Going for Kona (2 page)

I felt a little better about it, maybe three percent. “Five minutes?”

“Five minutes.”

“I’ll hit the ladies’ room and meet you at the café, then, okay?”

“Sounds like a plan, and I love me a good plan.”

I rolled my eyes at him in response.

He swooped me over backwards. A flashbulb lit up my peripheral vision. Scarlett’s hired shooter was still at it. “Hurry back.”

I put the back of my hand to my forehead and said, “Be still, my heart.”

He laughed and set me back on my feet, and we walked in opposite directions.

It felt strange and wonderful to have finished our book launch together, hell, to have written the book at all, instead of just enforcing the
Chicago Manual of Style
upon it. As an editor, most of my writers treat me like the punctuation police. Adrian doesn’t. Words matter to him, like they do to me. Even more, my words matter to him. Mine. I hadn’t even known I had my own words. Sure, I’d known I was prone to what my mother called an overactive imagination since the day I ran home from school, gasping for air, and told her I’d seen an elephant walk through my schoolyard and reach into my classroom window. That I’d felt the wiry hairs on his trunk as he lifted me from my seat, through the air, and out the window. Yet somehow—
“It was like magic, Mom!”
—I’d still been in my seat five minutes later to take the terrifying state assessment test. I’d kept that imagination under wraps until Adrian started unfastening all my buttons. And now my name was on a book jacket, too, and more words threatened to come out of me, this time forming themselves into an idea for a fantasy novel, for goodness’ sake, something I hadn’t told even Adrian yet because it was so crazy.

I made my way across the store toward the ladies’ room. Many of the browsing shoppers were people I recognized from our signing. I tried not to race-walk in front of them.

When I finished sprucing up—and answering questions from women in the bathroom who were more interested in my marriage than in triathlon—I broke toward the sounds of beans grinding and milk steaming. Adrian and Connor were talking with their heads together like longtime confidants—and Miss Boob Job was lurking behind them, more Mata Hari than Barbie now. When she saw me, she whirled around so fast her bag flew out from her body like a stripper from her pole. My eyes followed her retreat.

When the door closed behind her, I looked back at my husband and his new old friend. Connor was punctuating his speech with sharp nods of his head and smacking his closed fist into his open hand. Adrian snuck a glance back over his shoulder and saw me, then turned back to Connor and held up a palm. Connor looked in my direction, then back at Adrian, and nodded. They shook hands and Connor left through the same door Rhonda had, all before I could reach them.

I tilted my head. “That was some conversation.”

Adrian planted a firm kiss on my lips. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I started to roll my eyes, but stopped when I caught a flash of white through the window. A small sedan was driving past the bookstore, sending me into another blood-soaked flashback of Adrian on the side of the road with the dead cyclist. I shook my head to clear the image and gripped my husband’s bicep. Warm. Solid.

He picked up a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of orange and yellow tulips from the table beside him and I took them from his hands. “But it’s Thursday!”

Adrian brought me tulips every Friday since one hour after our first not-a-date. It was still hard to believe that a man who looked that good would work so hard to make me feel special. Tan, muscular but lean, and blond with short curls at the nape of his neck, Adrian was delectable. Like double-fudge-brownie-sundae-with-a-cherry-on-top yummy, although he would rather be compared to a gluten-free brownie sweetened with coconut nectar, hold the fudge and double the organic fresh cherries, please. He made me forget that I’m on the wrong side of forty and haven’t changed my hairstyle since my fifteen-year-old started kindergarten. Sure, I have a good face and can render a pretty paragraph, but Adrian was the looker in our twosome.

He kissed the tip of my nose. “Pretend it’s Friday, then, since it’s our anniversary and book launch. Thank Scarlett, though. I ran out of time today, and she saved my ass.”

I laughed. “Well, I have a surprise for you, too, but I’m saving it for dinner.”

“Oh, that isn’t all I’ve got, but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for your real surprise. Tomorrow night.”

“Then I’ll save mine until then, too.”

“Copycat.” He winked.

We started walking to the parking lot, my arm through his. Adrian’s strides were normally twice the length of mine, but somehow we made them match.

