“I took it away and put it where he couldn’t get it. That much I did. It wasn’t enough, but that much I did. Then I put her money in my pocket and walked out of there. I’d do anything to take that back. But I can’t.”
The women in the doorway had gone back to the kitchen. Some people were looking at their watches. A stomach grumbled. Looking at the assembled nine dozen alkies, Dan realized an astounding thing: what he’d done didn’t revolt them. It didn’t even surprise them. They had heard worse. Some had done worse.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s it. Thanks for listening.”
Before the applause, one of the oldtimers in the back row shouted out the traditional question: “How’d you do it, Doc?”
Dan smiled and gave the traditional answer. “One day at a time.”
2
After the Our Father, and the pizza, and the chocolate cake with the big number XV on it, Dan helped Casey back to his Tundra. A sleety rain had begun to fall.
“Spring in New Hampshire,” Casey said sourly. “Ain’t it wonderful.”
“Raineth drop and staineth slop,” Dan said in a declamatory voice, “and how the wind doth ram! Skiddeth bus and sloppest us, damn you, sing goddam.”
Casey stared at him. “Did you just make that up?”
“Nah. Ezra Pound. When are you going to quit dicking around and get that hip replaced?”
Casey grinned. “Next month. I decided that if you can tell your biggest secret, I can get my hip replaced.” He paused. “Not that your secret was all that f**king big, Danno.”
“So I discovered. I thought they’d run from me, screaming. Instead, they stood around eating pizza and talking about the weather.”
“If you’d told em you killed a blind gramma, they’d have stayed to eat the pizza and cake. Free is free.” He opened the driver’s door. “Boost me, Danno.”
Dan boosted him.
Casey wriggled ponderously, getting comfortable, then keyed the engine and got the wipers to work on the sleet. “Everything’s smaller when it’s out,” he said. “I hope you’ll pass that on to your pigeons.”
“Yes, O Wise One.”
Casey looked at him sadly. “Go f**k yourself, sweetheart.”
“Actually,” Danny said, “I think I’ll go back in and help put away the chairs.”
And that was what he did.
UNTIL YOU SLEEP
1
No balloons or magician at Abra Stone’s birthday party this year. She was fifteen.
There was neighborhood-rattling rock music slamming through the outdoor speakers Dave Stone—ably assisted by Billy Freeman—had set up. The adults had cake, ice cream, and coffee in the Stone kitchen. The kids took over the downstairs family room and the back lawn, and from the sound of them, they had a blast. They started to leave around five o’clock, but Emma Deane, Abra’s closest friend, stayed for supper. Abra, resplendent in a red skirt and off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, bubbled with good cheer. She exclaimed over the charm bracelet Dan gave her, hugged him, kissed him on the cheek. He smelled perfume. That was new.
When Abra left to accompany Emma back to her house, the two of them chattering their way happily down the walk, Lucy leaned toward Dan. Her mouth was pursed, there were new lines around her eyes, and her hair was showing the first touches of gray. Abra seemed to have put the True Knot behind her; Dan thought Lucy never would. “Will you talk to her? About the plates?”
“I’m going outside to watch the sun go down over the river. Maybe you’ll send her to visit with me a little when she gets back from the Deanes’.”
Lucy looked relieved, and Dan thought David did, as well. To them she would always be a mystery. Would it help to tell them she would always be one to him? Probably not.
“Good luck, chief,” Billy said.
On the back stoop where Abra had once lain in a state that wasn’t unconsciousness, John Dalton joined him. “I’d offer to give you moral support, but I think you have to do this alone.”
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“Yes. At Lucy’s request.”
“No good?”
John shrugged. “She’s pretty closed up on the subject.”
“I was, too,” Dan said. “At her age.”
“But you never broke every plate in your mother’s antique breakfront, did you?”
“My mother didn’t have a breakfront,” Dan said.
He walked down to the bottom of the Stones’ sloping backyard and regarded the Saco, which had, courtesy of the declining sun, become a glowing scarlet snake. Soon the mountains would eat the last of the sunlight and the river would turn gray. Where there had once been a chainlink fence to block the potentially disastrous explorations of young children, there was now a line of decorative bushes. David had taken the fence down the previous October, saying Abra and her friends no longer needed its protection; they could all swim like fish.
But of course there were other dangers.
2
The color on the water had faded to the faintest pink tinge—ashes of roses—when Abra joined him. He didn’t have to look around to know she was there, or to know she had put on a sweater to cover her bare shoulders. The air cooled quickly on spring evenings in central New Hampshire even after the last threat of snow was gone.