Looking for Laura (3 page)

She'd been utterly wrong for Paul. He'd been neat and contained, as organized in his demeanor as he was in every other aspect of his life. He'd never had a hair out of place; she never had a hair
in
place. He'd been logical; she was manic. He'd never gone anywhere without condoms, yet she had somehow managed to get herself knocked up. The immaculate conception, Todd used to call their daughter, who looked enough like Paul that Todd suggested he consider suing the condom company.

He wasn't in the mood to talk to Sally today. He wasn't in the mood to talk to her
any
day, but especially not today, after having endured his mother's ineptitude with a computer and her insinuations about his father's mental health, and the discouraging prospect of Eddie Lesher in search of a socially relevant story.

Ignoring Margaret, the office manager, who tried to stop her, Sally stalked through the newsroom, her stride ominously resolute. A large tote bag woven out of pastel-dyed straw hung on a strap over her shoulder, and her hair flailed around her face in ripples of reddish-brown.

Todd braced himself. He hadn't seen her since the meeting in the office of one of Paul's law partners for the reading of Paul's will, three months ago. Todd had been both honored and dismayed that Paul had named him the executor. The job would be tedious and time-consuming, and it would mean continuing contact with
Sally, but he respected Paul's desire not to give her the opportunity to mismanage his estate.

He hoped she hadn't come to argue with him over the will. Paul had left her comfortable, and the rest was going to Rosie. If Sally had any intention of messing with that, Todd would set her straight.

She swung into his office and he realized, somewhat belatedly, that she was furious. Her eyes were usually a gentle blue, but now they seemed diamond-hard and cold. Her hands were clenched into fists and her bosom rose and fell with each determined breath. Something strange was dangling from her ears. Gold dice, maybe.

Paul's cuff links. She'd looped them through gold wires, and now they hung from her ears, looking ridiculous.

“What do you want?” he asked none too graciously. He knew Sally didn't expect courtesy from him. They'd never bothered to pretend a fondness for each other when Paul was alive. They certainly weren't going to pretend now.

“I want the truth,” she retorted.

He was distracted by the rhythm of her breathing. Her breasts were plump beneath the bodice of her floral-print dress. Paul had always claimed to prefer petite women—yet one glance at Sally's voluptuous figure and he'd succumbed like a drooling adolescent.

Fortunately, Todd was immune to her endowments. “What truth?” he asked, refusing to smile or offer her a seat. If he did either, she might mistakenly believe she was welcome.

She set her tote bag down on one of the visitor's chairs with a clunk and glowered at him. “Who was Laura?”

“Laura?” He frowned. “Laura who?”

“You tell me.”

He sighed with forced tolerance. “Look, Sally—some of us have important jobs to do. If you want to play Twenty Questions, we'll have to do it some other time. I've got a newspaper to publish.”

“I'm not playing Twenty Questions. I want to know who Laura was. Some woman Paul was having an affair with, right?”

Todd was shocked into silence. Paul having an affair? He didn't believe it. He couldn't. Todd had known Paul for fifteen years, and he just wasn't the sort to do that. Affairs were too messy.

He tried to imagine it. Tried to visualize Paul sneaking around, making coded telephone calls, contorting himself for a little fun and games in the Alfa Romeo's bucket seats. No, Paul wasn't that limber.

And beyond that,
no
, he wouldn't have an affair. He was too decent. Decent to a fault, in Todd's opinion.

“He was fooling around with a woman named Laura. You were his best friend. You must have known.”

“You're crazy,” he told her. If she was suffering from delusions, he wished she would take her delusions and suffer somewhere else.

“She wrote him letters. He saved them.” She started rummaging through her tote bag. Hearing things clink and rattle in there, he tried to guess what she'd packed in it. A key chain, for sure. A tire chain. A pair of cymbals. Some plumbing hardware. Enough spare change to keep a Las Vegas slot machine fed for a year. Something scratchy—a currying brush, perhaps. Chopsticks. A great deal of crinkly paper.

Her hand emerged from the hidden depths of the tote, clutching some of that paper—a bulging manila enve
lope. “Letters,” she said, hurling the packet onto his desk. “Icky love letters.”

He glanced warily at the envelope. “Icky?”

“Purple-prose letters. Nauseatingly poetic. Who is this woman? I think she's got my knife.”

“Your knife?”

“Well, technically, Paul's knife—but only because I gave it to him. It was a family heirloom, and she's got it. Who is she?”

“I have no idea,” he insisted.

