With Friends Like These... (18 page)

She wasn’t paying proper attention to that hard-coal stare of Hattie’s. She thought Hattie was asking for company, and instead Hattie was preparing a trap, a subtle snare. The j’accuse was just around the corner, I was positive. I only wished I could see through her game plan.

“If there’s anything I can do,” my mother said, “bring you, take care of, drive you…”

I particularly liked that last offer, as she hadn’t a car, only a chauffeuring daughter.

“Please,” my mother continued. “Don’t hesitate to…”

Stop, I wanted to shout. Run back home. Did Florida have extradition?

“Let me help you, Hattie, however I can,” my mother babbled on. “We go way back, after all, there’s no denying…”

No, no! Remember Hattie? The overprotective? She thinks you killed the light of her life!

“If there’s an errand I can run, something I could cook—”

“No.” Hattie was loud and final, all tension abruptly gone. “Nothing. But it’s good to know you’ll be around.” Her hooded eyes fixed on my mother with a predator’s grip. My breath caught as she nodded, satisfied that the quarry was near at hand and all hers.

My dear mother. I saw it again, that dreadful optimistic innocence lighting her face. And all would be well, all would be well, some tiny spirit sang inside her.

She was not only capable of walking into the lion’s den, but of petting the lion while he devoured her. While she devoured her.

I drove away from the apartment building, unable to shake the image of Hattie Zacharias X-raying my mother. I couldn’t imagine why she was playing cat and mouse instead of acknowledging her suspicions, but whatever her reason, her actions made me queasy.

My mother broke off her humming. “Drop me off anywhere,” she said. “I’ll hail a cab.”

“Of course not!” Where were her brains? What had happened to her self-preservation instincts, all the warnings and precautions she directed my way?

“You can’t be late for your—”

“It’s not a—” I couldn’t bear to hear the word, to realize once again that this sweet woman was stuck in a Judy Garland movie time warp. “I’ll drive you to the Sheraton,” I snapped, rather more harshly than intended. I smoothed my voice, tried to keep the frustration out of it. “It’s close, on Dock Street. Right here in Society Hill. There’ll be a cab outside, or we’ll have them call you one and you can wait in their lobby.”

I was late for my appointment with Richard Quinn, but all the same, I waited outside, needing to be certain my charge didn’t wander out into danger. I had to control the urge to remind the cabbie to drive safely.

I was becoming just like the woman.

* * *

Consciously or not, Richard Quinn had matched the walls of The Scene to his eyes. It was a good choice. They—the eyes and the walls—were a silver-blue counterpoint to the dark night river and sky outside the oversized windows. The focal point here, as in Hattie’s nearby apartment, was a head-on view of Camden with a bonus peek at the lights of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “I hope nothing’s ruined.” Nothing like arriving out of breath, flustered, and mildly sweaty from anxiety, but, I reminded myself, this was not a date. Not the way my mother meant. I was here to check out the room and the food. “I was paying a condolence call on Hattie Zacharias. Got delayed,” I offered as excuse for my tardiness.

He tilted his head. “You know her?”

“My mother does. Did. I chauffeured.”

“Bad, huh?” He helped me off with my coat.

“Why’s that?” Your mission, I told myself, is to wrestle nouns and verbs and even more than one sentence at a time out of him.

Quinn shrugged. “The way she was about Lyle.”

“So you knew her, too?” I examined the restaurant-to-be. It was washed in marine colors, from the silvery walls to the aquamarine upholstered chairs to the deep-sea, blue-green carpeting.

“She checked me out.”

I waited.

He gave up and released an entire set of sentences. Victory for my side. “Checked everybody near Lyle out. Had to approve. Lyle didn’t mind.” He shrugged, then put my coat in an empty cubicle lined with bright blue pegs and lifted off a numbered tag hanging from it.

“I don’t think I need the check,” I said.

He put it back. No smile. No sense of the ridiculous. Boring. “Didn’t mean to go on that way,” he said.

“When?” He needed remedial going-on-that-way help.

“Like it?” Quinn opened his arms to embrace the room at large.

