Trust Me (14 page)

Max’s well-developed survival instincts had enabled him to pass judgment on the Martins within five minutes of arrival. They
were all crazy—but they were friendly. Which was good, because there were a lot of them.

Carly had introduced him to the mass of adults, children, cats, and dogs present, and every introduction seemed to be along
the lines of: “This is Chris, who was Dad’s student, and dated Jeannie—my sister, that’s her husband Mark—but now he’s married
to Cathy, who went to vet school with me, and their daughter—Heather, she’s thirteen—is best friends with my youngest sister
Anna, over there.”

There was no apparent distinction between blood relatives, adopted relatives, in-laws and family friends, and Max was taken
aback by the noisy conviviality of the group. It was difficult to get a word in edgewise, and he didn’t even try, preferring
to listen and watch as he processed the scene.

Rather than sticking by his side, Carly had turned him loose as soon as they arrived, as if his welfare was now a family responsibility.
She did seem to be keeping an eye on him, though, as if she feared that he might suddenly become overwhelmed and bolt for
the hills.

He watched her covertly, as well. She was in her element, surrounded by her own people, and as Max saw her laughing with her
sisters at some private joke, he felt an unexpected stab of envy. In the same way that his Jaguar and his Park Avenue apartment
were luxuries backed by his bank balance, he thought, Carly’s belief in the world’s basic goodness was a luxury backed by
this group. They had raised her to know that she would always be safe and loved, and Max had the sudden feeling that no matter
how rich he became, Carly Martin’s personal fortune would always be larger and longer-lasting than his own.

Dinner was potluck, served buffet style from a cluttered table set up on the lawn next to an arbor knotted with grapevines.
Carly’s thirteen-year-old sister Anna handed him a plate and trailed him as he approached the table. He cast an eye over the
collection of food and picked up a serving spoon, about to break the crust of the nearest casserole.

“Stop!” Anna exclaimed suddenly. It was the first thing she had said to him since he arrived, although she had been hovering
near him for some time, gazing at him with a fascination that he found unnerving.

Max paused, the serving spoon in his hand, and looked down at her. “What?”

“Put down the spoon,” Anna said. “You don’t want to eat that. Trust me.”

The dish in question appeared to be an innocent mixture of baked pasta and vegetables. Max frowned. “Why not?”

Anna glanced from side to side and leaned toward him. “Carly made it,” she said in a low, meaningful voice.

Max raised his eyebrows. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Oh, my God,” Anna said. “How long have you known my sister?”

“Not long,” Max said.

Anna nodded. “It isn’t that Carly
can’t
cook,” she explained. “It’s that she won’t. Make normal food, I mean. And it’s getting worse. Last week she brought this
thing called ‘nut loaf,’ which was supposed to be like meat loaf, except—”

“No meat?” Max asked.

“Right. It was made with, like, soybeans, and peanut butter and stuff, and it had this tomato ketchup sauce—”

Max recoiled. “I get it.”

Anna gestured toward the casserole dish. “That’s called ‘tofu surprise.’ It’s very, very healthy. Do you want to know what’s
in it?”

“No,” Max said. He put down the spoon. “Thanks.”

Anna smiled sweetly. “I didn’t think so,” she said. “Mark is almost done cooking the hot dogs. I’ll bring you one when they’re
ready.”

It took four folding dining tables, pushed together into a long, wobbly rectangle, to accommodate the group. Max was ushered
into a chair directly opposite Carly’s father, which, he was told, was the seat of honor. He soon learned that the “honor”
involved being the designated audience for Professor Martin’s steady stream of stories and bad puns. More than once, he caught
Carly watching him with an expression very similar to the one he had seen on her face when Lola the Great Dane had pinned
him to the wall.

None of it was remotely like anything that Max had experienced before. He had arrived expecting a variation on the usual theme,
where he would sit politely, eat politely and—as soon as possible—leave politely, all the while fending off nosy questions
about his family, his alma mater, his net worth, and his politics. But now here he was, dropped like a paratrooper into the
wilds of a foreign country, surrounded by this huge, rowdy tribe of people who seemed to be too busy enjoying themselves to
care where he’d gone to school or which fork he used for his salad. They told him jokes, brought him plates of food, and asked
him for his opinions on everything from the stock market to whether or not lizards made good pets.

By all rights, he should have hated it. Their closeness should have amplified his own sense of being an outsider, but, strangely,
it had the opposite effect. The Martins were like a weird vortex of happiness, drawing him in, and as the evening lengthened,
his resistance began to weaken. He began to relax—slowly, cautiously—in the warmth of their easy acceptance, and found that
he was not having a bad time. They made him feel almost as if he belonged there, a part of their ragtag family group.

Belonged there?
The thought was absurd enough to snap Max out his strange trance. He pushed his chair back from the table and folded his
arms against his chest.
Illusion
, he said coldly to himself.
And it won’t do you any good to forget that.
The Martins were not elegant people, but they had a refined social grace of their own. They were skilled hosts and knew how
to make a stranger feel comfortable; but it would be an idiot’s mistake to confuse the rituals of politeness with genuine
acceptance.

His cell phone rang, sounding a sharp tone that turned a few surprised looks toward him. He reached for it immediately. He
was not normally in the habit of answering calls in the middle of meals, but in this case, etiquette had to take a backseat
to the possibility of news from the hospital.

It was Henry’s doctor calling, and Max was glad for the excuse to leave the table. He stood up, and walked toward the Martins’
olive grove to take the call.

