Bundle of Joy (40 page)

Sandra turned to the women. "Please tell me he's exaggerating. He makes it sound like Dodge City out there."

Carol, who was already a full vice-president and secure in her position, laughed. "He's exaggerating, Sandra, but not by much. I heard that battery-operated televisions are going for just a little less than a fully-loaded Caddy."

"Maybe we're in the wrong business." She took the batteries from Ed and placed them on top of one of the packing crates near the door. "Maybe we should forget fixed-rate mortgages and start peddling appliances."

"Limited horizons," said Ed. "A boom market like this happens once every forty-five years. What do you do the rest of the time?"

Ilene's laugh was falsely hearty, and Sandra caught the look of disgust mixed with pity on Carol's face.

Time to change the subject.

"Listen, I haven't unpacked my good china yet, but if you'll settle for paper cups and saltines with Cheez Whiz, you're welcome to sit around the fireplace and trade hurricane stories."

Ed brushed her suggestion aside. "Get your sweater, Patterson. We're going to dinner."

"Where? I thought old Henry managed to blitz everyone for miles."

"One little strip on Jericho Turnpike in Commack has lights," Carol said. "Everyone on the Island probably knows about it by now, but there's a Roy Rogers, a Burger King, and a White Castle, all open for business."

"You don't mean White Castle with the little square burgers, do you?"

"The one and only," Ed said.

"I haven't had one in years," she said, thinking back to the scores of burgers she had devoured during her high school days. "I can't resist."

Ilene and Carol went out to the car to wait while Sandra found her sweater and locked up the house. Ed Gregory, however, stayed behind.

"So I've finally found Perfect Patterson's Achilles heel," he said as they carefully made their way over the fallen branches littering her driveway. "You never looked that happy when we went to Sitar or The Twelve Arches for dinner."

"Sitar doesn't have orange soda and fried onions."

"Orange soda and fried onions make you happy?"

"I'm a simple woman with simple tastes, Ed."

"I thought your tastes ran toward real pearls and BMWs."

"What can I say? Some tastes are ingrained in adolescence." She'd grown up in Queens, after all, not Sutton Place.

"I'd like to hear all about your adolescence, Patterson."

Sandra tried to control an involuntary shudder. "My adolescence was as boring as everyone else's, Ed. Typical teenage angst."

The whole long story of fatherless childhood and a mother whose life revolved around her only daughter was not the stuff business legends were made of. She preferred to let her credentials, which included degrees from NYU and Harvard, speak for themselves.

"Hard to believe that after six years I still have a lot to learn about you, Patterson. I'm looking forward to it."

His remark went deeper than the obvious reference to food and drink and adolescent angst. Her engagement to Andrew Maxwell had managed to keep Ed's and her relationship purely platonic over the years.

Although she'd argued the point at the time, Andrew's assessment that her feelings for him had been more practical than romantic now seemed largely on target. Their engagement had made it possible for Sandra to keep her personal life exactly that – personal – during her half-dozen years of training in Sioux Falls.

Climbing the corporate ladder was difficult enough for a woman; she didn't need to add sexual politics to the already stacked deck.

Ed had recognized the boundaries Sandra's engagement drew and he respected them. Professionally they continued to work splendidly together, and they both managed to overlook the hum of sexual tension beneath the surface. However, now that she was no longer involved with Andrew their relationship was changing, and Sandra was doing her best to discourage Ed romantically.

Hurricane Henry, however, had provided him with the perfect opportunity. Ed had stopped next to a tangle of tree limbs and fallen wires, and was surveying the damage closely.

"How badly were you hit?" he asked as they scrambled over the maze of branches, taking care to avoid the wires.

"Fourteen trees – not including this one – and the roof on my living room. How about you?"

"That's one of the great things about living in a condo: fallen trees are someone else's problem."

Sandra made a face in the darkness. "Lucky you. Think of me tomorrow morning when I'm out here with a chain saw, trying to hack my way to the mailbox."

"I can help you, Patterson."

She hesitated. "That's a lot to ask of a friend and employer, Ed." And it could lead to all manner of complications, she thought.

"After bringing you back to Long Island just in time for Henry, it's the least I can do."

"There's a lot of work." It was hard to imagine the ever-impeccable Edward Gregory up to his ears in tree limbs, but apparently hurricanes brought out the pioneer spirit in everybody.

"What time do you want to start tomorrow morning?" he asked.

He seemed serious. She thought about her wrecked front yard, her mutilated back yard and the gaping hole where her living-room ceiling had been, and gave in to temptation. "How does eight o'clock sound?"

"Disgusting, but I don't think Billy will mind."

"Billy?"

"My nephew," Ed said."That kid will do anything for some spare cash."

Sandra laughed into the darkness. It wasn't hard to understand how Ed had risen through the ranks of US-National : anyone who could delegate responsibility the way Ed did and make it sound as if he was doing you a favor was definitely on the fast track.

There's a lot I can learn from you, Ed Gregory, she thought as she followed him to the car.

#

Michael hadn't driven more than three miles beyond his neighborhood before he understood just how devastating the ridiculously named Hurricane Henry had been. Totaled Saabs and Toyotas and Chevys peeked out from beneath oaks and maples that had been saplings during the Revolutionary War. And the houses had fared no better; sheets and curtains were nailed in place where majestic picture windows had once provided a view of the Sound.

Despite everything, Long Island vibrated with a bizarre euphoria. Come morning, when daylight revealed the full extent of the damage, that euphoria was bound to wear off, but now, when they'd battled the worst that Mother Nature had to offer and come out the other side, a primitive sense of victory was everywhere.

