“I promise to come back and see you, though, if I may,” she told Anna.
Stan walked her to the car, carrying the manuscript and her briefcase. “I haven’t seen my mother so animated in years. She’s usually extremely reticent with strangers.”
“So am I,” Lorna admitted with a little laugh. “You two were so nice… I don’t know what I expected when you called. I think I was afraid you would take one look at me and decide you needed an older, more professorial type to translate the story. And I was desperately afraid the manuscript would be in Ukrainian. I really would have had a hard time handling that…”
“I doubt you could have a hard time handling anything.” He opened the door for her, and she slid in behind the steering wheel.
“I’ll need a chance to read it through before I can really commit myself to this or give you an estimate of how long it will take me to do it,” she said seriously, increasingly aware his brown eyes grew warmer the longer he looked at her.
“And that will take you how long?”
Unconsciously, she bit her lip, thinking. “I should be able to look it over by next Wednesday.”
“Would it be better if I called at your house late Wednesday afternoon, then?” He added smoothly, “If you should find problems, I would rather discuss them with you first, without my mother knowing.”
In terms of business, his suggestion was reasonable, though Lorna knew he was creating the opportunity simply to see her again. She didn’t know what to say for a minute, and then decided her hesitation was ridiculous. This was no heavy-handed man-on-the-make; she had a perfectly legitimate reason for seeing him, and he was nice. He’d gone out of his way to boost her morale from the moment she’d walked in the door, in an easy, inoffensive way. “All right,” she agreed, but there was no stopping the niggling guilt in the back of her mind. She refused to put Matthew’s name on it.
She closed the door and waved goodbye as Stan stepped back and then turned toward the house. Putting the car in gear, she backed up, and sighed as she drove the winding curves of Pontiac Trail again. It was the most pleasant, carefree afternoon she had had in weeks. Mentally, she gave herself a pat on the back.
She had only thought of Matthew 597 times.
When Lorna got home, she made dinner for Johnny, who for the next two hours harangued her with reasons why she could no longer buy Finnish, Russian or Japanese goods; it seemed those three countries persisted in hunting whales that were on the endangered species list. Her son’s commitment to the cause made her smile, although Lorna knew better than to treat the subject lightly. She did point out to him that the economies of those countries were heavily dependent on fishing, but Johnny was not to be discouraged. Nor could he be dissuaded from packing up a near fortune in matchbox cars that happened to have been made in Japan.
A little later, Lorna called Freda. “Thanks for taking him,” she said, with a touch of irony in her voice.
Freda laughed into the phone. “Has he bashed in the record player yet, or are all its parts American-made? I tried to explain to him that there was another side to the story, that those people might have to fish to live and you just couldn’t take away their livelihood-”
“I did, too.” Lorna added thoughtfully, “He said there had to be an answer for that. And just because the answer was hard was no excuse to do something wrong-as in killing the animals, upsetting the balance of nature.”
“He’s something, your son.”
Lorna agreed, hung up a short time later and went into the living room where Johnny was sprawled with both legs over the arm of the chair and a book in his hands. “Bedtime, Johnny.” Amid his groans and protests, she herded him into the other room, bullied him into picking up his clothes and harassed him until he washed his hands and face. When he was lying in his bed and looking like a perfect angel, he informed her that he was going to have power when he grew up. Power enough to right all the injustices in the world.
She bent down to kiss him, brushing back the cowlick. “I love you, Johnny,” she said quietly, turned out the light and left the room. He sounded so much like a Whitaker that she could have cried. Justice, right and wrong; at nine years old he was already struggling to do the right thing…as he perceived it.
Lorna took a bath, did a little cleaning up, then sat in the darkened living room for a long time. She was exhausted, and every hour since she had left Matthew had added to the confusion and guilt in her mind. She felt resentful, unsettled as a butterfly and unsure-as she seemed to have felt unsure her entire life-as to what the right and wrong of certain decisions were. Johnny, like Matthew, found the issues so easy to deal with. At the moment, the only conclusion she could come to was that it would be better not to see Matthew for a while. Even if he called.
He called. She heard the phone and ran for it, not wanting Johnny to wake up. “Misha?”
She heard the low, husky baritone, and her stomach flipped over. She caught her breath, feeling like a perfect fool. “It’s me, Matthew,” she confirmed. She knew her voice sounded cool and distant, disguising the anxiety that had plagued her all day. Her heart, by contrast, was soaring at the simple sound of his voice.
“You’ve been upset, haven’t you?” he asked quietly, but it was not really a question. “Misha, it was too soon. I know that. I didn’t intend…” He hesitated, as if waiting for her to say something she couldn’t seem to say. “I didn’t take you out to rush you into bed. I just wanted to see you again. To be with you…” He hesitated again, and still she didn’t answer. “I called to tell you I was sorry I rushed things, but on the other hand I can’t quite seem to do that. I loved last night…Misha…” He paused again, and a thread of humor suddenly entered his voice. “You wouldn’t like to help me with this conversation, would you?”
Helplessly, she heard a low throaty chuckle escape her throat, matched by his.
“Say ‘hello, Matthew,’” he ordered into the phone.
“Hello, Matthew,” she obeyed softly.
“I’m going to come and see you when I can get free next week. We’ll walk, Misha. Out in the snow. Nowhere near carpets and firelight. Do you hear me?”
She heard him. And she dreamed all night of making love on the carpet in front of the fire.
Chapter 7
The oak office chair had never quite felt comfortable to Lorna; she usually padded it with a pillow. Two if she was typing. At the moment, she was sitting on it crosswise, her legs slung over one arm, a blue pencil between her teeth and a red one stuck behind her ear.
It had been snowing outside since early that morning, though she’d barely noticed. Yellow legal-pad pages had been skimming off her lap and onto the gnarled walnut desk since first light. At one, she’d stopped reluctantly to eat a sandwich; it was now a little after two.
By working Sunday and the past three nights on her regular work, she’d made time for Anna’s manuscript. She was in love with it. With the red pencil she kept track of grammatical problems she would have to resolve in translating from Russian to English, while she used the blue pencil to mark passages where she had questions about the meaning. She would have to ask Anna Valicheck to explain those to her. There were dozens of marks, red and blue, throughout the yellow pages.
Lorna stopped her reading, shoved her reading glasses to the top of her head and rubbed her tired eyes. She badly needed a break but was too engrossed in the story to take one. Blinking hard, she stared restlessly out at the huge flakes of snow falling on the windowsill, then just as absently focused her gaze on the small hole in her thick gray socks. The matching gray wool slacks were old, baggy and maybe a little too well loved over the years. The oversized red flannel shirt fit loosely over her breasts. It was her favorite outfit for a dig-in winter workday. She stretched lazily to get the kinks out of her taut muscles, and heard the doorbell ring.