C
arly caught Max’s eye as he stood up, and mouthed
hospital
? to him. He nodded and walked away. He looked tense, she thought, but it was hard to infer anything from that, since he usually
looked tense. She wondered if he had always been that way, and thought not. Darkness sat familiarly, but not naturally, on
him, and Carly remembered the few times that she had seen him laugh. It was wonderful to watch his guarded expression lift
like a theater curtain, flashing a glimpse of a very different Max Giordano in the wings.

“His grandfather is very sick,” she said to the group at the table, for the benefit of anyone who didn’t already know. The
Martins were far too good-natured to be offended by Max’s abrupt exit, but Carly didn’t want anyone thinking that he was carelessly
rude.

“I hope it’s good news,” Jeannie said sympathetically. It was clear that she liked Max, and that she had been pleasantly surprised
when he had turned out to be nothing like the typical lost cause that Carly usually brought home.

Max wasn’t a typical anything, Carly thought. He was being extremely quiet, but that was a normal reaction to a first encounter
with the Martin family. Even so, there was an arresting intensity about him that drew the focus of the group. Carly hadn’t
missed the fact that her mother and sisters, all the way down to thirteen-year-old Anna, were practically flirting with him.
It was harmless and cheerful, a gesture of appreciation for this handsome stranger in their midst, and Max had seemed flattered,
though somewhat stunned by all the attention.

She looked toward the olive grove and decided to go and check on him.

He was standing under the canopy of branches, rolling a tiny green olive between his fingers.

“Hello,” she said as she approached. “Do you like olives?”

He looked up. “I’ve never seen them on a tree. I thought they grew in jars.”

His face was such a deadpan that it took Carly a few seconds to realize that he was joking. She smiled. “I’m sure you’ve seen
an olive tree before.”

“Nope. In my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, the only green plants were the dandelions in the sidewalk cracks. You wouldn’t
have liked it much.”

“It doesn’t sound like a very healthy environment for a kid.”

He shrugged. “Kids adapt to almost anything. They’re like little weeds themselves. If all you’ve got is a crack in the pavement,
you put down your root and do your damnedest to bloom. You don’t cry for things you don’t know about.”

“You do seem to be blooming.”

He nodded. “I’m a tough weed.”

“Was there news about Henry?”

“Improvement in his reflexes. They’re falling all over themselves to warn me that it might not mean anything, but I get the
impression that it’s a good sign.”

“Oh, Max, that is good news! I’m glad.”

He frowned slightly at her. “If that’s true, then you’re a very unusual person.”

“I like happy endings. What’s so unusual about that?”

“Not everyone in your position would consider my grandfather’s recovery to be a happy ending.” He held up his hand. “I’m not
being confrontational. I know that you care about him, and I’m actually beginning to believe that your saintly priorities
are genuine. Unusual but genuine. I’m not going to apologize for being skeptical. You may be good at idealism, Carly, but
I consider it a luxury I can’t afford.”

Carly smiled ruefully. “Some pair we are. You’re suspicious and cynical, and I’m naive and dopey. I guess we could both stand
to move a little more toward the center.”

“Maybe. For the record, though, I don’t think you’re dopey.”

She laughed. “You’re not arguing with naive?”

“Live and learn. I’d call you lucky not to have gotten those lessons too soon.”

He said it simply, but Carly heard something in his voice that reminded her of standing with him in Henry’s dining room.
You don’t know me, Grandpa, but I’m the product of Alan’s affair with a boozed-up cocktail waitress.
Those were not the words of a man who had enjoyed a sheltered childhood. She thought of the gray tomcat who lived in the
tiny park across the street from her apartment. He had a torn ear, a knobby tail, and a body roughened from years of scrounging
and fighting. She had finally convinced him to show up for a bowl of food in the evenings, but he kept a wary eye on her while
he ate, and never let her touch him. She thought that perhaps he had some things in common with the man who stood before her.
Max was a well-groomed stray, but fighting scars were not always so visible.

It was hard for Carly to imagine an existence like Max’s: solitary as a satellite, without a single family tie. And he did
not strike her as the kind of person who collected friends. What did you do without anyone to support you, to praise you,
to love you?

He was running his fingers absently over the bark of the olive tree, and Carly could see by his expression that his thoughts
were far away. His face was almost noble, she thought. The strong, square bones and long, slightly arched nose were as much
old Rome as they were Brooklyn.

Someone who knew and loved Alan Tremayne might have found character in his face, but judging from what Carly had seen in the
portrait, Alan had been a very average young man, with mousy hair and a face—perhaps already softened by alcoholism—that retained
a child’s lack of definition. He had the kind of generic fraternity-boy look that populated a thousand campuses, and aside
from the eerily identical gray eyes, Max seemed to have nothing at all in common with his father. In every way that Alan was
bland, Carly thought, Max was fierce. She guessed that his mother had been a very beautiful woman.

But genes alone did not build a face like Max Giordano’s. It was his own life that had added the angry pride, the guarded
eyes, the… weariness? It was difficult for Carly to imagine weakness of any kind in a man who was so vigorously alive, but
now that she was getting to know him better, she could sense something more subtle in him, something that seemed akin to a
soldier’s exhaustion after years and years of war. She didn’t understand what Max’s war was for, or why he felt a need to
fight, but it seemed to her to be a deeply difficult way to live.

She had the sudden urge to reach for him, to take him in her arms and cradle his dark head against her. She wanted to stroke
his hair and try to make him feel safe enough to realize that sometimes war was a choice, and not an inevitability.

But she stayed where she was. As she had learned from the gray tomcat, fighters and strays did not take kindly to sudden moves.

“Max,” she said gently, “Henry is my friend, so of course I care about him. But I also care about you.”

He looked coolly at her. “That’s hard to swallow,” he said. “You barely know me.”