Asking for Trouble (17 page)

Judy and Tom had formed a different sort of relationship, almost from their first meeting. They saw in each other the qualities Sydney liked best in them and had become friends. They kept a steady stream of teasing banter flowing whenever they happened to meet and seemed to accept the other’s presence in Sydney’s affections.

Sydney was well aware that now, at last, she had it all. A loving family, good friends, and Tom. And she didn’t need a holiday to remind her that she had a lot to be grateful for, she thought, listening to the voices in the next room.

“You know, it’s hard to believe you’re a ... ah ... you know,” she heard Judy saying.

“A what?” Tom asked. “A man or a mortician?”

Sydney could almost feel the glances that were being sent her way and quickly busied her hands, pretending not to have heard.

“A mortician,” Judy said in a low voice, knowing her friend hadn’t as yet resolved her feelings about Tom’s job.

They’d carefully avoided mentioning Tom’s profession in conversations during the past week. This was the first reference they’d made to it since the night on his boat. Strange, she thought absently, she’d almost forgotten what he was.

“What’s so hard to believe?” he asked, not bothering to lower his voice or hide the topic of their discussion. “Morticians are no different from anyone else. We get up in the morning, go to work—we sometimes work odd hours, but then so do cops and doctors and factory workers. We go home to our families, pay taxes, watch football on television. We even have our own jokes.”

“Mortician jokes?” she asked.

“Yeah. Want to hear one?”

“Of course.”

“A mortician in San Francisco was driving up this hill with a coffin in the back of his hearse. He hit a bump, and the rear door flew open ...”

Tom went on as a chilling fog settled around the warm feeling in Sydney’s chest. A curious sense of annoyance filtered into her consciousness, disturbing the contentment and kinship she’d felt moments earlier. Quite unnaturally, she wished Judy would go away.

She sighed. It wasn’t Judy, she decided on second thought. It wasn’t Judy’s fault that she could talk so freely with Tom about his profession. It was her own fault that she couldn’t be open and candid about it, that he hadn’t told her any of his mortician jokes.

“... he chases the coffin down the hill, through two sets of traffic lights, and through the front door of a pharmacy.”

She sighed again. It would always be there, the gulf between his profession and her phobia. How long would they be able to live with their heads in the clouds, never talking about it, never sharing what one of them did with eight to ten hours of his day? Her heart tore painfully as she admitted the truth.

“... he chased the coffin past the perfume counter and the soda fountain to the back of the store, and then he saw the pharmacist and stopped. He was huffing and puffing and wheezing when he looked at the man and said, ‘You got anything to stop this coffin?’“

Tom guffawed, and Judy groaned as Sydney’s heart broke into a million unmendable pieces.

“No more,” Judy insisted, hanging up the telephone with the force of her decision. “The next time that thing rings, you answer it. I won’t tell him you’re not here, when he knows as well as I do that you’re sitting less than two feet away.”

“I’m sorry,” Sydney said, knowing the shame her friend felt at having to lie repeatedly whenever Tom called. Her own guilt was twofold. Not only was she being unfair and hurtful to Tom, she was embroiling her friend in a situation she should have taken care of days before.

“Dammit, Sydney,” Tom’d said over the phone the day after their linguini dinner. “What the hell is going on here? So far you’ve come up with every flimsy excuse in the book not to see me again.”

“It’s not a flimsy excuse. I need time to think, and I can’t think straight when you’re around.”

“That’s the only time you
do
think straight,” he argued. “When you’re alone you get sidetracked from the real issues. You get confused and filled with doubt.” He paused. “I want equal time.”

“Equal time for what?”

“To convince you not to give up on us. That I’m right for you. To show you that we belong together.”

Sydney was silent. She knew she should make a clean break, tell him it was over and be finished with it.

But how could she tell him that she wouldn’t see him again, when her blundering heart was still enthralled with planning and building a life with Tom? Where were the words to convince him that what she thought to be the truth and what she wanted were one and the same? She knew she was hurting him, that she wasn’t being fair, and that she was acting like a coward, but how could she tell him without choking on her own breath? Could she be absolutely certain she was making the right decision? Could she live with the finality of it? She couldn’t. She knew she
should,
but she couldn’t.

