, no, it’s me who should go.”

“I’ve got nothing to offer you. I’m a single father with an autistic son, working two jobs. My life is chaos.”

“Gabriel—”

“You’re too good for me.”

“I’m
not
good. I’m a liar and a che—”

“No.”

“—and I’m not myself,” she stuttered. “I haven’t been myself in years.”

She felt something then, rising up from some deep place inside her, primitive and undeniable, summoned by Gabriel from a place where the
real
Wendy existed—not the one urged since youth to fall into line with the expectations of the world—but the wilder one who yearned for unattainable things: the chaotic jubilation of Dhara’s gregarious family; a small measure of Marta’s earthy lustiness and single-minded ambition; Kelly’s fearless determination to put her heart in immediate and terrible danger.

And now, most especially, this honorable, hard-working, beautiful man.

“Tell me good-bye.” He shifted his body to weave a thigh between hers. “I’ll let you go. You can go back to your world. I’ll miss the hell out of you in mine.”

Those eyes. Full of unreadable currents. She felt the long painful turning of her heart, three uneven beats, tripping over one another. The heat of his gaze warmed her lower lip, and her mouth swelled with the sensation. The blood moved beneath her skin, tingling.

He made a low, rumbling moan. His lips swooped down. She closed her eyes at the heat and moisture and hungry pressure. His hands trembled in her hair. In a blur of feeling, she lost all sense of the world and succumbed to the slippery, tumbling sensation of her own heart opening wide.

Then he pulled away, breathing hard. He scraped a hand down her side. He splayed his fingers over her hip and tugged her against him. He waited, his face fierce, in his eyes an unspoken question.

She opened her mouth but words caught. She was breathing as if she’d run three miles.

I can’t.

She surged up on her toes.

I can’t say good-bye.

I
n times like these, Marta had to remind herself of how she felt when she tried out for the basketball team at Sacred Heart, the Catholic high school her parents had enrolled her in after moving out of Washington Heights.

Sacred Heart was nothing like her old middle school, a cozy nest of two hundred neighborhood kids, where the volunteer lunch moms served rice and beans and the whole place sang with Spanish. No, it had taken her about five minutes of walking through her new high school’s scentless halls, plastered with the school’s shamrock emblem, to realize that the Fighting Irish basketball team was the center of social life—and the clearest, quickest way for this oddball to fit in.

She’d played basketball before, but these Maeves and Mollys were fearless and quick. Marta was thrown out in the first cut for being repeatedly knocked to the gritty gym floor. She practiced all summer and then tried out again her sophomore year only to be hip-checked out of the lineup by yet another competitor.

So she nursed her bruises, pondered her weaknesses, and then practiced with her male cousins in the driveway of their Riverdale house. By then, she’d found her social circle with a group of brainy friends—but making the basketball team wasn’t about social status anymore.

When she entered the gym her junior year, even the coach rolled his eyes, which only stiffened her resolve. This time, when Marta got the ball and saw one of those sturdy blondes coming right at her, she turned her flank. The two collided. Marta absorbed the hit and budged—but didn’t tumble. She hooked that basket with nothing but net.

Bruised, out of breath, and still standing at the end of tryouts, she faced the coach with her hands on her new secret weapon—her swiftly ripening, center-of-gravity-changing, and very fine hips.

The coach, with a little nod, allowed her on the team.

Now as Marta climbed out of the taxi in front of the Three Dancers bar in Soho, she silently bid a
hasta la vista
to lying Carlos and
adios
to darling Tito, forever gone from her life. She’d wasted too much time hiding in her apartment, dodging concerned phone calls from her friends as she nursed her wounded ego, a pomegranate Cosmopolitan, and the remote control. Having pondered her weaknesses, she’d finally come up with a perfect strategy. She’d signed herself up for a speed-dating event.

Marta swung into the hipster bar, adjusting the weight of her Italian leather briefcase and checking her cell phone for the time. She’d come directly from work, where she was elbow-deep preparing papers for the SEC concerning a complicated corporate merger, but she’d managed to pull herself out of the boundless depths of document review to arrive with five minutes to spare.

About ten women clustered on one end of the long bar. The sight gave her pause. The image of their cocktail dresses multiplied in the mirrored walls like the colorful splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting. Marta slowed her pace and tugged on the jacket of her brown suit, conscious of the hemline just skimming the top of her knee. She felt like a plain sparrow about to swoop into a flock of cockatiels.

A perky brunette stepped into view.