Sally scrutinized him through fierce eyes. “You don't have to cover for your buddy anymore, Todd. He's dead.”

That was it. He was done indulging the lunatics in his life. “I'm not covering for him,” he snapped. “I don't know what you're talking about. He wasn't having an affair. Why would he, when he had such a wonderful wife?”

Ignoring his sarcasm, she poked a finger at the envelope on his desk. “Those letters were written to Paul by a woman named Laura. She dated them by month and day but not year. But they must have been written within the past five years because they acknowledge that he's married, and that he lied about it to her for a while. And he gave her the knife I gave him. She must have mailed these letters to his office, because if she'd mailed them to our house I would have seen them. But I've got no envelopes, no return address.”

“You read his mail?” Todd wished he could sound more indignant than he felt. Paul
was
dead, as she'd pointed out. If he'd found a stash of mysterious letters after the death of a loved one, he'd probably have a peek at them, too.

“I found them in a drawer of his dresser. Which
means they were mailed to his office and he brought them home and hid them inside his brown crew-neck sweater.”

“Inside his sweater?” That was weird. Not very Paul-like at all.

“Why would he bring them into our house?” Sally started pacing around the small glassed-in cubicle, not waiting for an answer. “Maybe he liked to take them out and reread them when I was out. Maybe that was how he started his day. I usually left for work by six-fifteen. He'd get up, get Rosie ready for school, eat breakfast…and maybe he'd grab one of his letters from Laura and reread it to fire himself up. Or after I went to bed—maybe he'd pull out one of the letters, sneak into the bathroom and jerk off.”

“That's uncalled for.”

“Is it?” She halted in her minicircuit around the room and glared at him. “The man was having an affair, and I'm supposed to talk about him like he was a saint?”

“He wasn't having an affair,” Todd said with certainty.

“How do you know that?”

“If he had been, he would have told me.”

“He would have told you, and he would have sworn you to secrecy. He would have said, ‘Whatever you do, don't let Sally know.'”

True enough. But the fact was, Paul
hadn't
told Todd, so Todd didn't believe any of it. Sally was a wildly imaginative woman. In the throes of her grief, she'd concocted this sordid myth based on a packet of letters that Todd couldn't imagine Paul stashing inside a brown crew-neck sweater.

Still, the packet sat before him, daring him to examine its contents.

She must have sensed his curiosity. She stormed back to his desk, jabbed her finger at the envelope and said, “Read those letters, Todd. Read them and tell me why your very best friend would have given my knife to a woman who writes such icky stuff.”

“Reading them would be a betrayal,” he said, cringing inwardly at how pompous he sounded.

“Bringing them into my house was a betrayal,” she argued. “Knowing her was a betrayal. Telling her there was no love in our home…” Sally's voice cracked, and Todd noticed a flash of tears in her eyes. “That was a betrayal.” She drew in a deep, steadying breath and squared her shoulders. “And pretending you don't know anything about her, Todd—that's a betrayal, too.”

It would have been, if he'd been pretending. But he wasn't. He honestly had no idea what Sally was talking about.

The conviction in her voice unnerved him. He stared at the envelope, suddenly uneasy. If it contained what she claimed, if someone named Laura had sent love letters to Paul, if he'd had an affair…Damn it! To have an affair and not tell Todd was the worst betrayal of all.

“I'll read them,” he promised, unable to look at Sally. He was embarrassed to think he viewed keeping one's adultery a secret from one's best friend a worse betrayal than committing the adultery itself. Of course it wasn't, but still…Paul had known Todd longer and better than he'd known Sally. They'd met as freshmen at Columbia. Todd's closeknit family and small-town pragmatism had appealed to Paul, and Paul's coolheadedness and class had helped Todd keep things in perspective. They hadn't been quite opposites, but they'd complemented each other in pleasant ways. Paul had weaned Todd from cheap beer to microbrewery beverages, and Todd had
introduced Paul to cross-country skiing and burned lasagna—which tasted better when washed down with microbrewery beverages. Todd had suggested that Paul move to Winfield after law school, to practice in Todd's hometown, and Paul had enjoyed the town's slower pace, its backdrop of rolling hills and the fact that it enabled him to be a very big fish in a small pond.

He and Todd had double-dated. They'd compared notes. Paul had told Todd that Denise was too self-centered, and after the divorce Paul had exercised great restraint by saying “I told you so” less than a hundred times. Paul had known about the women Todd dated, he'd known about the women he slept with—not because Todd talked a lot but because they'd been best friends.

So wouldn't Paul have told Todd about Laura if she was at all significant?