“I’ve never been so glad to see Monday in all my life,” Judy continued to rant, more than a little angry with Sydney’s behavior. “Now your receptionist’ll have to lie for you all day and I can start looking at myself in the mirror again.”

“I said I was sorry,” she said, weakly. “I’ll ... I’ll tell him. You won’t have to lie to him anymore.”

“When?”

“Today?”

“Today,” Judy said firmly. And then, as a friend, she put her arm around Sydney’s shoulder. “You’ve got a good heart, my friend. Listen to it,” she said.

“It’s in love. It’s not listening to me.” She laid her head on Judy’s shoulder, hoping to tap into her calm logic. Hers was at an all-time low. “I feed it facts and tell it that Tom’s not healthy for us, and it keeps saying, ‘I love him.’”

Judy laughed. “Well, it appears to feel very strongly that it’s right. Perhaps you should give its point of view some more consideration.”

Sydney lifted her head and gave her a half smile. Judy was trying to be helpful, but it wasn’t as simple as she kept trying to make it. Judy knew about her phobia; she knew about Tom’s profession. As a rule, she was pretty quick to catch on to things, but at present she was lingering in her idealistic idea that love conquers all. Sydney knew better.

“You’d better get going, or you’ll be late for work,” she said, knowing that any further discussion about Tom would be useless.

“Look who’s talking. You’re not even dressed yet.” Judy turned and looked back at Sydney from the door. “Maybe your heart knows something you haven’t thought of yet.”

“Like what? I’ve been over and through this so many times, I can’t see straight anymore.”

“So I’ve noticed,” she said, and grinned. “And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe your head’s been so busy worrying, it hasn’t had time to figure out what your heart already knows.”

Sydney gave her a get-to-the-point stare.

“There’s a lot of talk about love. People talk about it so much, it seems like a common, ordinary thing. But it isn’t. It’s very rare and very special. It’s what every little girl dreams of ... and what very few women find.” She paused to choose her next words carefully. “Once your heart’s known real love, it won’t be content with anything less. And just because you found it once, that doesn’t mean it’ll be any easier to find a second time.”

Sydney stared at the door long after Judy had closed it, and listened as her words resounded through the room like echoes in a cave. They were heart-words, from one woman to another, that rang true and clear and real.

Deep in thought, she entered the bathroom and let habit take over as she applied blush and mascara. Somewhere between brushing her teeth and leaving the bathroom to get dressed, a strange notion began to form in her mind.

It was not a whole thought, merely bits and pieces of an idea. But even the selection of her darkest clothing, a milk-chocolate brown skirt and jacket with a cream-colored silk blouse, was a deliberate step in the scheme forming in her head.

A glance at the clock told her she was going to be late for work, but she didn’t quicken her pace. Work simply didn’t fit into the plan she was hatching. She wouldn’t be going to work that day.

Her life was upside down and needed to be set right. One minute she was dating safe, boring, predictable men, and on the heels of a wish for some variety in her life, all hell broke loose. A desire to meet a man she could tell her dreams to was all at once a man who shared her dreams and became an intrinsic part of them. A man who was neither boring nor predictable.

Her wishes had come true. She’d experienced the flip side to her sheltered, orderly lifestyle. She promised herself to be more careful the next time she made a wish.

But she’d also met the man she’d been looking for. A once-in-a-lifetime event—a phenomenon really, considering the number of people she knew who’d given up or settled for second best. And yet, a fear that she couldn’t explain or control, a curse that shamed her, stood between them.

What did she believe, then? That fear was more powerful than love? That she was doomed to a drab, solitary existence because everything out of the ordinary threatened her sense of well-being? That she was so tightly wrapped in her own security blanket, she’d risk her heart and her future to stay that way? It didn’t sound like her. She didn’t recognize the coward she’d become.

