you’ll be working, kiddo.” Peg laughed and rolled her eyes. “Trust me. You’ll be working. You just won’t be getting paid for it.”
“Well, that’s true, I guess.”
“You’ll be working twenty times harder than you ever did here. So, when’s the big day?”
“Monday. My appointment is at eleven, so by noon I ought to be one slightly and happily pregnant lady.”
“No kidding. Does it always work the first time?”
“It will with me,” Melanie said, her voice infused with every bit of the confidence she felt. Even though her OB-GYN had cautioned her that three, sometimes four artificial inseminations were the norm before a pregnancy “took,” she was positive that Monday would be her day and that her baby’s birthday would be in the first week of January. It was just too perfectly planned to go wrong.
Peg wrapped her cigarette-free arm around Melanie’s shoulders and gave her a hug. “Well, good luck, kiddo. We’ll try to hold it together while you’re gone. Keep us posted.”
“I will. Thanks again, Peg.”
The woman started to walk away, then stopped. “Oh, with all of the excitement of the party, I almost forgot to tell you. You know that cop who was shot last week? The one who got blown through the plate-glass window?”
“What about him?” As she asked, she could feel that tiny fault line in her heart begin to quiver the way it always did whenever she heard the words “cop” and “shot” in the same sentence.
In this particular case, the officer had been hit during a raid on a crack house in the Bienville neighborhood, one of the highest crime areas in the city. He’d been wearing a bulletproof vest, thank God, but the direct hit had still managed to propel him backward ten or fifteen feet, through a window and out onto the sidewalk. His name was still being withheld from the press, and Melanie had found the whole incident so disturbing that she’d avoided all the memos that referenced it. Even now, having asked, “What about him?” she really didn’t want to know.
“Guess who it was?” Peg asked.
From the way the woman’s eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead and her mouth kind of oozed to the side, Melanie didn’t have to guess. But before she could prevent the answer she didn’t want to hear, Peg exclaimed, “Your ex!”
“Oh.” While the fault line inside her slipped another tiny notch, she struggled to come up with some sort of appropriate comment. “Well, I’m glad he wasn’t hurt.”
“Me, too. Sonny hasn’t stopped by city hall in quite a while now, has he? Two or three months at least.”
Melanie nodded. It had been two months and two weeks, to be exact, and she didn’t even have to consult her calendar to remember. Her ex-husband’s entrances and exits were always indelible.
“Maybe he finally knows the meaning of the word divorce,” Melanie said. She could have said maybe he’d finally taken her threat of a restraining order seriously. And somewhere in a far corner of her heart she wondered if it was because he didn’t care anymore.
Peg sighed a little cloud of cigarette smoke. “I always enjoyed seeing him, even if you didn’t. I used to keep lollipops in my desk for him when he was trying to quit smoking. Red ones.”
“I remember.” She also remembered how those damned red lollipops increased the sensuality of Sonny’s already way-too-sexy mouth and how many times she’d wanted to kiss him, just to see if he still tasted as good as he looked.
All of a sudden she noticed that Peg was standing there silent and staring at her as if waiting for a reply to a question Melanie hadn’t even heard.
“I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
“Just that it’s a shame to be having artificial insemination when the genuine article is…”
“I’d better get going, Peg, before the traffic gets too bad.” Melanie stabbed her key in the car lock, opened the door, and tossed her handbag inside. “Thanks again for the wonderful party. Hold down the fort while I’m gone, huh? And don’t let Cleo do anything too bizarre to my office, okay?”
“Oh, sure. Good luck, Melanie. But I still think…”
“’Bye, Peg.”
The genuine article.
Peg’s words kept sneaking into Melanie’s thoughts no matter how she tried to dismiss them. It was a good thing she could have made the drive from city hall to Channing Square with her eyes closed because images of Sonny kept distracting her from the worse-than-usual Friday rush-hour traffic inching south on Grant Parkway.
The genuine article.
The first time she’d ever seen him, Solomon Stephen “Sonny” Randle had looked like a genuine bum and smelled as if he’d just climbed out of a Dumpster.
Two years ago, during one of Mayor Venneman’s forays to New York to do the morning talk shows, Melanie had presided in his absence at an awards ceremony for the police department. Always a nervous wreck at such occasions, she’d been even worse that afternoon, sitting up front with the chief of police and various dignitaries, trying to keep her trembling knees together in the way-too-short skirt of her gray gabardine suit.
After she’d made an equally short, rather gray-gabardine speech, she had handed out a score of letters of commendation to fresh-faced young patrolmen in dress blue uniforms with gleaming buttons, and presented half a dozen certificates of valor to older, but no less natty, officers. Then she called the name on the final certificate—Lieutenant Solomon S. Randle—and watched in horror as a bearded derelict shambled from the back of the auditorium to the podium where she stood.
Only the fact that the audience had cheered wildly—including the brass behind her on the stage—kept Melanie from screaming “Somebody stop him!” She’d presented the certificate with one hand while using the other to discretely wave away the garbage stench emanating from the awardee.
Afterward, at the reception that followed, he had come up to her like an ill wind, but one carrying two glasses of champagne.
“Here. Hold these a second,” he’d said in a voice that ranged somewhere between rough gravel and harsh cigarette smoke.
Melanie held the wet glasses, then watched in awe as the derelict cop proceeded to divest himself of one greasy beard, two straggly eyebrows, a terrible scar, and several gold front teeth, to emerge—Oh, Lord, had he emerged!—as the most gorgeous man Melanie had ever seen in her life.
He’d still smelled to high heaven in his undercover garments, but by then she almost hadn’t cared.
The three weeks that followed had been not just a whirlwind, but a complete sensual blur unlike anything she had ever experienced until she’d woken up married in Sonny’s disheveled downtown loft.
She now woke up at the wheel of her Miata on Grant Parkway to realize she had missed her turn onto Channing Avenue. Melanie cursed her ex-husband for derailing her again, then circled around in the terrible traffic and finally made the turn onto Channing only to find herself behind a moving van that seemed intent on going three miles per hour