“Welcome to Big Apple Speed Dating! You must be Marta Sanchez. You’re the last to arrive. So glad you could make it!” The brunette put a check on her clipboard and then, with a bend of her knees and a sweep of her hand, gestured toward the bar in a way that would do a Texas cheerleader proud. “Go ahead and get yourself a drink. I’ll be talking to everyone in a few minutes, telling you all how it works and laying the ground rules. After that, we’ll let the guys in.”

Fixing her gaze on a top-shelf bottle of liquor, Marta braced herself for the long walk across no-man’s land. She’d been told that this speed-dating event was for thirty-five- to forty-five-year-old single, professional men and assumed they’d be looking for single, professional women. Perhaps she’d miscalculated, for she passed at least one hair poof, two unnatural blondes, and three boob jobs—and felt herself sharply assessed and coming up thoroughly
boss.
She barely acknowledged the cute bartender before ordering a glass of the Glenmorangie single malt, neat.

While he poured the drink, she stared into the mirror behind the bar, trying to pick out her own reflection—brown hair, brown eyes, dark clothes—against the bar’s dim background. She reminded herself that her well-laid plans had never failed her. She reminded herself that this was just a first stride in the process. If she just followed the road one step at a time—like she always did—it would eventually lead to a white picket fence.

Yeah, but next time I’m wearing a red dress and Christian Louboutins
.

See? She had learned something already.

“New to this, aren’t you?”

The gravelly voice emerged from the dim end of the bar. A woman, toying with the olive in her martini, leaned forward into a pool of yellow light. Her streaked hair was swept up and agreeably tousled. The stranger assessed Marta with eyes that crinkled at the corners and then gave her a rueful little smile.

“Yes, it’s my first time,” Marta conceded. “I didn’t realize it showed.”

“The clothes.” She gestured to Marta’s suit with the pick from the olive. “And the briefcase. Very nice, by the way. Louis Vuitton?”

“Prada.”

“Ah.” The woman reached under the bar and briefly hefted a slim tooled black leather job. “Tumi.”

Marta gave it an admiring nod and then, raising her scotch in a toast, she took a healthy sip. From what she could see in the dim light, the woman was slim and well tended in the way of executives who diligently spent lunch hours working out at the gym. The black suit was conservative, but a bit of red lingerie peeked just at the V of the jacket. Unlike the chicks clucking on the far side of the bar, this woman was more of what Marta had expected for an event billed for high-wage-earning professionals.

The woman spoke again in that whiskey-tainted, cigarette-smoker’s voice. “Don’t worry too much about them, hon.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The competition.” She gestured to the gaggle with her chin. “The guys that’ll go for that type, well, they’re not the kind you’re looking for, believe me.” The woman leaned over to offer her hand. “I’m Sophia, by the way. Sophia Martin.”

“Marta Sanchez.” Marta gripped her hand then slipped onto a barstool close enough to talk. “It’s a pleasure to meet a coconspirator.”

“You a lawyer?”

Marta raised her brows. “Oh, you’re good.”

“Lucky guess. Where do you work?”

“I’m a partner,” she replied, lingering on the word with delight, “at Sachs, Offsyn & Reed.”

“Ah, yes—Sacks of Sin and Greed. I know that firm well.” Sophia pulled a card out of an outside pocket of her briefcase and slipped it across the granite surface. “VP of Operations, Hodges Pharmaceuticals. We had a fire in a plant ten years ago. The lawsuit is still going on. One of your colleagues—”

“Bill Offsyn, yes.” Marta handed over one of her own business cards. “I’m in corporate—not litigation—but I’m familiar with the case.”

“I’ll try not to hold it against you.”

Sophia laughed, and Marta noticed the playful grooves around her mouth. They made Sophia look mischievous and a lot of fun, but also gave away the fact that her age was on the far end of the range. Marta thought it was a good thing for both of them that the event planners had chosen to keep the lights flatteringly dim.

“So,” Marta asked, lifting her glass, “you’ve done this before?”

“Fifteen notches on my Manolo stiletto, hon.”

Marta nearly choked on her scotch.

“Hey, the first five hardly counted. There’s a skill to this, you know.” Sophia glanced at Marta’s briefcase. “You’ve got your list in there?”

“List?”

Sophia raised one very cleanly waxed eyebrow. “Your list of Vitally Important Questions.”

Marta felt her cheeks go warm. Of course, she had a list. She’d spent many a stolen hour this past week sitting cross-legged at her kitchen table with a mud mask drying on her face, trying to compose the perfect queries to tease out—in five minutes or less—everything she needed to know about a potential husband.