I stated my approval at length—more length than I honestly meant to provide, much more length than he’d ever manage, certainly. But each time I paused, thinking I’d concluded, Quinn raised his eyebrows and looked as though he hoped for more. He was stingy with his words, a glutton for mine. If it had been money instead of language flowing between us, I’d be the U.S. deficit and he’d be Midas.

It wasn’t that easy finding subjects to praise. After all, the main item to appreciate in a restaurant is the food, which was conspicuously absent. I trusted that Quinn had it squirreled away somewhere, as a treat after the compliments, and at least as a sampler of what the place would offer, and so I went on about how much I liked the color scheme, the way the tables weren’t overly close to one another, and the quality of the linen and china samples Quinn showed me. Growing desperate, I even said how much I liked what wasn’t there, such as fishermen’s nets and fake sea gulls and the hard surfaces that make too many restaurants uncomfortably loud. He handed me a menu, and I complimented the prospective variety of entrees and even the teal-blue leather folder that held the list of offerings.

And then I hit the compliment wall. “Must be scary to start a new venture,” I said, in search of a new conversational tack.

“Shows, huh?” He rolled his head back and pushed at his neck in a classic, but probably futile, attempt to ease the tension. “I’m pretty rattled.”

“Well, even if you weren’t just about to start something new, last night would leave you jangled.” I chitted, he chatted. Whenever I think longingly of marrying, it is primarily to avoid this tiptoed tour of forced cheer. But then I look at old marrieds’ silent meals in restaurants and I stay happily single. We made our way to the glassy end of the room, where all three walls were windowpanes and water lapped at the sides of the pier. “I mean, losing a friend—and losing him that way…” I pulled my attention away from the view of glamorous Camden and looked up at Quinn, who stared out over the water, his face as unrattled as a face can be.

I wondered where everybody else was. Shouldn’t people be rehearsing? Stocking the pantries and the bar? Setting the tables?

“Want a drink?” Quinn asked. “Not everything’s here yet, but—”

“Mineral water, please.” No alcohol on a stomach that felt cavernously empty. I checked the room again for signs of dinner, even sniffed for aromas, and felt a little like my cat when there’s no food in sight and he’s anxiously convinced there never will be again. I wondered what Quinn would do if I rubbed against his leg and mewed.

I was so absorbed in visual foraging that I nearly missed a murmur about Lyle and long ago and their partnership, although it was followed by a silence needing to be filled.

“Too bad you split up before Ace of Hearts,” I said, hoping I was responding properly.

Hitherto, I hadn’t known a face could change dramatically without visibly moving a muscle. It was as if each of his cells contracted and grew hard and his river-water eyes sparked like flint.

“Wouldn’t have, if I’d known. But we’d agreed we weren’t going anywhere. No ideas, no projects, no money. He said he was quitting the biz, too. Then four months after we split, Ace of Hearts was ready to roll.” His voice was icier than the Delaware River running outside. He handed me a Perrier, clutched his glass of bourbon and water, and seemed to stare into his past.

That had been a veritable oration for Quinn, startling for its verbosity and passion, relatively speaking. I looked at him. His anger wasn’t visible; he’d been an actor, after all. But it was definitely there, boiling the pale marine world he’d created. How angry Richard Quinn still was, decades after he’d made his badly timed exit.

Except, I remembered with a hot shock to the system, there was a new anger, new fuel for the fire. Sybil Zacharias had told me that Richard Quinn’s first restaurant partner had become sick and had backed out. Then he’d wanted Lyle to help with this place—recompense for past injustices?—and had been turned down. Lyle had called him a leech.

I wondered whether his obsession about the disparate fates of the Quinn and Zacharias halves of the former partnership was enough to lead to a twenty-year, time-delayed poisoning, particularly after further insults and injuries had been inflicted. And if you needed more capital for your restaurant and were refused, what happened? How much trouble was Quinn in?

And how much trouble had I put myself in?

The damned place was empty, and what was I doing here? I felt stupid and nervous. Could I blame this on my mother? Why wasn’t anybody else here? Surely, a restaurant’s opening needed the same sort of ensemble effort as a Broadway play.

“Water under the bridge.” Quinn didn’t sound overjoyed about that, either. “No point looking back. Come see my room.”