So he was almost disappointed when he rounded a particularly sharp curve on Jericho Turnpike and saw ahead of him a strip of neon lights against the sky proclaiming Burger King and McDonald's and White Castle were open for business.

In all the years since high school, he'd yet to find a French restaurant or pasta palace that could make him as happy as White Castle could.

With apologies to the medievalists, he made a right into the crowded parking lot.

The twentieth century, after all, hadn't been a total washout.

#

Nothing looked the way Sandra remembered it.

The benign shopping malls, the innocuous housing developments with their three-bedroom houses and wide front lawns, even the A&P on the corner, took on an eerie, almost sinister quality without benefit of electricity. It was as if the world had ended and no one had bothered to tell her.

How on earth could everything change so completely in just twenty-four hours?

The pioneer spirit her neighbors and she had exhibited a few hours ago was well and good, when the pioneer spirit went hand-in-hand with central air conditioning and the security of your own four – or forty-four – walls. Out there in the middle of nowhere, it was a whole other experience.

She breathed a sigh of relief when the oasis of lights on Jericho Turnpike came into view and Ed angled his Lincoln Continental into the White Castle parking lot.

"If Thomas Alva Edison were here, I'd kiss his feet," she said as they walked into the lobby of the fast food restaurant. "I've never been so happy to see the fluorescent lights in my entire life."

Her sentiments were apparently shared by the other two hundred or so customers jammed into the place. Everywhere she looked, people in various stages of post-hurricane disarray laughed and joked and jockeyed for table space, thrilled to find both a hot meal and the chance to exchange war stories with other weary veterans.

Carol spotted a cousin of hers who was leaving, and they grabbed the tiny table he had just vacated near the rear door and sat down to decide what to order.

"I'm telling you, Patterson here brought the bad weather with her." They had no sooner sat down than Ed resumed the heavy-duty teasing he'd started in the car. "Think about it, people: she's been here three weeks, and we've had a minor earthquake and a hurricane and now there's another one threatening down in the Carolinas. I don't know about you two, but I'm thinking about moving to New Jersey."

"I can't take any more of this abuse," Sandra said with a laugh. "Give me your orders and I'll wait in line. Maybe that will give you three a chance to vent your hostilities on one another."

The line snaked its way through the restaurant and into the enclosed entrance near the parking lot, and despite the crowds and the noise and the work that awaited her at home, Sandra felt unexpectedly lighthearted and pleased that Ed and the others had decided to drag her out into the real world.

She had known Ed since grad school, when he'd come up to Harvard to scan the latest crop of MBAs and had plucked Sandra from the batch. His vision of her future had coincided with her own, and so far he'd kept her on the path to success with few detours.

Even the move to South Dakota as his ace assistant had proved to be as advantageous as he had promised. Although Sandra was a native New Yorker, she had adapted easily to the pace of small-town life, and her years there had been a time to heal as well as a time to grow.

Ed had been promoted back to New York in her third year, and even without his presence she'd continued to advance. The only detour had been her engagement to Andrew Maxwell, and fate had taken care of that.

Fate, and Andrew's desire for the perfect wife.

But here she was back in New York, with Ed Gregory once again her mentor and friend. He and Carol and a few of the others at US-National had done a lot to make her transition a smooth one.

Showing up on her doorstep tonight and whisking her off to dinner was a perfect example.

While White Castle was hardly Lutece, it still beat cold-pizza-for-one by a mile.

Besides, where else but a fast-food joint in Yuppie country could you eavesdrop on an argument concerning the relative nutritional benefits of White Castle and Burger King?

"Remember, there's lettuce and tomato at Burger King," the woman behind her was saying as Sandra tried to hold back a laugh. "Vitamin C."

"I still say the lower starch content at White Castle is highly preferable," the woman's companion shot back.

Sandra felt like saying, "Why don't you two bozos go home and graze on your front lawn?" when a tall man standing near the counter caught her eye.

He towered over everyone else. That alone would have made him worthy of notice. However, he had more going for him than height – a lot more. Despite the chilly mid-September evening, he wore only faded jeans and a black T-shirt that revealed biceps and forearms worthy of a Michelangelo sculpture. The fluorescent lighting overhead picked up threads of silver in his curly black hair. His head was turned, and she could see only a fraction of his profile, but the high cheekbones and the strong jawline were so familiar that her breath caught in her throat.

She told herself not to be ridiculous. Michael McKay was probably balding and saddled with a potbelly by now, sagging into the beginnings of a sorry middle age. Just because her memories of him were of a man gloriously made, there was no reason to assume that his early promise had been realized.

And yet she couldn't stop watching the man ahead of her in line. How easy it was to fall into memory, to conjure up the heat of a summer day as it rose from the city pavement, to remember the heat of a summer night and the exquisite torture of passion denied.

Eavesdropping on the nutrition-conscious couple behind her paled by comparison.

The line snaked slowly along, and she lost sight of the man when she found herself trapped behind a Formica pillar. Then – damn the timing! – she was at the counter, and it was her turn to order.

"Order, please?"

"Two coffees, one hot chocolate, one orange—"

A movement to her left caught her eye, and she turned for a second, peering through the crowd behind her for one last glimpse of the dark-haired man.

"Hey, lady," the man behind her grumbled. "Other people are waiting, you know."

"Sorry." Chastened, she gave the rest of the order and reminded herself that she was thirty-five years old and beyond games as childish and fruitless as this one.