“So, what did Connor want to talk to you about?”

“We debated Coeur d’Alene versus Lake Placid.” Those were two famous Ironman triathlons.

“That’s caca.”

“He heard Lake Placid was the better race for a first-timer. I set him straight.”

My thoughts began to tumble like Keds in a drier. The scene replayed in my mind: Little Miss Boob Job skulking around in the café within earshot of the two men. I couldn’t make sense of what I’d seen, nor could I figure out the source of the dread that was seeping through me. But it was our anniversary. I had two options. I could act the paranoid fool or I could be a grown-up. I chose option B.

“Okay.”

***

My stomach bulged against my waistband, but I was not about to stop now. Why had I suffered through a sixty-five-minute swim and a two-hour run that day if not to overindulge on a special occasion? I’d eat like an Ironman contender tomorrow. Meanwhile I’d savor each bite, made even more dear because my Oxheart meal cost what I’d normally spend to eat for a week.

Tex, our Vietnamese waiter, arranged my dessert in front of me and backed away with a theatrical flourish. His voice was pure epicurean hip. “Your tapioca pudding caressed by Buddha’s Hand citron, ginger-galangal ice cream, and apple mint.”

Oxheart was definitely on the cool side: local ingredients and hip, rustic-leaning décor, light years away from our elderly Jewish neighborhood.

Tex lifted a bowl from his tray and held it high and away from his body like he was serving up a dead rat. “Your berries, sir.” He thunked the bowl down on the table. Plain ole fruit hadn’t been on the menu.

“Great, thanks.” Adrian was oblivious to the waiter’s pique.

Tex nodded at me, gave his head a barely perceptible shake at Adrian, and left.

I dug into my pudding. “Oh my.” I held a bite in my mouth and moaned, letting the flavors seep into my tongue. Heaven. Heaven in a spoon.

Adrian stabbed a strawberry with his fork, then held it suspended in the air in front of him, forgotten. He looked at me instead, looked into me, in a serious way unlike his usual self. “Lately I’ve noticed more strangers recognize me. I don’t like it as much as I thought I would. You’ve got to promise me you’ll be careful. Watch out for the crazies, don’t take chances, tell me if anyone does anything weird around you. You’re my world, Michele.”

I couldn’t recall a single time my free-spirited husband had scared me, but he scared me so much right then that I pushed my tapioca away. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” He shifted upwards like he was going to interrupt, so I hurried on. “I promise, though, I’ll be careful. Will you promise me the same?”

“Yes. I promise.”

His definition of careful and mine don’t even belong in the same dictionary, but I accepted his answer. “Is something going on?”

“No.” He drew out the word. “I’m just sentimental because it’s our anniversary.”

I narrowed my eyes.

He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

A lump rose in my throat. “I wouldn’t last a day without you.”

“Sure you would. You’re the strongest person I know. You’re my little Itzpa, my Butterfly.” He held up his hands bent into claw shapes. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Seriously, you know it’s me who’d crumble.” He leaned toward me and extended his hands palms up across the table. I put mine on his, our hands and fingers barely touching. “Please, honey, whatever you do, don’t leave me alone in the house with those two teenagers.”

The tension slipped off of me like a silk robe to the floor. Annabelle, his seventeen-year-old daughter, and my Sam were good kids, but they were your normal handful of hormones. I tickled his palms with my fingertips. “I think Belle and Sam would love it. Party every night and sleep all day.”

He snorted. “Your nose is growing, Pinocchio.”

I smiled and pulled my tapioca bowl back into place. I couldn’t help but think, though, that if anyone’s nose had grown that night, it hadn’t been mine.

The next morning came much earlier than I would’ve liked. Thank God it was a rest day: no workouts scheduled. I eyed the damp-haired woman in the bathroom mirror whose husband was shaving beside her. Well, I didn’t look as bad as I felt, and our bathroom looked marvelous, if I did say so myself. We’d just had it remodeled after four years in our cozy three-bedroom house with a shower that didn’t do hot. Now it did, and we had 16×16 tile and dual showerheads to enjoy it with, as we just had. The bathroom was our only true splurge as a couple, and it felt decadent.

