cash? I’ll write you a check.”
“I don’t need it, Nick,” she answered. “I just need the time. You’re giving me that, and I’m grateful.”
“Don’t come back too soon.”
“No, I won’t. Thank you again. So much.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just take care of your mom.”
Celie didn’t see Nick for a week.
She barely saw her apartment, either, as her mom needed a lot of time, at first in the hospital and then at home. After a week, her mom still wasn’t too confident on her crutches, but by this time Celie’s sister, Veronica, had organized to come up from Kentucky, with baby Lizzie, for as long as she was needed, which meant that Celie could go home and back to work.
The apartment sent out its silent “Good to see you” message, the moment she walked through the door. The clock on the side table had stopped, the air was a little stale and surfaces needed dusting. On the windowsill, Celie found a torn shred of white broderie anglaise fabric, left there like a message on a Post-It note.
A message for her.
She had no doubt of that.
But where had it come from, who could have put it there, and what did it mean?
“Hey, what’s going on here? Why are you doing this to me? I’m not the right person for it,” she said aloud to the room, and when she turned, she almost expected to see the woman fixing her hat in front of the mirror, wearing a broderie anglaise blouse.
But no one was there.
I’m talking to my apartment, she realized. How weird is that?
At least the solution to this problem was obvious, and within her control.
Don’t do it.
Celie hadn’t had any memorable dreams while at her mom’s, but tonight they again cut through her sleep. The baby cried. Or was it a doll? She kept seeing strange figures and forms, some of them reassuringly like people, others just the suggestion of a human shape. What were they made of? Plaster? Metal? None of the images stayed long enough for her to identify them. Bright lights flashed, startling and dazzling her, and she thought there must have been an explosion.
Where was the baby in all of this? Was it in danger?
She jumped out of bed and rushed to look for it.
No, not it.
Him.
Nick’s baby was a boy. Hadn’t the woman in front of the mirror said so, last week? Celie sniffed the air, in search of the acrid, firecracker smell of explosives but, thank goodness, couldn’t detect it anywhere.
Couldn’t find the baby, either. His cries still shrilled in her ears. Why didn’t Nick go to him tonight? His inaction distressed her. The baby was his. The woman had implied it, and Celie somehow knew it herself, in any case.
The baby belonged to Nick, only tonight Nick didn’t seem to be around.
“He doesn’t know,” she told the woman frantically. “Nick doesn’t know the baby’s crying. He doesn’t know about the baby at all.”
“He will,” she answered, with the calm smile that made Celie feel as if everything was all right. “He’ll find out. You can tell him, if you want.”
“And the explosion?”
“It’s not an explosion. The baby is miles from there, anyhow, on the other side of town. No one’s in that kind of danger.”
And this meant that Celie could sleep, so she did. This was very easy, because of course she’d been asleep all along. None of this was real.
In the morning, it felt great to be back at work, and even better to be busy—back the way life used to be, in this job, very safe and structured and efficient, with no time to think of Nick Delaney as anything except Celie’s driven, demanding employer. She wore her severest navy pinstripe suit and rocketed through the tasks Nick had given her with barely a pause to sip her coffee.
He had scheduled a long day. Meetings and conference calls ran until five, ahead of tomorrow’s demonstration of proposed new menu items by the resident team of Delaney’s food scientists and chefs. Delaney’s rotated its menu seasonally, four times a year, and although Ohio was currently clothed in spring colors, the new offerings for the coming fall were already in planning.
Celie wasn’t surprised, midafternoon, when Nick announced, “I’m going to go visit a couple of the restaurants tonight, check out the atmosphere.”
Nine years ago, there had only been one Delaney’s, and Nick and Sam had been able to check out the atmosphere in that establishment for sixteen hours of every day. Now, with ninety-eight existing locations and twelve more planned to open this year, the chain was so large and so successful that they risked losing touch with the ambiance they’d worked so hard to build. It must be more than seven years, Celie guessed, since Nick had personally thrown a steak on a Delaney’s grill, or poured a Delaney’s beer.
“You want to take notes?” she asked him. “You want me to come along?”
“I’d like you to come along. I don’t know if we’ll need to take notes. I just want to get the feel. Sam’s doing the same with Kyla, over near his place, at Delaney’s Franklin Street.”
Nick didn’t mention Sam’s gorgeous red-haired wife, Marisa. He rarely did, these days, and Celie had always gotten the impression that he didn’t like her. Celie had trouble with the woman’s snobbish attitude and social climbing instincts, herself.
They left Delaney’s company headquarters at just after five, and drove to Delaney’s Mill Run in Nick’s very average-looking American car instead of the chauffeur-driven limo, with Nick himself at the wheel. Celie suspected that he kept the car especially for times like this. He hated to be recognized as co-owner of the corporation when he dropped in at one of the restaurants. Getting any kind of special treatment would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
A perky college student showed them to a booth in the bar section, and as Nick had hoped, she had no idea who he was.
Although it was only midweek, the place already had a Friday-night mood, with groups and couples laughing and talking over appetizers, cocktails and beer. The decor was fresh and clean, and diners could choose booths or tables, lounge chairs or bar stools. In towns and cities all across America, Delaney’s was the kind of place where a man could bring a woman, confident that she would like the atmosphere and he would like the beer.
Up in a high corner across from their booth, a big television showed news and sports, but it didn’t dominate. Nick took a seat with his back to it, and didn’t even spare it a glance. Celie knew what he must be thinking. How many people in here? What was the gender balance? The age mix? The ethnicity? How many people ate in the bar section, and how many had one drink here, first, before moving to their table in the restaurant itself?
The Delaney’s marketing division had facts like these at their fingertips, but Nick liked to sample the data in a more personal way. He and Sam both believed that this was the way to pick up on trends and apply them successfully.
