“You’re thirty-two,” he said lightly.
“I know. It’s just always later than I think.”
He nodded, and then he put his hand on her forearm. “Hey, can you stay here, and I’ll go find Becca? I want you to meet her, I think you’d like her.”
“Oh, actually, I need to go and find Junie; I’m supposed to be helping her with a bunch of things. Maybe find you later?” She was already starting to turn away from the table.
“Okay. Find you later.”
But he didn’t, because she managed to always be somewhere else every time he tried.
* * *
—
And now, his divorce and her broken engagement later, she was trying to kill the last hour before he would be there. As she stretched and twisted on the couch, she saw out of the corner of her eye Aunt Dot’s copy of Persuasion, in a stack between Shōgun and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. She plucked it from the stack, and when she opened it, a receipt Dot had been using as a bookmark—dated 2010 and showing a purchase of aspirin and cough drops—fluttered out. Dot would have already been eighty-two then, carrying a basket at the CVS, plucking what she needed. Maybe she was reading the book in line, staying busy like always, and she slipped it into the pages when she turned to go home.
Laurie had meant to put on at least a little bit of makeup, but she got to reading, and she was lucky just to get her hair dry by the time he texted and said he was five minutes away. That was just enough time to brush her teeth again, do one last check to make sure there wasn’t anything like underwear or ice-cream containers in weird places like next to the bed, and get out some paper towels and plates to put on the coffee table.
She was just barely ready when he rang the bell at the front door, and she ran to get it. Nick was coming from work, so he arrived with a messenger bag over his shoulder, a pizza in one hand, a six-pack in the other, and a sunflower laying on the pizza box that he gestured at with his chin. “That’s for you,” he said. “I wanted it to be a rose this time, but I settled for what I could find.”
“That’s okay,” she said, stepping aside for him to come in, “roses will just stab you anyway.” She took the flower and set it on the coffee table, and he put the pizza and beer beside it. They dropped onto opposite ends of the couch. “I think thanks to you, I’ve gotten more flower action in the last few weeks than in the previous ten years. How was work?”
“It was good,” he said. “Today, I mostly got to actually answer questions and be helpful instead of chasing people around and telling them not to do things, and the people who were supposed to be working showed up on time. That’s a good day for me. Maybe not as good a day as you had, though. I want to see the big prize.”
“Well.” She went into the kitchen and came back with the duck, which she displayed grandly, as if she were selling it on The Price Is Right. “This beautiful weird thing has been returned to its rightful home.” She handed it to him.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “It worked exactly like it was supposed to.”
“Mostly,” she said. “Ryan was very confident that he wouldn’t be recognized, but he’s about five percent too famous to do this kind of thing safely. He got busted for being on Halls of Power with about thirty seconds to go.”
“That show,” he said, shaking his head. “But he played it off?”
“Fortunately, the kid really came through. He managed to convince everybody he just looks very generic.” She took the opened beer bottle he extended. “But yes, the guy handed it over, we brought it home, and Ryan is getting a new burner phone. Hopefully, that’s going to be that, and how it disappeared is going to be a problem that stays between one creep and another.”
“What do you do now?”
She sighed. “Well, the really interesting part came when Rocky showed Ryan the authentication stuff that Matt had shown to him.” She explained the letter, the picture, the Facebook message she had already sent. “Now I’m waiting to see if I can put a couple more pieces together.”
“Have I told you recently that I think you’re pretty cool?” he asked, lifting up a slice of pepperoni.
“If you have, I never mind hearing it again. And I’ve got to say, you have done some pretty tremendous friend work these last few weeks. I never thought research could be so beguiling. Cheers.” She knocked her beer bottle against his.
“Cheers. And I’m glad you liked it. I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve known guys who didn’t think knowing how periodicals were indexed was going to impress women.”