A muffled voice came through the bathroom door. “Who’s picking me up after baseball?” Sam. It sounded like he was in the entryway, just outside the bathroom.

“Not me.” Belle’s voice came from near his. “I have late swim practice tonight. Buh-bye.” The front door whooshed open, the alarm chimed four times, and the door thwumped shut.

Adrian and I looked at each other, then I picked up my lipstick. A brownish-neutral, my favorite color, if neutral qualifies as a color. “Can you get him today? We have a
Speedboat Quarterly
to get to press. I can drive him this morning.” Besides
Multisport Magazine,
Juniper Media published magazines and collector books on a variety of sports, including speedboat racing, dressage, and even Ping-Pong. They’d gone a new direction recently, too, and published a certain book called
My Pace or Yours
.

Adrian rinsed his razor, tapped it against the edge of the sink, rinsed it again, and stuck it in a cream-colored porcelain cup by his faucet. “I can, but you need to hurry home, too. We have a little trip to make tonight.” He turned toward me, his eyes still green and smoky from the hours we’d spent nose to nose, toes to toes, and everything to everything else in between, the night before. People who called his eyes hazel had never woken up naked with him and seen the eyes I saw most mornings. Definitely green.

“We do?”

A tap sounded on our bathroom door and I opened it. Steam whooshed out at Sam. The scent of Adrian’s pomegranate mango body wash dissipated. “Guys? My rides today?” His dark hair hung in a flop over his forehead and in front of his left eye. It would drive me nuts if I were him, and I fought the urge to lick my finger and smooth it back like I would have only a few years ago. Annabelle’s crooked-tailed Siamese cat, Precious, padded along behind him, meowing as she wended her way around his ankles.

“We do,” Adrian said, finishing our conversation and pretending to ignore Sam. “For your surprise.” He leaned down and in, nuzzling the crook of my neck and shoulder.

“Guy-uys,” Sam said. Even though he was as tall as Adrian, he still looked like a boy and acted like one most of the time. Displays of affection elicited the gross-out response I knew Adrian was going for.

I held back a smile. “I’m taking you to work, and Belle will take you from there to baseball practice.” Sam was a summer lifeguard at the Jewish Community Center.

“I’m picking you up after baseball.” Adrian replaced his nose with his hand on my shoulder.

“Oh, and Adrian checked out some paintball place for your birthday yesterday.” I couldn’t believe my baby boy was turning sixteen in one week—or that I was waiting until the last minute to pull things together for the big day.

“Sweet!” Sam bounced on his toes like an oversized Labrador puppy. “Can I drive my friends when we go?”

“May I. Nope. You can’t get your license until after you turn sixteen, and your birthday is on a Saturday. The DMV isn’t open on the weekend.”

“Please?”

“N.O.”

“Belle got to drive when she was fifteen.”

“Belle had a hardship license so she could get across town to the pool and back twice a day.”

“No fair.”

Adrian cut in at just the right time. “Speaking of Belle and no fair, her grandmother called. She’s not coming, and Belle’s bummed. We’ve got to cheer her up.”

I winced. “Oh no. We will.” Her maternal grandparents lived in New York. Their daughter Elise—Adrian’s first wife—fatally crashed her Porsche when Annabelle was an infant, and Adrian inherited an obscene amount of money. Enough that he could quit his all-consuming job in audit at the then-Big-Eight firm of Price Waterhouse to care for Annabelle and follow his heart into writing. Belle’s grandparents funded a trust Belle would gain access to at twenty-one, like Elise before her. Their visits were solar-eclipse rare, but to Annabelle, the love of her grandmother Diane was the moon and the sun. My heart ached for her, but I had to get my son moving. “Are you ready to go?”

Sam’s eyes fluttered, dangerously close to rolling at me. “I’ve been ready.”

I looked up at him and put my hands on my hips. “Teeth brushed?”

“Yes.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“With a toothbrush?”

“Mommm,” he complained, but I stared him down. He sighed. “Yes.”

“And toothpaste?”

