“No, I’m not okay. I’m furious. How could he betray the voters like this? How could he be so stupid? So arrogantly corrupt as to put himself above the law?”
Pete grinned. “She’s going to be a lawyer someday,” he said to Kurt. “She’s going to be dynamite.”
“A lawyer?” Kurt said. “No kidding? Hey, that’s terrific.”
Louisa blushed. “It’s actually only in the planning stage. I haven’t even taken my LSATs.”
“Don’t worry about the LSATs. Pete and me’ll help you study. And if that doesn’t work, I can get into their computer. I can give you any grade you want.”
She was touched. She was also horrified, but she told herself Kurt’s intentions were good. Maybe Kurt wasn’t such a bad guy. Just a tad misdirected. She took another look at him. Who was she kidding? He might have a good heart, but his brain had mental deviant engraved on the frontal lobes. Kurt was frighteningly weird.
Pete watched the play of emotions on Louisa’s face and could hardly keep from laughing out loud. He knew exactly what she was thinking. He’d gone through the same thought process many times himself and had always reached the same conclusion about Kurt. In South America he’d worked with entire units of Kurt types-bottom-line personalities. The end always justifies the means. It was a convenient philosophy to take into combat.
Louisa slid another tray of chocolate chip cookies into the oven and set the timer. At four-thirty in the afternoon the sky was gun-metal gray and the outside air cold enough to make her kitchen window frost. Inside, the house was filled with the warm smell of freshly baked cookies and melted chocolate.
Louisa leaned against the counter and wondered why she was feeling so cranky. It was Saturday. She had the whole day to herself. She had her life under control. She had exciting plans for the future. She’d gotten her way with the pig project. She was sexually satisfied. Why wasn’t she happy?
She looked up at the ceiling. The source of all discontent, she thought. She was in love with Pete Streeter, and she didn’t like it. He was all wrong for her. In fact, he was probably all wrong for anybody. And she loved him. She rolled her eyes and flapped her arms. Love was stupid. It made no sense. After so many years of being so careful, she’d gone and fallen in love with Pete Streeter. Go figure.
She nibbled on a warm cookie. She was going to ignore the “L” word, of course. She absolutely was not going to say it out loud, and she especially wasn’t going to say it out loud to Pete. She was certain this was a temporary condition. All she had to do was wait it out.
Pete could smell the cookies baking downstairs in Louisa’s oven. She was torturing him, he thought. She knew he had to work, and since early morning she’d been producing the most distracting sounds and smells…sighs and stretches; rustles of clothing, snatches of tunes hummed between chores, and now the cookies. He looked at the computer screen in front of him and swore out loud. He was doing rewrites and e-mailing them to the coast, because he didn’t want to leave Louisa. Ordinarily, he’d be in L.A. by now, gearing up to go on location. In a few days they were going to start shooting, and he was going to have to be on call for daily page changes. It wasn’t the sort of thing he felt comfortable doing long distance.
Unfortunately, Louisa refused to give up the pig investigation. They’d tapped Maislin’s home phone and tagged his car with a transmitter. They’d alerted the insurance company and were working with a fraud investigator. In his opinion, Louisa was superfluous. The insurance investigator didn’t share that opinion. And Louisa wasn’t budging from her desk until Maislin was caught with the goods.
So here he was, torn between his work and Louisa Brannigan. It was frustrating, especially since he didn’t know why he was in this predicament. It wasn’t as if she needed him. Once she’d gotten it into her mind to take control of her life, she’d done it with a vengeance. He was the one who’d told her to cut the umbilical; now he felt like Dr. Frankenstein.
He saved his file, stood, and stretched. He was meeting her parents later that night. She’d been invited home to dinner, and she was dragging him along. He suspected it was one last vestige of cowardice, but he didn’t care. He was curious about the typical suburban family. As a kid he’d watched reruns of fifties and sixties family sitcoms and desperately wanted to be adopted by Donna Reed. As a teenager he’d struck out against the saccharine unreality of the heartland image, and as an adult he wondered if the coveted clean, harmonious, upper-middle-class, Cape-Cod-house, dog-sleeping-on-the-hearth family actually existed.
Two hours later he found himself shaking his head in disbelief. There it was in front of him-a white brick Cape Cod with black shutters, a white picket fence, and a flagstone front walk. Even in winter it was nicely landscaped with lots of big holly and azalea bushes bordered with silver-dollar wood chip mulch. It had a brick chimney, which he was sure led to a living room fireplace and had been designed with Santa Claus in mind. No disrespect intended-he really was very impressed.
The door flew open before they had a chance to knock, and the frame was filled with Louisa’s father, dressed in a knit shirt and sans-a-belt pants.
“Mike Brannigan,” he said to Pete. “Good to meet you.” The man was medium height and stocky, his complexion was ruddy, his outstretched hand was short fingered and meaty. He was a Brannigan through and through.
Louisa’s mother was close behind her husband. “Kathy Brannigan,” she said, extending her hand. Her hair was short and feathered with gray, her face was friendly. She was wearing gray University of Maryland sweats and red high-top basketball shoes. “You’ll have to excuse the way I look,” she said. “I just got back from the library.”
Louisa shook her head. “June Cleaver never dressed like that.”
“Who?”
“June Cleaver. Beaver’s mother.”
Kathy Brannigan gave her daughter a wan smile. “When you were five and Susan Fielding’s mother knitted a ski hat, I took up knitting. When you were seven and Carolyn Chenko’s mother made homemade bread, I gave baking bread a shot. I decorated cakes better than Amy Butcher’s mother, went on more field trips than Jennifer O’Neil’s mother, and baked better chocolate chip cookies than any mother in the history of the world. I draw the line at dressing like June Cleaver.”
“Mom’s gone back to college,” Louisa explained to Pete. “She’s a sophomore.”
“I missed it the first time around,” Kathy said. “I was busy doing the mother thing.”
Pete handed over his jacket and checked the hearth for a sleeping dog. He wasn’t disappointed. The furniture was dark wood and freshly polished. The couch was overstuffed and homey. The house smelled like woodsmoke and apple pie. He wouldn’t have believed any of this if he hadn’t seen it firsthand, he thought.
Louisa’s mother tapped Pete on the arm. “Are you all right? Your eyes look a little glazed.”
“It’s the pie fumes,” he said.
She led him into the living room and seated him in a wingback. “Don’t get too choked up over it. It’s one of those frozen ones that you just put in the oven and bake.”
He didn’t care. A pie was a pie.
Mike brought him a beer and set a basket of chips at his elbow. “I hear you’re one of those Hollywood types.”
“I write screenplays.”
“You know James Garner?”
“Uh, no.”
Louisa caught a glimpse of the dining room table. It was set for five. She looked at her mother and the question silently passed between them.
“Grandma Brannigan,” Louisa’s mother said. “She’s visiting for a few days.”
“Oh boy.”
“I heard that,” Grandma Brannigan called from the kitchen. “You always did have a smart mouth.”
Everyone in the living room exchanged looks of suffering.