I pulled back, clutching my Perrier as a potential weapon until I realized he meant the room where the burned-out prom might be held. This was a business-as-usual night. I had nothing to fear from Quinn, except, it appeared, hunger.

We returned to the entrance and I followed him up a flight of stairs.

He’d been a failed producer and a minor, not overly successful actor, and I didn’t know what else. Now he was trying to become a restaurateur and already hitting bad luck in the effort. This could well be his last real chance, and he had every reason to be nervous. I wondered why Lyle had decided against investing. I wondered what the scene between them had been like. I stayed close to the exit from then on, never letting Quinn block my path toward the door. Just in case.

Upstairs was a perfectly wonderful potential prom site. The view was even better—as long as Camden continued to be considered a view. The space seemed right. I could see it bright with summer formals and tuxedos, the corners junked up with Senior Prom decor.

“We have small tables and lots of chairs. As many as they want,” Quinn said.

And in one corner, amongst the balloons and streamers, Mackenzie and I would be drinking the legal punch, knowing that the students had managed, no matter our vigilance, to spike theirs. “No alcohol, you know,” I told Quinn.

“No problem.”

“And the food?” The more nervous or anxious I get, the more hungry I also get. I hoped mention of sustenance would prompt him to offer me something. My stomach echoed the hope—audibly.

“The best. Good prices, too,” he said. No samples.

We would have to make sure that the restaurant was actually opening on time and that it would still be open in June, given Quinn’s financial problems and lack of personal charm as a restaurateur. Never had the school newspaper been presented with such an interesting investigative challenge.

It was very quiet. We had run out of conversation.

I told him that I was personally sold on the space, told him the prom date, asked him to hold it for twenty-four hours, and reassured him that lots of people would want to hold their significant parties upstairs at The Scene and that his future seemed assured. Then I headed back to the stairs. I had two goals: to go home and to eat, in either order.

“Lyle’s aunt,” Quinn said from behind me. “Is she okay?”

It was the first time he’d asked about somebody else, extended himself. “Understandably grief-stricken,” I answered.

“She say what killed him?” We were back in the entryway of the restaurant, next to the coat-check cubby.

As what she’d said pointed toward my mother’s head, I decided it was privileged information. “Nope,” I said, practicing taciturnity.

Richard Quinn gave me my coat. I had half expected him to charge me for its storage. I put it on, hoping it would muffle my stomach’s growls. I considered Quinn’s chronology with Lyle. “Did you know Lyle’s first wife, too?” I was eager for information about my mysterious semirelative.

“Uh-huh.”

Did he think that answer sufficed? “What was she like?”

He rolled an imaginary toothpick around in his mouth. “She’s dead. Don’t like to speak ill.”

Of course, by saying that, he already had, only indirectly. “Please. I’d really like to know.”

He seemed on the verge of asking me why, and then seemed to stop caring. “Very Sixties. Peace and love, but intense about it. Holier than thou.”

“Interesting,” I said. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. It was a tic with him, a substitute for emotion. “Wanted people to be perfect. Other people. Fought with Lyle all the time.” He shook his head, perhaps believing that I could see what was going on inside his skull. “Last dinner together…” More head shaking. “Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“Why?” I cued him once again. “About what?”

He—surprise—shrugged. “Don’t know. Called each other names, like idealistic idiot. That would be for her. And she called him a pig. Back and forth.”

So much for my father’s sweetness-and-light vision of Cindy.

So much, too, for Quinn’s interest in the subject.

“Take my card,” he said. “And extras, to pass around. So I’ll hear from you tomorrow?”

Accepting a small pile of cards seemed easier than protesting. But I couldn’t resist one last question. “Why did you go to Lyle’s party?” I asked softly, one hand already on the front doorknob. “Was it for Tiffany’s sake?”

“No. Tiff didn’t want to go, either.”

“Then why?”

“To see.”

“See what?” We sounded like one of my niece’s stupid riddles.

“Who else he needed to let bygones be bygones with. How many.”

“But surely not everybody there—”

“Can’t say. Not the young ones, the new ones. But people who go back a while.” Quinn leaned against the front of the coat-check cubby. “Like Sybil said, Lyle doesn’t have old friends. Once you get to know him…”