perhaps we should leave this conversation for another day. You can understand it has been a hard time.”
“Jack, I’d have thought you would have been—” came the woman’s shrill voice through the receiver.
“I’m sorry, Jenny, but Darcy and I have an appointment and we really need to go.”
Darcy shut her eyes. She heard Jack mutter something less than kind as he thrust the handset back into the cradle.
“You knew she’d react that way,” he said as he bent over the broken glass, picking shards out of the puddle of orange juice with his fingers.
Darcy sniffed. “I can hope.”
“It’s gonna get worse when she finds out about the money.”
“She’s not going to find out about the money,” Darcy replied. It was hard enough to deal with her own reaction, she wasn’t going to add vicious Aunt Jenny into the mix. “Dar—”
“I’m not dealing with her. Not now. She’s been invisible for two years, she doesn’t get to show up and play loving sister now.”
“Yes, I know she’s horrible, but she was horrible before. She’s always been—”
Darcy cut him off. “Who’s side are you on, anyway?”
He tossed the shards into the garbage. “Yours. Ours. But we’re all just going to have to try to be reasonable….”
“Don’t do that!” Darcy snapped. She wasn’t ready to be reasonable. She’d been reasonable and responsible and reliable for months, and she’d been repaid with deception and death. There was nothing reasonable about that. She’d earned the right to act out. To be unreasonable.
But not to Jack. For God’s sake, he didn’t deserve this. She wasn’t handling this well. Tears tightened her throat.
“Jack, I’m…”
“Not handling this well,” he said softly, as he stepped over the juice puddle to take her in his arms. “But it’s only your first week on tour as Little Orphan Heiress.” He’d coined the term late last night after they lay in bed talking. It was so crass, so full of disrespect for the situation at hand, that it made her laugh. Awful but truthful. She should have slapped him on the cheek for the hideous remark, but somehow she loved him for daring to say it. For the absurd honesty of it. “We’ve got a lot to work out here, and that last remnant of your bonkers family isn’t helping.” He kissed her forehead. “But I’m on your side, here, remember?”
“No, I’m on the side. You’re standing in the middle of the orange juice.”
Chapter 4
Comfortably Drastic
Despite death and national security, Monday came.
After seeing everyone off to work and school, Darcy sat alone in the quiet of her deserted kitchen, watching the steam make graceful curls out of her teacup. The frenzied desperation of the last week had filtered down to a kind of dead calm. A low tide, still and dry. Darcy remembered the feeling from her childhood home on the Gulf Coast. A flat void of mud and tidal leftovers, baking to a slightly foul smell in the hot summer afternoon.
Low tide.
If life had a low tide, she had hit it.
Her dad was right about one thing: the money meant almost nothing in the face of her life’s tangled messes. It offered no real comfort, just complication. Darcy wondered if the odd sensation of useless abundance had struck her father when the lawsuit had been won. Money, she guessed, was a poor substitute for a living wife. She sure knew it was a poor substitute for a living father.
The house gaped open and empty around her. She wondered, aimlessly, when the last time was she washed this bathrobe? Or when was the last time she’d bought anything new for the house? Had a haircut? Put on lipstick?
The idea rose in her chest and surfaced with a small, quiet, pop. Today was Monday. Mike had science club, Paula had dance lessons. And, for once, it was everybody else’s turn to carpool. She cast a hopeful eye at the kitchen calendar, grateful to see a blank square. She had the whole day.
Granted, there were about two dozen responsible things Darcy ought to be doing today, not counting the massive stack of paperwork for her father’s estate.
But responsibility wasn’t coming along today. Darcy Nightengale was going to be her own best friend today, and the rest of the world could just wait until tomorrow.
She grabbed her address book and the yellow pages and made three phone calls, not taking no for an answer on any of them.
She was out the door in seventeen minutes flat.
“Mercy! What have you done with Darcy Nightengale? I know she went in there half an hour ago. Where’d you put her?” Kate let the magazine she was holding fall into her lap. Darcy reveled in the way Kate’s eyes lit up. Kate’s look was exactly the way she felt.
Ernestine came up behind her. Ernestine, whom she’d never met before today. Yet, the minute she sat in her salon chair, Darcy felt one of those instantaneous, giftlike connections with the woman. Ernestine picked up immediately why Darcy had come to the salon and seemed to know just what to do. A large woman with complicated black hair and a South Seas type of accent, Ernestine winked at Kate and made a clucking sound with her tongue.
“It does do wonders for the woman, don’t you think?”
Kate nodded from above her pedicure. “Dar, you look wonderful.”
“Comfortably drastic,” Darcy quoted, using Ernestine’s perfect phrase for what she needed. Turning to the mirror, she admired again the oh-so-up-to-date flippy thing her hair was doing. “I’m just hoping I can achieve the home version. What do you think about the color? I’ve never done highlighting before.”
“It suits you. Really. Hey, when do I get to do ‘comfortably drastic’? And Ernestine, would you consider moving closer to Cincinnati? Tomorrow? One look at Darcy and I could garner you a full client base in about forty minutes.”
Ernestine smiled. “You drove out here once. You’ll drive it again. I don’t plan to be going anywhere. And as for you, redhead, I get my hands on you in twenty minutes—after your toes dry.”
“Mmm,” sighed Kate, wiggling her toes, “I can hardly wait.”
The idea to come here had sprung itself on Darcy in a heartbeat. She’d scrambled through the yellow pages to find a full-scale salon sufficiently out of town and ordered the works for two. She wanted no chance of encountering a judgmental eye wondering why a grieving daughter was popping for beauty treatments two days after the funeral.
Darcy eased into the pedicure chair next to Kate and accepted a fantastic-smelling cup of tea. “I feel like a snake shedding its skin.”
The hip young man filling her tub, who looked suspiciously like a relative of Ernestine’s, gave her a wide grin. “I am looking at these heels and thinking you are not too far off. These feet have been through a lot, mmm?” Somehow he managed to make such a potentially judgmental comment come
