Paco gave me a quick once-over the way men do and nodded in silent approval. Cats and dogs wave their tails to applaud, men nod and twitch their eyebrows.
From his beloved grill, Michael said, “Good timing, Dixie. Heat’s just right.”
I went over to a redwood chaise where Ella Fitzgerald was surveying the scene. She wore a kitty harness with a long thin leash attached to one of the chaise legs, and she gave me a glum look when I stooped to kiss the top of her head. Paco had bought the harness and leash after Ella had bounded into the woods behind the house and he’d spent several anxious hours looking for her.
Paco said, “The princess is pouting.”
I said, “She’d pout a lot more if a big critter got her in the woods.”
Michael said, “We’ll eat the gazpacho while dinner cooks.”
Like an artist setting paint on a canvas, he laid thick tuna steaks on the grill, then gave us the kind of beatific smile that only a great chef bestows when everything is going exactly the way he planned.
Paco and I didn’t need encouragement. We hurried to slide into our seats and had our spoons ready by the time Michael joined us. Michael’s gazpacho is absolutely the best in the world, with everything fresh from the farmers’ market and all the flavors blending like an orchestral creation. For a few minutes, the only sounds were the clicks of our spoons against the bowls and my soft whimpers of pleasure. There had been a time when I made those same noises when I made love. But that had been a long time ago.
Paco said, “Gazpacho is what, Spanish?”
Michael did a facial shrug with his eyebrows. “I guess. Or Portugal. Someplace like that.”
Paco said, “Did you ever think how different cultures get connected through food? We’re having gazpacho, somebody in France is eating nachos right now, some Russian is eating pizza. That’s pretty cool.”
Michael said, “Sauerbraten with potato pancakes. Some red cabbage.” He had obviously lost track of the idea and was imagining menus.
Paco said, “I’ve always had a fantasy of going to Greece and meeting distant relatives. We’d sit and talk and they’d feed me roast lamb and stuffed grape leaves and kibbe, and I’d come home feeling as if my boundaries had been extended.”
I said, “I don’t think kibbe is Greek. It’s Lebanese.”
Michael said, “You hungry for lamb? Why didn’t you say so? I’ll make you some.”
Paco grinned. “No, doofus, that’s not what I meant. I’m just talking about how food connects us to thousands of relatives we’ve never met. They’re all over the world, but we eat the same food they eat. You have relatives in Norway, probably in England too, or God knows where, and I probably have Cypriot cousins. If one of my Greek ancestors married an Irish woman and moved to Russia, I may have Greek-Irish-Russian relatives. Heck, we’re probably all related to one another in some way.”
We all fell silent at the enormity of the idea. My gosh, everybody in the world could be distant relatives of one another. Boy, talk about a family tree!
When the gazpacho was all gone, Paco gathered the bowls while Michael checked the tuna steaks and peered at the stuff on the grill’s side cookers. I didn’t do diddly, just sat there like royalty and let two gorgeous men wait on me.
The tuna was cooked to perfection, and the side stuff turned out to be some of the corn and green beans Michael had got that morning. There was also mango-and-papaya salsa for the tuna. All in all, a dinner fit for royalty.
We chatted idly while we ate, but nothing important. Michael said the latest news report said the red tide had drifted away from us, so the fumes weren’t a problem anymore. I said Big Bubba would be happy about that because he preferred his outdoor cage. Paco asked who Big Bubba was, so I told him about Reba being in France eating at four-star restaurants. We all agreed that four-star or not, she probably wasn’t getting food as good as what we were eating.
They didn’t ask me if I’d had any scary encounters with strangers, and they probably didn’t even wonder if I had. I mean, why would they? I didn’t ask Paco why he’d been home all day, or when he would be on duty again, but I did wonder. Loving people means you let them have certain secrets they don’t share with you.
After dinner, Michael and I cleared the table while Paco took a little plate of tuna to Ella. She was still sulking, so he had to sweet-talk her until she condescended to hop from the chaise to the deck floor and eat his peace offering. Michael and I grinned at each other because Paco deals with the dregs of humanity without showing a shred of sympathy, but guilt at cramping Ella’s style with a leash had reduced him to pleading with her to eat twenty-dollar-a-pound tuna.
In the kitchen, I loaded the dishwasher and helped Michael stow left overs in the refrigerator. Then I hugged him good night and headed for bed, with a detour to tell Paco and Ella good night. Paco had stretched out on the chaise and Ella was sitting on his chest purring at him, so I guess she’d forgiven him for trying to keep her safe.
Upstairs, I lowered the storm shutters, checked phone messages, brushed my teeth, and shed my clothes. By nine o’clock, I was in bed with a book. By ten o’clock, I’d turned out the lights and was asleep. When you get up at four A.M., bedtime comes early.
In my sleep, I heard the subdued purring sound of Paco’s Harley, and knew that he was headed for some undercover job.
It was after one when I woke to the sound of somebody banging on the hurricane shutters and screaming my name. I shot out of bed in a momentary panic. It took a few seconds to get my bearings and recognize the voice hysterically shouting my name.
6
The thing about going crazy, really, truly crazy with no more pretending that you’re even a little bit sane, is that once you’ve been there you don’t have to wonder anymore what it’s like. Crazy is a dark ugly town. Stay there long enough and you’ll learn all the roads, all the houses and gas stations, until you figure out that crazy is just an alternate territory. You can live there if you want to, or you can leave. It’s your choice. There’s a kind of strength in that, a weird kind of power that people who’ve never gone crazy don’t know about. When you leave crazy and come back to normal, you feel a special closeness to people who were loyal to you while you were there—like the woman calling my name.
Sleep dazed, I grabbed a robe to cover my naked self and ran to open the door to the woman who’d been my best friend all through high school. Maureen had been a total airhead then, but fun. Her father had abandoned her the same way my mother had abandoned me. Being the kids whose parents hadn’t loved them enough to stay with them had drawn us together like orphaned lambs huddled away from the herd. In our senior year, Maureen had fallen in love with a sweet guy named Harry Henry. Everybody had expected them to marry, but right after we graduated Maureen had broken Harry’s heart by marrying a rich old man from South America.
She and I lost contact after that. I went to college for two years and then to the police academy. Maureen learned to travel in private jets and hang out with movie stars and European princesses. By the time I married Todd, a fellow deputy, I was deep in the hard-edged world of law enforcement, and Maureen was deep in the soft world of luxury. She sent me a baby gift when Christy was born, but we no longer saw each other.
But after Todd and Christy were killed and I fell into a bottomless pit of crazed agony, Maureen had shown up one night with a tremulous smile and a bottle of Grey Goose. She had only come that one time, but I’d always been grateful for it. With Maureen, it hadn’t been necessary to pretend to be strong or rational. I could be what I truly was, broken and empty and full of fury. And baring my true self had helped me find the thread that would eventually lead me back to sanity.