“I'll read them,” he repeated, lifting his gaze to Sally and praying with all his heart that she would go away.

“Call me when you're ready to tell me the truth,” she said, an undeniable threat underlining her words. Then she hoisted her cacophonous tote bag off the chair, slung the straps over her shoulder and left his office.

He stared after her as she marched through the newsroom and out the door. Then he swiveled back to his desk. The envelope sat on his blotter, beckoning, taunting. There was something foul about the entire situation, something sleazy about the act of reading a dead man's private correspondence, something dishonorable about letting a suspicious widow tarnish the memory of a good man.

But the only way Todd could prove Paul had been a good man was to refute the contents of the envelope. If he read the letters, he might discover that Sally was as
nutty as he'd always assumed. Or he might recognize the letter writer as an old acquaintance of his and Paul's from their college days, or perhaps a client of Paul's who had expressed herself ambiguously in her correspondence. Perhaps Paul had saved the letters because he thought they were funny or absurd.

Reading the letters might be tantamount to dancing on Paul's grave—but it might also be tantamount to planting flowers on his grave, salvaging his reputation. Todd owed it to his best friend to redeem him.

He opened the flap of the envelope and shook out the letters, all of them neatly folded in thirds, handwritten on unlined parchment, fancier paper than he was used to handling. The creamy weight of it seemed overindulgent, almost fetishistic.

“Shit,” he muttered, wondering if Sally had screwed with his head. Since when did he pass judgment on paper quality?

He unfolded the letter on the top of the pile and started to read. His gaze inched along the florid handwriting, the even more florid phrasing, and he found himself swallowing hard, several times. Partly because the writing was sweet and thick enough to choke on, and partly because…

Shit
. This was a love letter. No question about it. It was a love letter to Paul, and it was signed, “Love, Laura.”

Who the hell was Laura?

And how could Paul have kept this a secret from his best friend?

A
t eight-fifteen, Sally stomped into the New Day Café, still fuming. Todd had had nearly an entire day to get back to her. He'd had plenty of time to read the revolting letters, recognize that there was nothing he could tell Sally that she hadn't already figured out and telephone her to say, “All right, so you caught him. He was screwing around with a bimbo with literary pretensions. But he didn't mean to. He couldn't help himself. He really, really loved you.”

Did she actually want to hear that? If she did, would she believe it? Could Todd say anything that would make her feel better?

Probably not. But she wanted to hear from him anyway. As Paul's best friend and confidant, he had to have known about Laura. And since Paul wasn't around to apologize, Todd could apologize for him.

She didn't like arriving at the café after eight. Before the accident, she used to be at the café in time for its six-thirty opening. Greta would have been there for two hours by then, baking the first round of pastries and preparing the trays for later rounds that Sally and the others could slide into the industrial ovens and cook fresh as inventory demanded. Greta would receive a daily delivery from a bakery that specialized in bagels, and a delivery of coffee beans, which she would grind on the
premises so they'd be optimally fresh for brewing. Then Sally would come in, unlock the cash register and set up the tables, and Greta would leave.

Greta was a fabulous baker, and as shy as Sally was gregarious. She'd been operating the New Day Café for fifteen years before she'd hired Sally as a waitress, and Sally had turned the place from a sleepy little nook where early-shift workers stopped by for a quick cup of coffee and a warm apple turnover into a prime meeting spot that stayed open until midnight, serving coffee and pastries during the morning hours, light sandwiches at lunch and cappuccino, espresso and slices of cake in the evening to the college kids who were too young to get served at the bars in town.

Sally had loved being an early-morning shift worker, and she'd been able to keep that schedule when Paul was alive. Her routine had been to wake up at five forty-five, give Paul a kiss and slip out of bed, leaving him to sleep for another hour or so. She'd dress out in the hall by the armoire, then creep into Rosie's room and kiss her, too. Rosie could be a handful when she was awake, but asleep she was one hundred percent angel, a plump little mound of girl under her downy yellow blanket, her hair a mess of auburn curls and her thumb conveniently positioned near her mouth in case she needed an emergency suck. In the predawn twilight she smelled of baby shampoo and powder, and her eyelashes were long against her cheeks. She was truly the most marvelous creature in the world.

