“She really missed you, Lindsay,” Karen said.
“Ya think?” I said, laughing as Martha whimpered and barked and knocked me completely off my feet. I just sat there on the threshold as Martha pinned down my shoulders and soaked my face with kisses.
“I’ll be going now. I see that you two need to be alone,” Karen called out, walking down the steps toward her old Volvo.
“Wait, Karen, come upstairs. I have a check for you.”
“It’s okay! I’ll catch you next time,” she said, disappearing into her car, tying the door closed with a piece of clothesline, cranking up the engine.
“Thank you!” I called out as she drove past me and waved. I returned my attention to my best girl.
“Do you know how much I love you?” I said into one of Martha’s silky ears.
Apparently, she did.
I ran upstairs with her, put on my hat and coat, and changed into running shoes. We took to the streets we love so much, running down Nineteenth toward the Rec Center Park, where I flopped onto a bench and watched Martha doing her border-collie thing. She ran great joyous circles, herding other dogs and having a heck of a good time.
After a while, she came back to the bench and sat beside me, rested her head on my thigh, and looked up at me with her big brown eyes.
“Glad to be home, Boo? All vacationed out?”
We jogged at a slower pace back to my apartment, climbed the stairs. I fed Martha a big bowl of chow with gravy and got into the shower. By the time I’d toweled off and dried my hair, Martha was asleep on my bed.
She was completely out — eyelids flickering, jowls fluttering, paws moving in some great doggy dream.
She didn’t even cock an eyelid open as I got all dressed up for my date with Joe.
Chapter 127
THE BIG 4 RESTAURANT is at the top of Nob Hill, across from Grace Cathedral. It was named for the four Central Pacific Railroad barons, is elegantly paneled in dark wood, staged with sumptuous lighting and flowers. And according to a dozen of the glossiest upmarket magazines, the Big 4 has one of the best chefs in town.
Our starters had been served — Joe was having apple-glazed foie gras, and I’d been seduced by the French butter pears with prosciutto. But I wasn’t so taken with the setting and the view that I didn’t see the shyness in Joe’s eyes and also that he couldn’t stop looking at me.
“I had a bunch of corny ideas,” he said. “And don’t ask me what they were, okay, Linds?”
“No, of course not.” I grinned. “Not me.” I pushed a morsel of hazelnut-encrusted goat cheese onto a forkful of pear, let it melt in my mouth.
“And after a lot of deep thought — no, really, Blondie, really deep thought — I figured something out, and I’m going to tell you about it.”
I put my fork down and let the waiter take my plate away. “I want to hear.”
“Okay,” said
Joe. “You know about my six sibs and all of us growing up in a row house in Queens. And how my dad was always away.”
“Traveling salesman.”
“Right. Fabrics and notions. He traveled up and down the East Coast and was away six days out of seven. Sometimes more. We all missed him a lot. But my mother missed him the most.
“He was her real happiness, and then one time he went missing,” Joe told me. “He always called at night before we went to bed, but this time he didn’t. So my mother called the state troopers, who located him the next day sleeping in his car up on a rack in an auto-repair shop outside of some small town in Tennessee.”
“His car had broken down?”
“Yeah, and they didn’t have cell phones back then, of course, and Christ, until we heard from him, you can’t imagine what we went through. Thinking that his car was in a ditch underwater. Thinking he’d been shot in a gas-station holdup. Thinking that maybe he had another life.”
I nodded. “Ah, Joe. I understand.”
Joe paused, fiddled with his silverware, then started again. “My dad saw how much my mom was suffering, all of us, and he said he was going to quit his job. But he couldn’t do that and still provide for us the way he wanted to. And then one day, when I was a sophomore in high school, he did quit. He was home for good.”