They had been awake most of the night, talking and loving one another. Like old friends in one way, but in the other-Hardy was amazed at what had gone on. Now, showering, the images of Frannie over him, under him, things they’d done the second and then third time, he found himself getting excited again and turned up the cold water so he could get on with the day, with his real life.
His real life.
He put on a pot of coffee, wondering what his real life had become lately, ever since Rusty Ingraham had walked into the Shamrock. Until then he’d been doing okay-in some ways, he thought, better than okay. Certainly better than the sleepwalk he’d been in before he got back with Jane. And things with Jane were at least steady. He worked bartending with easy hours doing something he mostly enjoyed.
And then-it was like the question you sometimes heard at parties-what if somebody told you that you were going to die in three days, or six months? What would you do differently?
And of course the ‘right’ answer was “I’d just keep doing what I’m doing.”
Well, somebody had made Hardy believe that he might die in the very near future, and he hadn’t done anything like what he’d been doing. What did that mean? That he hadn’t been happy with what he was doing? And how did he feel about what he was doing now? If he had one day left, would he choose to spend it with Frannie or Jane? Or alone?
Well, if he was lucky he had more than one day left, and didn’t have to make that decision. The sun was high. The fog was mostly burned off. Hardy thought that when he moved back into his house-whenever that happened-he’d start going down to Graffeo’s for coffee. It really was better than his canned espresso.
He went to the front door and found the Sunday paper on the stoop. He looked out at the line of cars parked along the curb, trying to imagine himself last night, huddled behind one, a gun trained on Abe Glitsky’s back. It looked so different in the sunlight. Had he really done that?
Had he and Frannie really done all that, too? And what would that look like in the daytime?
He opened the paper in the nook and a front-page story got his attention right away. Hector Medina was back in the news. Fred Treadwell, it seemed, had now accused Medina of killing his dog and threatening his own life. There were two sidebars on Hector. One outlined the seven-year-old accusation that he had been a killer cop. Case closed. Hardy was still an ex-cop and ex-D.A., and that sort of reporting bothered him, never mind that he had been suspicious of Medina’s self-serving protests of innocence to him. The other sidebar was an interview with Medina-evidently some reporter had called him at home the night before the paper went to press. All Hardy read there was a refrain of Medina’s complaint to him-once you’d been accused, you might as well have done it, since everyone treated you like you had anyway. Of course he hadn’t killed any dog, but everyone would believe he had, although he said it was the dumbest accusation he’d ever heard. Why would he kill the man’s dog? And so forth.
For a second it crossed Hardy’s mind that maybe he’d done the same thing with Louis Baker. He was a bad man. Therefore he was guilty of bad things that happened. And it followed-once you got accused of doing bad things, you might as well go ahead and do them. In for a penny, in for a dollar.
No. Not in Baker’s case. He’d been at Rusty’s. He’d gotten shot after breaking into Jane’s, for God’s sake, looking for him…
Hardy put the paper down and was staring out the windows. He felt hands on his shoulders, massaging, coming around to rest on his chest. Frannie kissed the top of his head, and he leaned back into her.
“Hi,” he said.
She patted his chest and straightened up. “I love you,” she said, sliding into the chair next to him, looking in his eyes, “and you’re confused.”
Hardy smiled. “Not so confused.”
“Good.”
“Not that I have any idea what I’m doing, what we’re doing, what any of this means.”
“That’s okay. I don’t either.”
Hardy took her hand. “It’s not casual, though, you know?”
“I know.”
“I’m just trying to figure out what’s my so-called real life.”
“Me or Jane?”
He shook his head. “Not just that. That’s part of it.”
“I’m not staking any claim, you know. But I do want you to know that I love you.”
Hardy looked down at the hand he held. Eddie’s wedding ring was still on her finger. He wanted to say a lot of things-that saying you loved somebody was staking a claim, that he didn’t know where to put his own infatuation, that he didn’t trust what he called “love, the feeling”-he trusted “love, the attitude.” The problem was that he had the feeling with Frannie. With Jane, he was starting to think he had the attitude and was trying to manufacture the feeling, often with decent success. But it wasn’t the same as the racing he felt in his veins now.
He did, however, know that he wasn’t going to just say “I love you” right now. That was too open to misinterpretation.
Instead he lifted her hand and kissed it. “You know when I said I wasn’t so confused?” he said.
She nodded.
“I lied.”
Frannie laughed her wonderful laugh, fixing him with dancing eyes. “Oh, Dismas. Let’s just enjoy this. Eddie’s gone and I miss him horribly and Jane’s not in the picture right now and we’re two grownups who’ve known and cared about each other forever and now are attracted to each other.” She squeezed his hand. “Okay, very attracted. We’ve got a little window in time we can have just for ourselves, so let’s take it. I’m not trying to find a father for the baby and you don’t have to decide between me and Jane, at least until what you call your real life starts again.”
“I’ve never thought of the ‘love as a window in time’ theory.”
“How about if there isn’t any theory?”
“Then something can happen you’re not ready for.”
Frannie laughed again, shaking her head. “You ever think that life is something that happens and that you’re not ever completely prepared for?”
“Yeah, and it makes me uncomfortable.”
“I know. So you want to control everything, but things can’t be controlled. Eddie being killed. Michael dying. Louis Baker putting you and me together like this. It’s just out of our control.”
“How about last night?”
Now a slow smile. “Last night was a freight train without brakes going downhill and you know it.”
“But something had to get it started.”
“It started when you rang my bell here. It started before I married Eddie. It started when I met you. And in our, as you say, real lives, we had it under control. Then this funny thing happened with your life being threatened. Just like funny things happen all the time.”
“Well, your window of time is closing. Jane is coming back. I should move back home. Louis Baker’s in custody. Why don’t I feel like things are over? Settled?”
Frannie leaned over and shut him up with a kiss. “Because some things are just starting.”
Hardy got up and went out to the living room, where last night’s comforter lay heaped on the couch. Glitsky’s file was still open on the coffee table.
Frannie came up behind him and put her arms around his waist, her face against his back. “Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “Everything seems connected somehow-you, me, this Baker situation. And my instincts are telling me it’s not over. There’s too much unresolved-”
“You mean with Baker?”
“I mean with Rusty Ingraham. But I’m also wondering if that instinct is really me just wanting to prolong things here with you, put off my return to real life.”
She rubbed her hands up and down the front of his shirt. “What’s unresolved?”
He crossed over to the table, picked up the file. “This stuff here. Also, in the paper this morning another guy involved in all this shows up around another violent crime.”