Later, when Sally was busy serving the morning customers at the New Day Café, Paul would wake up, get Rosie dressed, fix them both breakfast and take Rosie to school. It was their special time together, that morning hour, and Sally used to be so glad they could have it.
Now, though, she couldn't rid herself of the suspicion that Paul might have been tossing a granola bar in Rosie's direction every morning and then abandoning her to drool over his poetic missives from Laura. Or maybe he'd been calling Laura during his Rosie time, planning a tryst, whispering erotic secrets to her, swearing to her that there was no love in his house. If he used his cell phone, Sally would never find out, since the cell phone was billed to his office.

Or maybe—even worse—Laura would sneak into the house after Sally was gone. Maybe Paul would only be pretending to sleep through the alarm. He'd lie motionless in bed, listening for the sound of Sally locking the door behind her, opening the garage door, revving the engine of her dilapidated Subaru and driving away. Then he'd bolt out of bed, dial Laura's number, let it ring twice and hang up. That would be their secret signal:
Sally's gone! The coast is clear!
Laura would hurry over, slip inside—had Paul given her her own key? Sally would have to change the locks—and race upstairs to the bedroom, where Paul would “render her nothing but sensation” while Rosie slumbered innocently in her bedroom at the other end of the hall.

The whole thing was so sordid, so tawdry, so…clichéd.

Trying to tamp down her indignation, Sally scanned the café's dining area to make sure Tina, one of the other waitresses, had business under control. A few of the regulars were there: Officer Bronowski in his crisp blue uniform, drinking a large morning blend, cream-no-sugar, and polishing off an eclair. The two suburban ladies—Sally didn't know their names, but they always ordered flavored decaf, bemoaned the fact that they were on diets and then succumbed to Greta's sticky buns and
raspberry Danish—at a table near the window. And the mysterious guy in black who sat in the corner, sipping a cup of espresso and scribbling on the pages of a spiral notebook—writing a novel, Sally guessed. A brooding, angst-ridden tale of existential loss and ennui, being and nothingness.

Everything seemed to be under control. Tina stood behind the counter, sponging the polished marble surface. Sally had insisted on marble counters when the place was renovated a few years ago, even though they'd cost more than Greta had wanted to spend. “Stainless steel looks too institutional,” Sally had explained. “And polished wood doesn't last as long. It gets nicked and gummy. Marble is indestructible, and it looks classy. New Day Café is a classy place.”

“It is?” Greta had asked, apparently bewildered. She herself wasn't particularly classy. The offspring of German immigrants, she was a sixty-three-year-old widow who knew how to bake and not much else. She dressed in pilled cardigans and refused to read the newspaper because it had too much nastiness in it, and Sally imagined she would be baking her pastries at the New Day Café until the day she curled up and died, which probably wouldn't happen for another forty years. Greta struck Sally as being as indestructible as marble.

The café hadn't been classy when Greta had created it, but it was now, thanks to Sally. The windows were framed in cheerful blue-and-white striped curtains, and colorful abstract paintings hung on the walls—Sally had created them in her basement in one afternoon, then had them professionally framed so they would look like genuine art. Muted lighting draped the tables. The chairs, purchased during the renovation, featured cushions so a person could sit comfortably for a long time. “Why do
we want them to be that comfortable?” Greta had questioned her. “They'll buy one cup of coffee and then occupy the table for hours because they're so comfortable. Better they should buy, drink and leave.”

“We want the New Day Café to be a destination,” Sally had explained. “We want people to think about lingering. Once we've got them in the door, we don't want them to leave. They'll buy another cup of coffee. Or a big chocolate chip cookie to munch on. This isn't a take-out joint. It's a cozy hangout.”

“So, you got a business degree when I wasn't looking?” Greta had asked.

“No. I've just got a lot of common sense,” Sally had assured her. It wasn't necessarily true, but she did seem to have good instincts when it came to the café. Every improvement she'd pushed through increased profits.

Greta had given her the title of manager three years ago, and she'd drawn up a contract that entitled Sally to a share of the profits. The job didn't pay as much as being a partner in a law firm did, but Sally and Paul hadn't really needed the money she earned. However, working at the café was essential to Sally. It taxed her brain in interesting ways. It gave her a chance to schmooze with customers. It got her out of the house so Paul and Rosie could bond in the morning.

Assuming Paul hadn't been spending his mornings bonding with Laura, the mistress of overheated prose.

Tina tossed her sponge into the small sink behind the counter. She had a vague look about her, her eyes unfocused, her smile enigmatic. Tina was a sophomore at the college, as Sally had been when she'd started working at the New Day. Like Sally, Tina needed money; like her, she was energetic and willing to work hard.
Unlike Sally, however, Tina was not going to get accidentally pregnant. Sally was not going to let her.

