“We’re not, she’s just that worried, and she was trying to make excuses for why you keep canceling on me.”
“Sorry.” Oh, oh. Bad to worse. Où est la salle de bain?
“She said she had to put a gun to your head to go out tonight, that you made some kind of deal.”
True. Mary also had to agree to baby-sit Penny next weekend. She was a lousy negotiator. “It’s not personal, obviously. I’m just busy at work, on this case.”
“She also said you’re not allowed to talk about whatever that case is, and I’m supposed to get your mind off it and talk about my job.” Paul smiled. “She thinks you’re becoming dangerously obsessed.”
Mary flushed. “I come with a lot of directions, it seems.” Wait’ll I get her. I’ll pierce her myself. “Okay. What do you do?”
“I teach engineering.”
“Interesting.” Actually, Mary didn’t even know what it was, not specifically. She was an English major, which meant all she could do was compare and contrast. “Where do you teach?”
“I started in September at Penn. ”
“My alma mater! You’re a professor there?”
“Yes. I am Professor Reston.” Paul nodded in a courtly way, and Mary laughed.
“In the conservatory, with a wrench.”
“Everyone says that.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s three times you’ve apologized.”
Mary hated that he kept count. Couldn’t he let her apologize in peace? The relationship was doomed. “Do you like teaching?”
“Very much. It’s a challenge. The kids are smart, able, energetic. I like it.”
“Great. It’s good to like your job.” Mary hadn’t liked hers, until Amadeo. But she wasn’t supposed to talk about that. “How do you like Philly? You have to say you love it.”
“I do love it.” Paul smiled. “It’s hard to get to know people, but I’m getting there. This dinner is a good start. A great start.”
Mary felt her face redden. Paul was making her job of hating him harder. Inconsiderate man. “Where do you live?”
“A few blocks from here, in Bella Vista.”
“Nice.” Bella Vista, in addition to being the immigrants’ name for Fort Missoula, was also a neighborhood near Olde City, but she couldn’t tell Paul about this coincidence because she wasn’t allowed to talk about work. Or suicide.
“It’s a rental with an option to buy, and if I get tenure, I’ll go for it. Real estate is a helluva lot cheaper here than the Bay Area.”
“Jeez, your own house. That’s great.” Mary felt happy for him. She was working toward a house, too. But when you bought a house, people always said the same thing: “Owning a house is a lot of responsibility.”
“That’s okay. I like responsibility.”
Mary smiled. So did she. Then she realized that, so far, she hadn’t thought at all about Mike.
Paul looked at her.
Mary looked back at him. She sipped some water, impossibly cold. The candlelight flickered. An animated man at a nearby table burst into laughter. She felt suddenly fresh out of conversation.
“Okay, I give up, tell me about your case,” Paul said, with a smile.
“It’s just a case, sort of historical, but it seems a little sketchy, the way it’s unfolding.”
“Judy said you’re way too involved with it. She says you’re showing an unusual interest in laundry and worshipping dead hair.”
“It’s just the file!”
“Tell me about it. I’ll keep an open mind.” Paul cocked his head, and Mary felt a tug in her chest. He was a nice man. He even had a nice voice, soft and deep. He was a good listener, better than the reporter, who just wanted his story. Paul didn’t seem to want anything from her, nor could he. It would take 38,270 more dates before she slept with him, and even then she wouldn’t enjoy it. Enjoying it belonged to Mike.
“Well, I don’t know where to start.” Mary didn’t want to say the wrong thing. It was fast becoming her new forte, and since she wasn’t allowed to apologize, she felt disarmed. She needed a replacement forte.
“Tell me about the hair.”
“It’s hair I found in an old wallet, that’s all. My client’s wallet. He passed away in 1942.”
“So your client is dead?”
“Well, technically, his estate is my client, but I guess I think of him as my client.”
“I see,” Paul said, without apparent judgment. “Whose hair is it? Is it his?”
“I doubt it, but I don’t know. The hair thing isn’t as wacky as it sounds. Lots of people, traditional people like immigrants, carry hair with them or keep it somewhere. It’s a family thing, an old-time thing. It’s not that weird.”
“Like when you save some hair from a kid’s first haircut?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“My mother did that for me. She showed it to me last time I visited, at Christmas. She even saved my baby teeth in an old envelope. They were disgusting, hollow with brown edges on the top.” Paul laughed, and so did Mary. Still, she felt uneasy. Old teeth and dead hair didn’t seem like good dinner conversation, though he wasn’t barfing yet. She decided to shift gears.
“And there were drawings in his wallet, too. Judy thinks he just liked to draw or doodle, but I think they mean something.”
“Why?”
“Because people don’t save doodles, and he saved these. He carried them around in his wallet, with the hair, a saint’s picture, and some photos that meant a lot to him. He didn’t have a lot of possessions and he was a simple man. He kept the drawings in the billfold section, where money would be. So I think they were important.”
“Okay, I’m with you there.” Paul nodded. “I put important papers in my billfold all the time. Bank deposit slips, ATM slips, store receipts.”
“Me, too,” Mary said, encouraged. “And also they’re not just doodles. When I showed them to the lawyer who hired me, he got a little agitated. Nervous.”
“So what are the drawings of?”
“I don’t know. A reporter I know had no idea, either.”
“What do they look like?” Paul leaned slightly forward on his seat. It was too dark to see clearly, but behind his glasses, his eyes seemed to sharpen. Mary couldn’t discern his eye color, but she thought it might be blue. Smart blue.
“I don’t know. They look like a circle, with things on it. Different views of the same circle, over and over.”
“Do you have the drawings with you?”
“No.”
“Just the hair?”
“I don’t have the hair with me!” Mary yelped, but Paul’s sly smile told her he was Joking Around. Okay, she officially liked him. “I could draw the circles from memory, though.”
“Be my guest, and I’ll order for us.” Paul extracted a ball-point from inside his jacket, passed it to Mary over the table, and flagged the waitress. She took the pen, opened her napkin, and began to draw a lame version of Amadeo’s circles. When the waitress arrived, Paul ordered them both avocado salads and grilled bluefish.
“This is what one looks like.” Mary finished her drawing and handed him the floppy napkin. Paul held it up by both sides, squinting in the votive candle, then lowered it to reveal an unhappy professor.
“I have no idea what this is.”
Mary took the napkin and assessed her handiwork with a frown. Her drawing looked like a pepperoni pizza. “I didn’t draw it well enough.”
“Where did you say the drawings are?”
“At my office.”
“So why don’t we have dinner and go see them?”
Mary blinked. “Really?”
“Why not?”
Mary’s hopes soared. “I have a better idea. How hungry are you?”
“Not very.”
“Me, neither. So let’s go see the drawings and then have dinner. Would you mind?”
Paul laughed. “Now I see what Judy meant,” he said, shaking his head, but Mary was already signaling to the waitress.
It took them only fifteen minutes in a cab to get uptown, and Mary held on to the hand strap as the cab lurched and swerved. No one seemed to be following them, but the Escalade driver couldn’t have kept up anyway. Her knee, thigh, and arm touched Paul’s about 9,274 times, and when they pulled up in front of her office building, she could have sworn the cabbie was trying to marry them off. They entered the building, signed in with the guard, and took the elevator upstairs.