Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 14.

Amanda surprised me later with a call. “You doing anything this evening?” Her voice sounded small.

“Nothing I like.”

“Dinner?”

“You told me last night you were booked up until the next millennium, or at least until our date next week.”

“I canceled for tonight. I’m craving simplicity.”

“So you thought of me.”

She laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, but it offered promise.

“Actually, we have something to celebrate. You must have impressed Sweetie Fairbairn. She called, asked very few questions about the children’s wing at Memorial Hospital, and then said she’d be sending a donation. She hinted it might be larger than what we’d discussed.”

“What time?”

“I’m thinking around eight.”

“No, I meant what time did Sweetie call?”

“An hour ago. Why?”

“Did she mention me?”

“Mention you? What’s going on, Dek?”

“Our trattoria, at eight?” I asked, sidestepping.

“Somewhere else.” She named Rokie’s, a barbecue sandwich place nestled next to a forest preserve, northwest of the city. We’d been there once, after a movie or something. It had no history for us.

History or not, it was a start. Or maybe a restart. Whatever it was, I decided to think of it as progress.

Amanda was already there, waiting in her white Toyota at the far corner of the lot. I pulled up alongside and got out.

“Shall I slip the maître d’ a twenty for a table away from the window?” When we’d last been there, we’d laughed about the grease on the windows.

She gave me a hug. “I’m thinking al fresco.” She pointed at the row of picnic tables across the parking lot.

It was a nice night. It would be fine.

I went in and got two beefs, two Cokes, an order of fries, and one squirt bottle of barbecue sauce to color our lips and chins the shade of congealed blood.

“This is a wonderful surprise,” I said when I got back to the table.

“I needed a night.”

“You can have more than one.”

“I know.” She reached across the table to put her hand on mine for a moment. “I know that a lot.”

I ripped open the bag, handed her a beef, and spread the fries between us. The beefs were good; the fries were good; squirting everything with barbecue sauce was superb.

“Ever get back to the Art Institute?” I asked after I’d gotten my hands sufficiently sticky. The Art Institute was where Amanda used to spend her time, teaching and writing. When she wasn’t sleeping. Or with me. Or both.

Her face became guarded. “I gave up my last class a month ago.”

“Do you miss it?” I asked it casually. I’d told myself, driving over, that I wouldn’t push against her new life.

“That’s the thing, Dek. I don’t know. Every time I start thinking about the way I’d been living, one thing keeps coming up: selfishness.”

“You taught. You wrote. You lived a frugal, almost ascetic life.”

“With eleven million dollars’ worth of art hanging on my walls.”

“And hardly anything on your floor.” That had been true both in the gated community and in the high-rise on Lake Shore Drive where she’d moved after the houses in her neighborhood began exploding. Her income from her art books and her teaching had always gone to pay for insurance and a secure habitat for the art, not stuff to walk or sit or lie down on.

“You do understand?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, smiling like I meant it.

Her chin rose, just a touch. She knew well that I didn’t understand, not really.

“Here’s what else I think I understand,” I said. “We’re more alike than I used to believe, in that we’re both orphans, of a sort. Except your father didn’t take off, like my mother. Now you’ve been given a second chance to connect with him.”

“At his instigation.”

“Yes, and for that, he is to be applauded. I also think, if given the opportunity, I’d jump at the chance to connect with my mother, or the Norwegian who supposedly was my father.”

Her face was still guarded. She wasn’t accepting what I was trying to blithely pass across the table as a change in my attitude.

“Sweetie Fairbairn,” she said, steering to a safer harbor. “You had a good time?”

“I always enjoy mingling with swells on the tops of buildings. The elevation does something for my appetite.”

“Appetite or not, you did well. As I said earlier, she was all business this afternoon. She’s seriously interested in helping the children’s wing.”

“After I told her you and I never had shared a checkbook.”

She laughed, just like old times. “Strange, though,” she said. “I’ve been told Sweetie likes to start out slow with new charities. Ten, twenty thousand dollars, usually. This afternoon, though, she hinted at a donation approaching a hundred thousand.”

“How did she sound?”

She shot me a quizzical look. “All business, as I said. Why did you ask if she’d mentioned you?”

The newspaper photos of Amanda and the silver-topped jokester came back at me. She’d appeared happy, in her element. Or maybe it had been something more. She might have become close enough to the commodities man to trade confidences.

The thought cut, that I might have to guard information around Amanda.

“Vanity,” I said. “I like to be remembered.”

Her face changed. She recognized the brush-off.

“Well, whatever it was, I hadn’t anticipated hearing from her for some time. You helped, Dek.”

I wondered, then, if we were at Rokie’s because she felt she owed me, for not screwing up at Sweetie Fairbairn’s the previous evening.

We made small talk. She asked about Leo, and about Endora. I asked more about the children’s wing. We talked about my working on the turret, and whether Rivertown would ever become upscale enough for me to make a buck on my rehabbing.

We talked about Elvis Derbil and salad oil, too, because she’d seen Jennifer Gale’s coverage of his arrest. In the not-so-long-ago days, she would have called me right away, laughing, incredulous, demanding to know what I knew about what was going on. No longer. Spontaneity had left us; we’d become careful about even the most inconsequential things.

“I met her, you know,” I said.

“Met who?”

“Jennifer Gale. The television reporter who broke the story.”

“The day they arrested Elvis?”

“She wanted to know about the lizards.” Suddenly, I felt like I ought to confess things I hadn’t done.

“She’s beautiful. Did you like her?”

“She is, and yes. I like her.”

She looked away then, at the cars parked in the lot.

“Your picture’s been in the paper,” I said. It was on my mind. It just came out.

Her eyes flashed back to mine. “Fund-raising.”

We said more careful things, but I don’t remember what they were. We were like two old friends who’d bumped into each other on a street and decided to grab a quick bite before going different ways. For forever.

“We’ll have our proper date at our trattoria next week?” I asked.

“That would be nice,” she said softly.

Then there was nothing more to talk small about, and we walked to our cars. The night, still young, had become old. She got in her car, I got in mine. She drove east and I headed south, as if we were off to separate planets.