Page 76 of Save the Date
Jack Finnerty had to be the least inhibited man she’d ever met, Cara decided. She handed him a clean towel and a washcloth. “Your turn. Listen, while you’re in the shower, I’m going to run to the store for a couple things.”
“More condoms?” He waggled his eyebrows in a comic leer. “Whipped cream?”
“Steak,” she said. “And a couple baking potatoes. Where are your clothes?”
He hooked a finger inside the edge of her towel and pulled her toward him. Good God, he was already aroused again.
“Why, you wanna hide ’em so you can keep me here as your love slave?”
“Dream on.” She kissed his nose. “I’ll throw ’em in the wash. Rapid cycle. You don’t want to put on those grubby jeans again after a shower, right?”
“Not really. It would be great if you’d go ahead and wash ’em, but I always keep a spare pair of jeans and a shirt in the truck.”
“Okay. I’ll check on the dogs on my way out.”
He’d seen her grill on his various trips in and out of the courtyard earlier. “I’ll start the grill, if you tell me where you keep the charcoal.”
“There’s a big galvanized trash can just outside the back door. The charcoal’s inside it and the lighter fluid should be sitting right beside it.”
When he got out of the shower, Jack wrapped the towel around his waist and wandered into her living room. The room was like her, he decided, and he approved. Lots of books. Novels. She had eclectic taste, from classics to recent best-sellers, heavy on mystery with some girly-looking romance novels mixed in. There were three whole shelves of gardening and interior-design books. And one devoted to nonfiction. Some history, some pop culture.
He’d never seen Zoey read anything heavier thanUsmagazine.
There were also half a dozen self-help books with dreary, depressing-sounding titles on Cara’s bookshelves. These, he decided, would be classified as “relationship books.”When Love Dies.Divorce: Getting Over It, Getting Through It.
And then there was his favorite:Putting Back the Pieces: Post-Divorce Recovery.
He pulled it from the shelves and leafed through it, noting several pages that she’d dog-eared. The author photo of this little gem showed a grim-faced Slavic-looking woman, who, according to her bio, had a thriving marital therapy practice in New York. The author, a Dr. Jankovic, reminded him of Frau Blücher fromYoung Frankenstein.
For a moment, he felt a spasm of guilt, for invading Cara’s privacy. But that didn’t stop him from skimming down one of the pages, and when he saw a passage heavily underlined in ink, he read it aloud.
Over and over again in my thirty years of practice, I find a recurring pattern among patients whose marriages have failed. After careful examination, we discover that all too many of them have been attracted to a partner, in part because something in that spouse’s family life supplies that which was lacking in a person’s own life. Children of failed marriages often choose a partner from an intact home, in the mistaken belief that marital happiness can be genetically transferable.
What was that about? All Jack knew about Cara’s parents was that her father was a strict, controlling military type and her mother was dead. And of the ex, Leo, he knew even less, except that the guy was a shit.
And he also knew that no matter what she said, the divorce had left Cara emotionally fragile.
He found the stacked washer-dryer unit in a closet just off the kitchen, and transferred his clothes into the dryer. Then he padded outside, with the towel wrapped loosely around his hips, to get the grill started.
As soon as he opened the back door, Poppy and Shaz bounded over to greet him, tails wagging. He winced when he saw the havoc they’d wrought in Cara’s garden. Flowerpots were upended, plants matted down, and yes, it looked like one or both of the dogs had been digging up the beds. He’d have to make good on the peony IOU.
He dumped charcoal in the grill, added lighter fluid, and looked around for matches. Finding none, Jack went inside, found his truck keys on a small table in the hall, and went through the garden gate, into the lane where his truck was parked.
Stepping carefully to avoid broken glass and worse on the lane’s crumbling asphalt paving, he unlocked the truck and reached under the front seat, pulling out the rolled-up jeans and clean T-shirt he kept there. He stretched across the seat, opened the glove box, and scrabbled around until he found a box of kitchen matches.
He was just locking the truck again when a shiny black Lexus rolled slowly down the lane. The car’s windshield was tinted, so he couldn’t see the driver, until he stopped right beside Jack and the electric window slid down.
The driver was a white guy, late thirties, with blond hair and a deeply tanned face. Despite the tinted windows, he wore a pair of Ray-Bans.
Jack didn’t know the guy. He tucked the clean clothes under his arm and started back toward the gate.
“Hey man,” the stranger called out.
Jack turned around, but said nothing.
“What’s goin’ on?”
Jack shrugged, and the towel settled lower on his hips. He retucked it. “Not much.” He turned to go again.
