I wonder if Minka will not be able to make an ID because of the quality of the photograph.

That’s fascinating,” I say absently.

“Leo, you’re not listening to me.”

“I am. You had a dream about me that I wasn’t in.”

“Your son was in it.”

“I don’t have a son—”

“You have to remind me?” my mother sighs. “What do you think it means?”

“That I’m not married?”

“No, the dream. The roots growing out of the soles of my feet.”

“I don’t know, Ma. That you’re deciduous?”

Everything’s a joke to you,” my mother says, miffed. I can sense that if I don’t take a few minutes to focus on her, I’m going to have to field a call from my sister, too, telling me that my mom is angry. I push the photographs away.

Maybe that’s because what I do for a living is so hard to understand, I need a way to let it go at the end of the day,” I tell her, and I realize that this is true.

“You know I’m proud of you, Leo. Of what you do.”

“Thanks.”

“And you know I worry about you.”

“Believe me, you make that patently clear.”

“Which is why I think it’s important for you to take a little time to yourself.”

I don’t like where this is going.

“I’m working.”

“You’re in New Hampshire.”

I scowl at the phone. “I swear to God, I’m hiring you. I think you’re a better tracker than anyone I’ve got in the office—”

“You called to ask your sister for a hotel recommendation and she told me you were on the road for business.”

“Nothing’s sacred.”

“Anyway, maybe you want to get a massage when you’re back at the hotel at the end of the day—”

Who is she?” I ask wearily.

“Rachel Zweig. Lily Zweig’s daughter. She’s getting a degree in massage therapy in Nashua—”

“You know, the cell phone service really stinks up here,” I say, holding the phone away from me at arm’s length. “I’m losing you.”

“Not only can I track you, I can tell when you’re feeding me a load of BS, Leo.”

I love you, Ma,” I laugh.

I loved you first,” she says.

As I gather the photo spread together into its file, I wonder what my mother would make of Sage Singer. She’d love the fact that Sage could keep me well fed, since always I look too skinny to my mother. She would look at her scar and think of her as a survivor. She would appreciate the way Sage still grieves for her own mom, and her close attachment to her grandmother—since to my mother, family is the carbon atom at the base of all life-forms. On the other hand, my mother has always wanted me to marry someone who is Jewish, and Sage—a self-professed atheist—doesn’t qualify. Then again she has a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, which has to earn her a few points—

I break off in my thoughts, wondering why I’m thinking of marrying a woman I met yesterday—one who is simply a means to a witness for me, and one who clearly, as evidenced by last night, is in love with someone else.

Adam.

A guy who stood about six four and had shoulders you could use as a Thanksgiving banquet table. Goyishe, my mother would call him, with his sandy hair and aw-shucks smile. Seeing him last night, and watching Sage react as if she’d been electrocuted, brought back every acne-riddled middle school post-traumatic flashback—from the cheerleader who told me I wasn’t really her type after I published a sonnet to her in the school literary magazine, to my junior prom date, who started dancing with a soccer jock when I was getting her a cup of punch, and wound up going home with him.

I’ve got nothing against Adam, and what Sage wants to do to screw up her life is her own business. I also know that it takes two to make a mistake of that magnitude. But... Adam has a wife. The expression on Sage’s face when she saw the woman made me want to put my arm around her and tell her she could do so much better than this guy.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21