“Oh, hon,” Sophia said kindly. “Please tell me it’s less than five pages.”

Marta clanked the drink back on the bar. “Six and a half, actually.”

“Greenhorn.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew my checkered past.”

“Hon, I’ll meet your checkered past and raise you two divorces.”

“Oh, my. Does your list fit in that briefcase?”

“It fits in here.” Sophia tapped her temple. “After all the hard time I’ve served, I’ve boiled it down to three basic questions: Does he have kids? Does he have an apartment? And does he have a job?” She mused a moment as she swirled her quickly disappearing martini. “Though I must say, the presence of kids is becoming less of an issue.”

Surely she was joking. Not about the kids, but certainly about the job and the apartment. Marta watched Sophia’s amused expression, trying to tease out whether Sophia was amused at her own joke, or just amused at Marta. The incredibly animated woman on the phone had assured Marta that she was going to meet a bunch of
professional
men. That meant a job. That meant an apartment.

A sudden raucous clanging made Marta all but leap out of her shoes. She swung around on her barstool to see the perky brunette shaking a huge brass bell like the one Sister Magdalene used to shock students into silence.

“Ladies, ladies, thanks for coming to our speed dating event tonight! For those of you who’ve never done this, here’s how it works.” The perky brunette gestured to a line of numbered tables like a game show host gesturing to a new washer-dryer. “You’ll all be sitting here at individual tables, and then we’ll invite in the men. They’ll sit down, one at each table, and you’ve got five minutes to chat. Five minutes, ladies! Make them count! When the time’s up, I’ll ring this bell, and the men will shift to the right. It’s that simple. At the end, you fill out the form sitting on each table to pick out the guys you’d like to see again. If he’s asked for you too, then that’s a match! We’ll give you each other’s email addresses, and you guys can take it from there. Got it?”

The cockatiels raised their drinks and made excited chirping sounds. Marta took a good, long slug of her scotch and then gestured to the bartender for another.

“All right!” The cheerleader pumped her fist. “You all seem like you’re in a good mood. Don’t forget to tip the bartender, ladies, Sam deserves it! You’ll have a chance, halfway through the evening, to take an eight-minute break and order another drink. Remember, there’s a two-for-one special tonight.” The cheerleader glanced down at her clipboard. “Okay, I’m happy to tell you that you’ll be meeting fifteen men tonight. Fifteen thirty-five- to forty-five-year-old single, professional men, ladies. Are you ready? Take your seats, get comfortable—I’ll get the guys.”

Santa Maria.
Marta mentally made the sign of the cross. Sophia, with a gravelly little laugh, slipped off her barstool, hauled up her briefcase, and then took Marta firmly by the arm.

“Poor lost lamb.” Sophia led her toward the closest tables. “The first time is always the worst.”

Marta sank into a chair behind table number 15. “You were joking about the job and the apartment?”

“Such a little virgin.” Sophia tossed her briefcase on the floor. “Listen, Marta—it is Marta, yes?—part of my job in management is to make quick but accurate judgments about people, and I’ve got a good vibe from you. So here’s what I’ll do. I’ll cut through the crap for you, all right? When these guys file in, I’ll point out the ringers and dingers, you got it?”

“Sophia, I’d appreciate that,” Marta said. “But how do you know—”

“Shh. Here they come.”

The men poured in, drinks in hand, from an adjacent room. Marta scanned them quickly and, considering the conversation with Sophia, with more than a little dread. She perked up as she saw some promising prospects. One was an older man with a bit of silver in his hair, a well-preserved guy with a nice square-jawed face. Another candidate was dressed in a very expensively tailored suit and looked dashingly European. A third swaggered in sporting a fitted T-shirt. He was clearly an athlete of some type, with a quick half smile.

“Okay, here’s the deal.” Sophia leaned in her direction, keeping her voice low. “The guy in the Italian suit? With the swept-back hair? He’s the ringer.”

“What’s a ringer?”

“The bait, hon. He’s dashing, he’s romantic. Every girl in the place is getting damp panties looking at him.” Sophia hissed her breath through her teeth. “This one is particularly hot. I swear, they salt the crowd with at least one guy like this every time. The sight of him keeps us all coming back. But he won’t make any matches to anybody, you’ll see. Well, maybe to the blonde with the big boobs.”

Marta felt a twinge of disappointment. He was clearly the best-looking guy in the group. As he sat down at the first table, he made a very Gallic shrug, and she heard what sounded like a French accent. Already, she was imagining a transcontinental relationship and sex on an airplane.