Her tardiness helped her avoid the early morning bumper-to-bumper traffic, during which she usually did some of her best fretting. She soon discovered there was a strange correlation between motion on the freeway and the activity in her brain. The faster she drove, the quicker and less congested her thoughts were.

She’d never considered herself to be a quitter, a loser, or someone who was afraid to take a chance. She had accommodated her fear of dying all her life, but she’d never had to make a real sacrifice for it. Was she so afraid of dying that she wouldn’t allow herself to live? And wasn’t the line between living and existing drawn at the quality of one’s life rather than its length?

“Damn right it is,” she said aloud, bobbing her head to read the exit signs and steering the car into the far right-hand lane. “And I’m about to start living.”

She took the first downtown exit she came to, her strategy formed solidly in her mind.

Sydney Isadora Wiesman was a fighter—not Rambo, mind you, but certainly someone to be reckoned with when it came to getting what she wanted. And she had her heart set on Tom Ghorman. Her fear was all that stood between her and the man she loved, and it was this same fear with which she was about to do battle. Once and for all time, she would stand up to the dread and terror that controlled her without cause or invitation. She was going face-to-face with her unseen enemy, and she had every intention of conquering it.

Well, she had every intention of conquering it while she parked her car in the lot outside the largest of the eight Ghorman mortuaries. And she had every intention of conquering her fears while she reapplied the lipstick she’d chewed off, and while she envisioned herself walking through the hallowed halls of the first Ghorman funeral home to the executive offices in the rear, where Tom would be waiting for her. The expression she pictured on Tom’s face gave her the momentum to carry her to the front steps.

But there she faltered. The huge blond-brick building rose up before her like the gates of hell. Her heart pounded out an alarm, and adrenaline poured into her veins. She stood with one foot on the first step and watched the structure sway and lean heavily toward her. The thick wooden doors opened wide to expose the black abyss beyond, and her fingers went numb. The portal grew larger, wider, closer. Bile burned in the back of her throat.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she muttered, frozen on the first step.

“It’s all right, dear,” a voice said. “Edward won’t mind that you’re a little late. Lord knows, the man took his own sweet time doing things when he was alive.” There was a thoughtful pause. “
Alive
is certainly one word you could use to describe our Edward. What a pistol. Of course,
cad, cheat,
and
completely impossible
are just as descriptive. But he was a human being, and he deserves a certain amount of respect, don’t you think?”

Sydney turned her head slowly until she could see the gray-haired middle-aged woman who’d spoken to her. She was tall and slim and had an air of elegance that one usually associated with affluence. She didn’t, however, strike one spark of recognition in Sydney’s distorted mind.

The woman smiled. “Oh, you had it bad, didn’t you, dear?” she said kindly. She slipped an arm through Sydney’s and began to walk with her up the steps. “You know, I’ve wondered about it a thousand times, and I have never been able to figure out what it was about Edward that got to us. He wasn’t the richest man alive, and as far as his looks went ... well, I have a poolman who Edward couldn’t hold a candle to, even in his younger days.”

Sydney couldn’t believe her feet were moving. She told them not to. She told them to turn around and run back to the car, away from the darkness, away from the danger and the crazy woman beside her. But they ignored her. Step after step, they brought her closer and closer to the black void in which she would be lost forever if she crossed over its threshold.

She looked at the woman again and tried to protest, tried to make her understand the perils of getting too close to the eternal pit of doom that loomed before them, but her vocal cords were paralyzed.

The woman continued to speak in the absence of comment from Sydney. “He had that special something, though. I can’t count the times that I made up my mind to be done with him, and then, out of the blue, there he was again. I wouldn’t hear from him for months, and then suddenly he’d show up. No doubt he was the same with you. There are so many of us, one man couldn’t possibly keep it up, so to speak, to satisfy us all.”

What
was
she talking about? Sydney wondered. Her fear and the unfamiliar rambling of the woman were making her head swim.

“You’re obviously one of the newer ones, so he probably saw you more often. He truly did prefer younger women, but he wasn’t a love-’em-and-leave-’em type of man.” She laughed. “We should form a sorority. We could call it We Bedded Eddy.”