Elevation(12)

“That’s wonderful. Please come again. And tell your friends.” She bent forward and lowered her voice. “We really need the business.”

*

Deirdre McComb wasn’t at the hostess stand when they went out; she was standing on the sidewalk at the foot of the steps and gazing toward the stoplight at the Tin Bridge. She turned to Ellis and gave him a smile. “I wonder if I could have a word with Mr. Carey in private? It won’t take a minute.”

“Of course. Scott, I’m going across the street to inspect the contents of the bookshop window. Just give me a honk when you’re ready to roll.”

Doctor Bob crossed Main Street (deserted as it usually was by eight o’clock; the town tucked in early) and Scott turned to Deirdre. Her smile was gone. He saw she was angry. He had hoped to make things better by eating at Holy Frijole, but instead he had made them worse. He didn’t know why that should be, but it pretty clearly was.

“What’s on your mind, Ms. McComb? If it’s still the dogs—”

“How could it be, when we now run them in the park? Or try to, at least. Their leashes are always getting tangled.”

“You can run them on the View,” he said. “I told you that. It’s just a matter of picking up their—”

“Never mind the dogs.” Those green-gray eyes were all but snapping off sparks. “That subject is closed. What needs to be closed is your behavior. We don’t need you standing up for us in the local grease-pit, and restarting a lot of talk that had just begun to die down.”

If you believe it’s dying down, you haven’t seen how few shop windows have your picture in them, Scott thought. What he said was, “Patsy’s is the farthest thing in the world from a grease-pit. She may not serve your kind of food there, but it’s clean.”

“Clean or dirty, that’s not the point. If standing up needs to be done, I’ll do it. I—we—don’t need you to play Sir Galahad. For one thing, you’re a little too old for the part.” Her eyes flicked down his shirt front. “For another, you’re a little too overweight.”

Given Scott’s current condition, this jab entirely missed the mark, but he felt a certain sour amusement at her employment of it; she would have been infuriated to hear a man say some woman was a little too old and a little too overweight to play the part of Guinevere.

“I hear you,” he said. “Point taken.”

She seemed momentarily disconcerted by the mildness of his reply—as if she had swung at an easy target and somehow missed entirely.

“Are we done, Ms. McComb?”

“One other thing. I want you to stay away from my wife.”

So she knew he and Donaldson had talked, and now it was Scott’s turn to hesitate. Had Missy told McComb that she had gone to Scott, or had she, perhaps in order to keep the peace, told McComb that Scott had come to her? If he asked, he might get her in trouble, and he didn’t want to do that. He was no marriage expert—his own being a fine case in point—but he thought the problems with the restaurant were already putting the couple’s relationship under enough strain.

“All right,” he said. “Now are we done?”

“Yes.” And, as she had at the end of their first meeting, before closing the door in his face: “Good discussion.”

He watched her mount the steps, slim and quick in her black pants and white shirt. He could see her running up and down the bandstand steps, much faster than he could manage even after dropping forty pounds, and as light on her feet as a ballerina. What was it Mike Badalamente had said? I can’t wait to run with her, not that I’ll be running with her long.

God had given her a beautiful body for running, and Scott wished to God she was enjoying it more. He guessed that, behind the superior smile, Deirdre McComb wasn’t enjoying much these days.

“Ms. McComb?”

She turned. Waited.

“It really was a fine meal.”

No smile for this, superior or otherwise. “Good. I suppose you’ve already passed that on to Missy by way of Gina, but I’m happy to pass it on again. And now that you’ve been here, and shown yourself to be on the side of the politically correct angels, why don’t you stick to Patsy’s? I think we’ll all be more comfortable that way.”

She went inside. Scott stood on the sidewalk for a moment, feeling . . . what? It was such a weird mix of emotions that he guessed there was no single word for it. Chastened, yes. Slightly amused, check. A bit pissed off. But most of all, sad. Here was a woman who didn’t want an olive branch, and he had believed—naively, it seemed—that everyone wanted one of those.

Probably Doctor Bob’s right and I’m still a child, he thought. Hell, I don’t even know who Milburn Stone was.

The street was too quiet for him to feel okay about even a short honk, so he went across the street and stood beside Ellis at the window of the Book Nook.

“Get it straightened out?” Doctor Bob asked.

“Not exactly. She told me to leave her wife alone.”

Doctor Bob turned to him. “Then I suggest you do that.”

He drove Ellis home, and mercifully, Doctor Bob didn’t spend any of the trip importuning Scott to check into Mass General, the Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic, or NASA. Instead, as he got out, he thanked Scott for an interesting evening and told him to stay in touch.