A fraction of a second’s hesitation gave him away. “Uh—”

“Get right back upstairs and brush your teeth for one minute with water and toothpaste, put on deodorant under your arms, comb your hair with a comb, and meet me at the front door in three minutes. I’m going to check, too. Don’t test me.”

Behind me, Adrian chortled.

Sam opened his mouth, then closed it. He spun around and within a few seconds I heard him stomping up the stairs.

“I wish Robert would let him try medication.”

Sam rarely made it from one routine task to the next without prodding, even with the checklists I posted all over the house. His father resisted ADHD meds, though, and since he split Sam’s expenses with me, was entitled to his say. “I didn’t need it to become an electrical engineer, so why should Sam?” he kept insisting. I’d grown up with Robert in Seguin, Texas, outside San Antonio, and in my humble opinion, a good dose of Concerta wouldn’t hurt him, either.

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

I followed Adrian to the kitchen for the last leg of our morning routine. I glanced out the front window and through the sagging arms of our oak, heavy with a full season’s growth of leaves. A white sedan was parked across the street. I peered closer. An old, nondescript Ford Taurus I hadn’t seen before. It probably belonged to someone we knew or someone working for someone we knew; Meyerland looks like Little Mexico by day with all the yard workers, maids, and nannies reporting for duty. More than once, neighbors have mistaken me for the help.

I walked over to Adrian, who was slathering cashew butter on a banana as the Keurig dispensed his Kona. Light spilled in through the glass block windows over his hands. “You know how I’ve been seeing white Tauruses everywhere? Do you recognize that one?” I pointed out the window.

He chomped a bite of his banana—breakfast number two, after an egg white and veggie omelet before our shower—then looked outside. He sucked a slow breath in through his nose and released it the same way, still chewing. He chewed some more, then swallowed. “Yeah, we need to talk about that.”

“And?”

“Well, let’s just say something’s a tad off about the owner.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m gonna be late, Mom.” I looked behind me down the hall, and there he was, his cheeks pinker and his hair neater.

“Remind me tonight and I’ll tell you all about it. You’ve got to get out of here.”

I recognized the bum rush when I got it. Adrian had almost no concept of time except when it related to speed and distance covered.

“Mom, come
on
.”

I growled softly at Adrian. I didn’t like waiting, but I wasn’t going to cause Sam to get fired either. “Later, then.” I grabbed my voluminous zebra-print bag from the kitchen counter and turned back to my husband. I let him give me a cashew-butter kiss, but I made my voice stern. “I love you. And I’ll hurry home for our surprises and to hear about this mysterious driver.”

“I love you, too.” He called down the hall toward Sam, “See you at five after practice. Family date tonight.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“
Family
date?”

Adrian’s satisfied grin bordered on smug. “Wait, did I not tell you that part?”

“You know you didn’t.” I stood on tiptoe to kiss his smile.

“Huh. I guess that’s why they call it a surprise.” He emphasized the last word, widening his eyes and leaning in at me.

I shook my head and laughed as I headed down the hall that led to the driveway. Two sets of footsteps followed behind me. When I got outside, the Taurus wasn’t there.

“You take the 4Runner today.” I waved my hand at Adrian’s SUV, which I’d been driving for the past few weeks while we tried to figure out what was wrong with my Jetta. “Since you have to pick up our bicycles from the shop.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to be responsible for El Diablo giving you an aneurysm or something.”

“I’m sure.” I clicked to open my Jetta. Nothing happened, as usual. I opened the door the old-fashioned way, cringing at what came next: the car alarm blaring—wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk. I threw open the door and pulled the switch for the headlights to quiet the alarm. Sam was waiting at the back end of the car to catch the trunk when it popped open when the headlights switched on. He slammed it closed and I lowered myself into the seat and pulled the door shut.

“We can take it in to the shop on Monday,” Adrian shouted.

I could barely hear him through the electric windows that wouldn’t roll down. I muttered, “If it makes it until then,” and turned on the ignition. Adrian claimed the car was possessed, and had tried to get me to hang a rosary from the rearview mirror. But much to the horror of my deceased abuelita—my namesake on my father’s side—my mother had raised me Baptist. No rosaries at La Hacienda de Hanson.