It seemed odd that Sally could feel so maternal toward Tina when she was only six years older. But six years filled with marriage, a baby, home ownership, a job, widowhood and betrayal could age a person fast. Sally was feeling quite old at the moment.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

Tina turned her glazed eyes to Sally. She wore her hair in a spiky short style, the better to display the assortment of studs, hoops and dangly earrings adorning her lobes. That was another thing that made Sally feel old: not just Tina's array of earrings but her hairdo. Sally sometimes felt she'd been born in the wrong decade. She should have been a flower child. She would have loved the original Woodstock. She would have loved living on a commune somewhere, kneading bread and adding freshly harvested herbs to her vegetarian dishes, which she would serve to hearty, sturdy, unbearably sexy young men with long hair and beards, who would adore her because she was smart and gentle and nurturing.

Instead, she'd wound up with a clean-shaven lawyer, and she sold food someone else had baked.

She wore her hair long, though—usually loose down her back, but braided for work. She was pretty sure she was smart, and she tried to be gentle and nurturing, at least with people who deserved it, like Rosie and Tina.

Tina's smile expanded slightly, the corners of her mouth edging outward. “Wanna see something?”

Sally wasn't sure she did. But her sense of responsibility toward Tina compelled her to nod.

Tina scanned the room. Officer Bronowski was just finishing up, crumpling his napkin into a wad and pushing his chair away from the table. He was the only cop
who ever came into the New Day Café after eight in the morning. The early-shift cops stopped by at opening time, and they slurped their coffee standing at the counter or took it with them in lidded paper cups. But Bronowski always arrived a little later, and he always ordered one of Greta's prissier pastries—a wedge of carrot cake, perhaps, or a blueberry tart, or biscotti with slivers of blanched almonds adorning the top.

Paul used to say about Bronowski, “I think he's a little light in the trousers.” Sally would defend the cop, arguing that enjoying an elegant pastry was no more an indication of homosexual tendencies than eating greasy doughnuts was an indication of heterosexual tendencies. Paul didn't eat greasy doughnuts, did he?

Only because he didn't want to gain weight, he'd explained. He was definitely heterosexual.

He was also dead, and since Bronowski had been the policeman who'd very sweetly, gently broken the news to her that her beloved husband—that lying, cheating son of a bitch—had left this world for the next, Sally would defend the officer's sexuality, whatever it might be, until the end of time. She was happy to welcome him with a smile each morning and serve him whatever delicacy he wanted.

She and Tina waited until he'd donned his cap, nodded his farewell and left the café. The suburban ladies were still going strong, gossiping in high gear, and the dreary artiste in black was scribbling fervently in his notebook. No one needed their attention right now.

“Come here,” Tina whispered, motioning with her head that they should go into the kitchen.

With a parting look toward the customers, Sally reluctantly trailed Tina into the narrow room where Greta performed miracles with flour, sugar, butter and eggs.
Huge canisters of ground coffee stood along one counter, and trays of unbaked pastries covered the long table that occupied the center of the room. Sally glanced over her shoulder; no one in the café seemed aware that she and Tina had ducked out for a minute.

When she turned back, Tina was untucking her Winfield College T-shirt from the waistband of her baggy khakis. She hoisted the shirt up under her armpits, peeled down the stretchy fabric of her bra and exhibited her left breast to Sally. Tattooed above the nipple were the letters H-O-W-A-R-D.

“Howard?”

“Isn't it cool?” Tina's smile reached full strength. “I just had it done this past weekend.”

“Why on earth did you name your breast Howard?”

“That's not my breast's name. It's my boyfriend's name.” Tina let out a giddy little sigh.

Sally gripped the edge of the counter to keep from clamping her hands on Tina's shoulders and shaking her until centrifugal force tore the ink letters from her skin. “You tattooed your boyfriend's name on your breast?” she asked, trying not to sound hysterical.

Tina nodded and offered another fizzy sigh. “Friday night. What do you think?”

I think you're an idiot. I think you must have gotten into college via some special affirmative action program for dimwits
. “What are you going to do if you break up with him?” she asked.

“Oh, that won't happen,” Tina vowed with all the certainty of a young, naive imbecile. “I love Howard.”

“You love Howard.” It occurred to Sally that perhaps there were worse things than accidentally getting pregnant at the age of twenty, marrying for the sake of the child and blindly convincing yourself that you loved
your husband so the marriage would seem acceptable. Etching six ugly blue-black letters permanently into your breast was definitely worse. “I don't suppose Howard loves you enough to get ‘Tina' tattooed on his penis?”