cure for cancer, but sheesh. When push came to shove, what was one of the most absolutely critical things in life?
A rhetorical question, of course, as she sashayed over to her private stash by the computer drawer. One truffle before dinner. Oh, yes, all the rules were going by the wayside tonight. If those who called her an obsessive-compulsive fuddy-duddy could only see her now…having chocolate before dinner. With wine. Walking around the house near naked. No looking at the bills. No cleaning. No doing anything constructive.
And they said she’d never manage being wicked. Hah. She was just swallowing the last sip of wine when the doorbell rang.
She froze, then spun around, cracked her toe on a chair leg, winced, and then hobbled into the bedroom, yelling, “Hold on! I’ll be there in a minute!” As fast as she could, she yanked on yoga pants and a sweatshirt, yelling out another promise at the top of her lungs, and then pedaled for the front door.
Because she was wicked—not crazy—she naturally looked through the peephole first. Her jaw dropped even as she hurled the door open. “Dad! What on earth are you…?”
She started to ask what her father was doing here, but since he was standing there with a suitcase, some kind of crisis was self-explanatory. The suitcase itself showed more proof of a crisis. It was one of those old-fashioned cases—hard-shelled like a turtle, gray, the kind that was too heavy to carry but you just couldn’t kill it off; throw it off a cliff and it’d land without a dent. Only this one had three socks clamped in its teeth. One white, two black.
“Dad?” she asked more gently, by that time pulling him into the light by the front door.
“Your mother kicked me out. She told me to get out and stay out.”
There. Her worst nightmare. The reason she’d stayed home so long and never moved away like every other self-respecting, independent adult woman. Only damn. She’d always feared her parents would argue each other to death if she wasn’t there to play referee.
“Come on, give me your coat.” He was just standing there with the suitcase, looking at her like a lost soul. Luther Fitzhenry was a surgeon. Cardiac. One of the most brilliant at Mayo—which was saying something. She’d inherited her slight height and skinniness from him. He couldn’t be over five-six and was built leaner than wire. But his heart was huge, and showed clearly in his gentle facial lines and soft blue eyes.
At the moment, he looked a lot more like a confused, lost puppy than a brilliant surgeon. “She says I’m never home. That I’m always at the hospital. That we’re already strangers so I might as well just leave.”
“Okay, okay. We’ll talk about this in a minute, but first let’s calm down.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go, Lucy. If I could just stay here. For a night or two.”
“For a night or two,” she echoed, trying not to feel panicked at the terrorizing thought that he’d stay longer.
“I won’t be a problem.”
“I know you won’t.”
“I just didn’t know where else to go.”
“Uh-huh.” She led him into the living room. He plunked ked down on her green microfiber sofa—the unpaid-for sofa from Pottery Barn—and looked around bewilderedly.
“I love your mother, Lucy.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“You know I don’t drink.” He leaned forward with his long hands hanging over his knees. “On second thought, I would. Chivas on the rocks.”
“Um, Dad. I can’t afford Chivas. It has to be wine or beer.”
“Oh.” He looked at her hopefully. “If I gave you some money, could you go buy some Chivas? I don’t want to put you to any trouble. It’s probably too much to ask. Never mind.” His thick, light hair was graying a little, and right now standing up in strange spikes. “I don’t need a drink. Just completely forget I asked.”
“Dad.”
“What?”
“I’ll go out, get you the Chivas. Just relax now.”
“I love your mother, Lucy.”
“Yes, you said that. I know.”
“She says I never notice anything she does. That I was a spoiled young man and now I’ve turned into a spoiled old man. That I’m self-centered. That I never see her. I keep trying to figure out what brought this all on—”
“Her birthday?”
“No. It can’t be that. I bought her that Mikado watch she wanted for her birthday—”
“That was last year, Dad.”
“Well, it wasn’t that. It was something else. I think…she may have reupholstered the couch. Or bought a new chair. Something like that. I walked in and she just seemed to get madder and madder—” He looked at her pitifully. “Whatever you do, don’t go out just for me.”
Okay. She went out, found a liquor store, bought his Scotch, came home. By then he’d fallen asleep—with his shoes up on her couch. She pulled off his shoes, covered him with a down throw, and then jogged back to the spare room.
She had a bed and various odd pieces of furniture in there because her parents had pawned off all the furniture they didn’t want when she moved out. But since she rarely needed a spare bed, she’d tended to fill up the room with stuff. Unfortunately her dad could trip on things like the exercise bike and cross-country skis and snow gear, especially if he woke in the middle of the night, so it all had to be cleared out and cleaned up.
On the third trip to the garage, her stomach turned a triple somersault, making her stop dead. Not now. Not again. She hadn’t had time—or she’d forgotten—to call a doctor that day, but then she realized, she also hadn’t had any dinner. Except for the truffle.
The truffle was fabulous. When it came down to it, there was no such thing as a bad truffle. But it did seem as if she had a tiny propensity to get in trouble with chocolate lately.
That sudden insight was so unpleasant that she immediately hurled it in her mental-denial bin and aimed for the kitchen. Because her dad was still napping, she did the mac-and-cheese thing, finished making up a fresh bed for him, and then made the usual nightly calls…Ginger, her sister. Merry, her best friend. Her cousin Russell miraculously managed to connect between her calls—something was new with him, she could hear it in his voice, but he didn’t mention anything except stopping over soon. And finally, her mom got a turn at the phone lines.
“Is he there, Lucy?”
“Yes. Do you want to—”
“No. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want him to know I called. And I don’t care where he is. I just…” Eve sighed on the other end of the line. Lucy could picture her mother, so beautiful, her blond hair never looked fussed-over but always wonderfully styled, makeup just so, elegant as roses. But angry. “I just wanted to be sure he was all right. That’s all. Kick him out, Luce.”
“Mom,
