LITMIR.BIZ

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be in San Fran for three days?”

       “Four.” Lucy pointed. “See? San Francisco’s in pink.”

       “Of course.” Parker bent over the paper, grateful for Lucy’s organizational skills. She’d know where her son was every minute.

       Ethan came into the kitchen and helped himself to a cookie. “Parker, what are your plans while we’re away?” he asked. “Got anything lined up?”

       “Oh, I might bop out to Nantucket and see some old pals out there. Go into the city. Maybe visit my mom. You know.” She reached for another cookie.

       The truth was, she hadn’t made any solid plans. The idea of having her son four thousand miles away made her want to sleep at the airport, in case something went wrong. Which it won’t, the Holy Rollers assured her. Lucy and Ethan are the best! Plus, it’ll be good for Nicky to see what a healthy adult relationship looks like!

       Take a bite, Parker thought. So she hadn’t been in a relationship since Ethan. So she’d yet to go on a second date with anyone in five years. So what? She tended to attract emotionally unavailable men, anyway. Married men, engaged men, sociopaths, that sort of thing. Better not to date at all. The fact that she’d spent a lot of time watching gritty TNT dramas and eating Ben & Jerry’s should not be construed as jealousy. It was more like a filling of the gap.

       A gap that would now be uninterrupted for three weeks.

       When Ethan broached the vacation idea back in March, it had seemed like a fabulous idea…Parker, on her own, free to do whatever she wanted—sleep past 5:00 a.m., for example, as Nicky was like a rooster about mornings. Find that elusive new idea for a book series. Just because Parker had been born with a trust fund didn’t mean she wanted to build a life around shopping for handbags.

       But as the spring progressed, she did nothing. What if something happened with Ethan’s restaurant, and the trip had to be canceled? What if a new book series came to her, and she was on fire to write it, the way she’d heard other authors describe? She should probably stay home, in case something came up.

       It didn’t. And now with ten days to go, the time alone seemed to loom like a mine shaft. She didn’t even have the Holy Rollers to keep her busy, and the fact that this even caused a twinge was deeply disturbing.

       “I was hiding! No one found me! I beat you all.” Nicky charged into the kitchen with Elephant, his favorite stuffed animal.

       “Nicky, you can’t hide without telling us, remember?” Parker said. “It’s not a game that way.”

       “But I always win,” her son pointed out.

       “He has a point,” Lucy said.

       Parker grinned and knelt down. “Kiss me, mister. I love you.”

       “I love you, too. Bye, Mom! Bye, Lucy!” He bolted out of the kitchen.

       “That’s my cue. See you, girls. Have fun tonight.” Ethan kissed Parker on the cheek, then went out to the foyer with Lucy, where Parker presumed he would kiss her goodbye a little more intensely.

       For a second, she wondered if Lucy was here out of…well…sympathy. Once, she, Ethan and Lucy had been three single friends. Now, instead of three, it was two and one.

      So? Get a boyfriend, Golly advised. Since the release of the final book, it seemed to Parker that the Holy Rollers were aging in her imagination. They were depicted in the books as being about eight, but here Golly was already trying on mascara.

       “Right. A boyfriend,” Parker answered. “I need that like a stick in the eye.”

       She headed down to her father’s beloved wine cellar, complete with a stone tasting room—fireplace and all. Thousands and thousands of bottles, including the bottle of Château Lafite supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson. Or not. Harry was quite a liar.

       She hadn’t seen her father for a while now; the last time was when he’d held a wine-tasting dinner down here with a few sycophants from Wall Street, his omnipresent personal attorney and one of the Kennedy clan, who was up for reelection. Her orders were to bring Nicky down to be introduced, then bring him back upstairs. And stay upstairs with him. Not that she’d have stayed even if asked. Which she wasn’t.

       Well. Here was that nice 1994 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Harry had bragged about. Eight grand a bottle, far less than the 1996 vintage. Surely Harry wouldn’t mind if his only child and her best friend drank that, right? He had a whole case, after all. She wouldn’t tell Lucy how much it cost. Lucy was a little scared of Harry. Most people were.

       Parker went back upstairs, uncorked the wine and let it breathe a little. Got out some goat cheese and grapes, some of those crumbly crackers. It was so great that Lucy had decided to hang out. Maybe too great. You’ve got to fill these empty hours somehow, Spike said.

       “Hush,” Parker said. “You’re dead to me. Go. Fly off to heaven.” She poured two glasses of the wine and set the cheese plate on a tray.

       “Who are you talking to?” Lucy asked, coming back to the kitchen.

       “Spike.”

       “Oh, dear. Well, listen. The books were very, um…entertaining. And they did a lot of good for a lot of kids. To the Holy Rollers.” Lucy clinked her glass against Parker’s.

       “May they rest in peace,” Parker said, taking a healthy sip of wine.

       Six years ago, Parker had been sitting in the office of a Harvard classmate, hearing for the fifty-seventh time that Mickey the Fire Engine, the children’s story she’d written, wasn’t good enough.

       “I’m sorry, Parker,” George had said. “It’s a little familiar.”

       Familiar? Mickey was wonderful! And really, what the heck? She had a double degree from Harvard in literature and ethics. Half of her graduating class seemed to be writing romance novels; Parker had fifty-six rejections to her name. Make that fifty-seven. Mickey was full of sincerity and good messages—having a purpose, commitment, courage, second chances. With all the schlock that was out there, it was hard not to feel bitter.

       “Got anything else?” George asked, already glancing at his watch.

       “Yeah, I do,” Parker said. “How’s this? A band of child angels are sent to earth to teach kids about God. Right? They haven’t earned their wings, though, so they roller-skate everywhere—they’re the Holy Rollers. Do you love it? All they eat is angel food cake, and they live in a tree fort called Eden, and whenever a regular kid is up against a tough moral decision, in come the Holy Rollers and the preaching begins.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s The Crippled Lamb meets The Little Rascals meets The Exorcist.” She sighed and stood up. “Well, thanks for your time, George. Good to see you.”

       “Hang on,” he said.

       The next week, she’d had an offer and a contract, and she and Suze, her old roomie from Miss Porter’s School, had come to Grayhurst to celebrate, eat whatever Harry’s chef felt like cooking them, swim in the indoor pool and laugh at life’s ironies. The second night, they’d gone to Lenny’s, the local bar, and there was Ethan Mirabelli, who’d flirted with them equally, despite Suze being gay and built like a professional wrestler. When Ethan had asked for Parker’s phone number, Suze had given her a heavy elbow to the ribs, her way of indicating approval. And the rest, as they say, was history.

       Parker and Lucy took their goodies into the front room and were laughing over Lucy’s in-laws’ propensity for dropping by during certain intimate moments. “It’s like they know,” Lucy said. “Honestly, some days I think they have the apartment bugged.”

       “They might,” Parker agreed. Her phone rang, and Parker glanced at the screen “Oh, speaking of difficult parents, it’s my mother. I bet she has a husband for me.”

       “Goody! Put her on speaker so I can hear, too!” Lucy clapped like a little kid.

      

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