like a graze on my neck. I’ve done worse shaving. It does, however, make it onto the list.”
“Jesus, baby,” Karen said, “won’t you stop at anything to get yourself on TV?”
Hauck laughed. Karen did too. There was another pause until she asked, “So, what do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“What do you think about what? About the state of the goddamn economy, Ty…What do you think about you coming down here?”
“I don’t know…” He brought his knees up on the table. “I’ve got Jess. We’ve got Thanksgiving this year.” He winced at the lie, not sure why he said it. “Anyway, it’s probably better to just keep it a Friedman thing down there, don’t you think?”
“In that case, Ty, how do you feel about giving me back the dog?”
He laughed again. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him. I’ve been feeding him pretty good…”
“Ty…” Karen said, sniffling, “I do love you, baby…You know that. You’re one of the best men I’ve ever met. I just hope you can somehow understand. I’ve been gone since I was eighteen. And now they need me. I don’t know how long. I can’t say no. I always told you I wasn’t a perfect bet.”
Hauck took a sharp breath. He guessed he’d seen it coming. “I always thought you were a damn good bet, Karen.”
“You keep yourself safe, Ty Hauck,” she said, “you hear? I’d make you promise me that, but we already know just how little that means…”
“I’ll do my best.”
They hung up, the click of the phone carrying a kind of finality that made Hauck pause. He rubbed his head and drained the last of his beer.
Tobey sat up, his ears perked.
He could call someone, like Beth had suggested. His sister, Angela. In Massachusetts. Or Warren.
Talk.
Instead, he looked straight at the dog, who seemed primed for something. “C’mon—before you bail out on me too.”
He threw on a sweatshirt and went out on the landing, climbed the stairs leading up to the flat, tarred roof. Tobey followed. It was a clear, starry night, warm for late October. He stared out at the dark expanse of the sound, the lights of Long Island twinkling in the distance, six miles away.
He kept an old set of golf clubs up here, along with a trove of beat-up range balls he had scrounged. Hauck looked out at the sound and then back at Tobey, who sat watching him.
“Whaddya think, guy, go with the eight or a friendly seven?”
The terrier cocked his head.
Hauck took out his eight.
He dropped a ball on the worn carpet remnant he used for a tee mat, swung through a couple of practice swings, then launched a crisp, high-arcing fade over the lot next to his neighbors, Richard and Justine, and deep into the darkness of the sound.
I do love you, Ty…
He hit another.
Karen had brought him back from the long slumber he’d been trapped in, in the years after Norah died. From the vise of guilt he felt. From hiding out up here…
He sent another ball deep into the darkness.
She taught him how to smile again. To fight for someone again. How to love. He thought of the freckles on her cheeks and the laughter in her drawl and the time they’d spent together. He couldn’t help but smile. You’re a damned good bet, Karen…
His mind flashed to David Sanger. His daughter, not much older than Jess, in tears. “Why did this have to happen, Mom?”
I’ll find out, he’d promised.
Hauck blasted six more balls into the darkness. The last was a high-arcing beauty, soaring with the perfect right-to-left draw, plopping to a stop on some green deep in the void, six feet from an imaginary pin.
He looked at Tobey. The dog jumped up. Hauck threw the eight iron back in the golf bag.
“C’mon”—he winked— “we’re puttin’, dude!”
It was the end of a long, crazy Saturday night, and Annie Fletcher was beat.
They had served over forty tables, a hundred and twenty plates. For the first time in the restaurant’s life, they’d gotten a three-time turn.
Since Annie’s Backstreet had opened, just over a year ago, they’d been trying to get the place off the ground. She’d been at it since seven that morning, starting with the fish market and the farmer’s market in Weston, picking out squash and heirlooms, and the local bakery she used for fresh-baked sourdough and olive bread. They had stuffed twenty veal chops, hand-rolled two hundred agnolotti stuffed with chicken and feta, made twenty off-the-charts chocolate crespelles. Her hair smelled of spattered grease. Her nails were caked with allspice and Madras curry.
They call it sweat equity, right?
Annie looked over the rows of empty tables, finally sitting down to pick at an iceberg wedge salad and sip a glass of wine. This exhausted never felt so good.
It had been a slow, building process. They didn’t have the “glamour” opening. They weren’t in the hot location. They were situated in Stamford on the other side of I-95, amid the antique warehouses and next to a tiling factory. OTMO, they called it, tongue in cheek. Other Side of the Metro-North. Not exactly Tribeca. They didn’t get throngs of young people lining up on the sidewalk drinking beers or families pouring out of the movie theaters. But it was her place. In her style. Cross-beams on the high ceiling. Linen-colored, stuccoed walls. An open kitchen with copper pots hanging from the racks. “Comfort food with a point of view.”
After the debacle at her last place in the California wine country, with her partner (and husband) siphoning off the register (and the checking account!), it closed literally overnight. She had put everything she had into that place. Her dreams, every penny in the world, her trust.
It had almost cost Annie her son.
She’d gone from someone who had everything going for her to a person who had no place to go the next day. To someone who had liens. Nothing. Jared, who was eight and needed a special school. She’d tapped into money from her parents, and she hadn’t done that since she had left home.
Then Sam, whom she had gone to the Culinary Institute with, called out of the blue and offered her this chance to do a new place. Start a new life.
So she left. Healdsburg. San Francisco. Where she had a history and a name. To come east, start over.
Everything rode on this.