Sam stuffed his red backpack into the toe space of the passenger side and dropped into the seat with a mesh bag of baseball gear and a brown paper lunch bag. He shut the door and buckled in, then immediately changed the radio station. I liked The Bull, he liked Young Country, but both played George Strait, so I didn’t fight him over it.

He cut his eyes at me. “You’re not going to make me drive this thing, are you?”

What the Jetta lacked in coolness it made up for in safety, so I hedged. “We’ll see.” I backed out, waving at Adrian, and rolled the Jetta past the hodgepodge of remodeled and enlarged 1960s ranches toward the JCC. My day had officially begun.

***

I reached the open gate of Juniper Media’s lot just before eight and right on time. Juniper officed in a long multicolored brick building on the western edge of the Heights, just north of downtown. The one-story structure was part office and part industrial, like its neighborhood, which blended into the rest of Houston. We are a city infamous for lack of zoning.

I backed the Jetta into my reserved spot and shut down the engine, thankful that my electrical issues didn’t wreak havoc when I turned the car off. Sweat immediately trickled down my neck as I walked toward the office. It was ninety-plus already and wicked humid, typical for August. I dug in my purse for my phone, but something made me stop midstride, hand still in my bag. I looked back toward my car. Parked three down was an old white Taurus. My stomach tightened. I walked back to it and snapped a photo of its Texas plates with my phone. The numbers were completely obscured by a thick coat of dried mud.

On edge now, I entered the lobby, strewn with Houston sports pennants and memorabilia: red, white, and navy for the Texans; red, white, and black for the Rockets; blue and orange for the Astros; orange and white for the Dynamo. I was already on sensory overload after our late night, and the garish colors jarred me. I was irritated that Adrian wouldn’t tell me about the car. I needed coffee.

A familiar voice jolted me from my thoughts and I followed it to the reception desk.

“Hello. I’m here to apply for a job.” The woman was clad in a fitted hot-pink blouse, black pencil skirt, and peep-toe patent-leather heels. Once again, Rhonda Dale did not blend.

I positioned myself beside her. “We meet again.”

She swung her head toward me. Her mouth opened and closed, marionette-like. “What are you doing here?”

“Me? I work here. What are
you
doing here?”

“I was just applying for a job I saw posted on Craigslist.”

Marsha, our longtime receptionist, piped in. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t show that we have any jobs posted right now.” God bless her
.

“Whoopsie.”

And then it hit me why Rhonda was here. This was no coincidence.

“You do know Adrian doesn’t work here, right?” He was a freelancer, as in free to write his column from home, or over the Kona they stocked just for him at Fioza’s Coffee Shop, or wherever his free spirit took him.

Rhonda’s dark eyebrows pulled together under her bleached bangs. “But—” She shook her head in rapid, tiny movements. “Whatever.” She wheeled on the point of one heel and stalked back toward the front door.

The me that first earned my Itzpa nickname in middle school when I punched a girl twice my size for picking on a fifth grader was more controlled as an adult, but still no one to mess with. All five foot two of me. “Hey, Rhonda,” I called after her, “I’ll tell Adrian you came by to see him. But I wouldn’t recommend you do it again.”

The door swung shut behind her.

Marsha looked at me from over her half glasses with their dangling bejeweled strap, chin down. “Well, good morning to you.”

I guffawed to cover my anger. “Yeah. Wow, huh?” I didn’t trust myself to say more. I started toward my office.

“Oh, and congratulations, Ms. Famous Author. There’s a picture of you and your husband on the cover of the Entertainment section of the
Chronicle
this morning.”

I turned and walked backwards with a finger to my lips as I said, “Shhh, we’re trying to keep a low profile.” I resumed my walk. I heard Marsha laugh behind me. She was a peach, and I owed her one for shutting Rhonda down. I turned and added, “Don’t eat before work Monday. I’m bringing you cinnamon raisin bagels from New York Deli.”

She beamed.

Despite putting up the good front my mother had always required, I was still pissed. I remembered when I didn’t make the volleyball team in high school, I ran home and cried my eyes out. The next morning when I got ready for school, she came into my bathroom and stared at my face in the mirror. “More concealer.”