He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Her voice was so concerned, and he’d never known her to be disingenuous with her emotions on the rare occasions she showed any. And she’d never lied to him, at least that he knew of, so it was once again tempting for him to imagine that there was a benign explanation for the man on her front stoop. “We need to get together and talk. Are you at work?”
“No, I took the morning off, I’m going in at noon. Listen, I didn’t handle the whole Seattle thing well, and I’m sorry. We do need to talk.”
No lies yet. “I can come over right now. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I’m busy this morning.”
Servicing a guy with six-pack abs? he almost blurted. “I thought you had the morning off.”
She let out an impatient sigh. “So I could catch up on things. How about an early dinner? If you’re not working.”
“I’m not. Yuki, you cried when you told me about Seattle. I’ve never seen you cry like that. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
She was silent for a very long time. The only thing he could hear was her breathing. “No, I’m just sad. We’ll talk later. Five o’clock at Taiko?”
Taiko—home of silken shrimp dumplings and luscious black cod, dishes that made him question his agnosticism with every bite. He loved that restaurant, and if things went horribly wrong there this evening, he’d never be able to return to further explore the possibility of a religious conversion. “How about Sushi Roku? I’m in the mood for an ocean view.”
“Fine.” He heard background noise, the shuffling of papers, a drawer closing. Either her head wasn’t in the conversation and she was multitasking, or she was exhibiting displacement behavior—like a cat licking itself to defuse a potentially dangerous confrontation.
“Were you here early this morning, Sam?” she finally asked. “I thought I heard your car.”
“There are a lot of loud cars in LA.”
“The Mustang has its own sound.”
Yuki discerning the audible difference between a big block Ford and another engine? It was inexplicable. “I confess. I had a dream that you were being strangled and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I drove by to make sure you were all right.” Sam clenched his jaw, keeping the rest inside.
“How did you know I was all right?”
“A light went on, so I left.”
“It could have been the strangler who turned the light on. You didn’t even wait for me to get the paper, just to make sure?”
Sam felt like he’d swallowed a hot rock that was now burning a hole in his stomach. Yuki was trolling for information so she knew where she stood at dinner tonight. He could ruin her day, like she’d ruined his, and part of him relished the thought. But he would approach this like a special ops mission, where the element of surprise gave you the greatest advantage. “The dream didn’t seem so real anymore, so I decided to get out of there before you got the paper and potentially spotted your crazy husband parked outside your house,” he lied. “At the time, it seemed like it would be hard to explain my presence without sounding unhinged or stalkerish.”
“You just told me, and it didn’t sound either unhinged or stalkerish.”
“The light of day and all that.”
“Dreams are powerful. I thought hearing the Mustang was a dream, too, but I still looked for you when I got the paper.”
And there it was, the big lie. She’d been fairly strategic up until this point, but she’d overplayed her last card by volunteering too much information in an effort to sound casual. Yep, business as usual, got out of bed, fetched the paper, went to make coffee. If you saw a shirtless man on the porch, you had the wrong house.
Sam suddenly felt hollow, like a mammoth void encased in a pouch of flesh. “I was gone by then.”
“I guess you were. See you tonight, Sam, Sushi Roku at five. Goodbye.”
Goodbye. One simple word people said to one another all the time. Context was everything.
He stared at his lucky cat for a while, trying to empty his mind. The cat stared back with flat, unfeeling black eyes.
* * *
Melody was subdued when he finally came out of the bedroom. She’d tidied things even more, washed their coffee mugs, put plastic wrap over the plate of pastry, and his mother’s throw was folded neatly and draped on the arm of the sofa. The countertops sparkled and the cheap table was crumb-free. She looked at him expectantly and gestured to the empty wine bottle sitting by the sink. “I wasn’t sure where your recycling was, I didn’t want to snoop around.”
“I’ll take care of it. Thanks for cleaning up.”
“I’ll get going, then. Jim is probably hungry.”
“Who’s Jim?”
“My scrub jay. I feed him peanuts. He’s pretty tame now. If I leave the window open, he’ll hop in and grab the peanuts out of the basket on the kitchen counter. Maybe he left me the roses.”
Sam was stunned when he felt a chuckle rising up his throat. It never made it all the way, but it had gotten close. Apparently you could still think about laughing when you were standing on the edge of a cliff, gazing down at the end of the world as you knew it. Or maybe he’d just given up on feeling shitty and was entering some kind of manic phase in an attempt to retain or reclaim his sanity.
“Want to take a drive first? Pink’s opens in half an hour.”
“A hotdog at nine-thirty in the morning after we just ate breakfast?”
“Reckless, I know. But you’re dealing with the fact that your boyfriend was murdered and I just found out I have a cheating wife.”
Melody’s face changed very little, but it was enough to intimate sorrow and disappointment that was genuine, familiar to her. She’d been betrayed in life, too. Maybe in different ways, but when a cornerstone of your existence crumbles, you recognize the same malady in others and feel the pain all over again.
“Oh, no. Are you sure, Sam?”
Was he? “I’ll tell you about it over a bacon chili cheese dog. You said we should wait until we’re both happy before we take a ride in the Mustang, but the way things are going, we’ll both be dead before then.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
SAM AND MELODY SAT AT ONE of the tables outside, eating their dogs and observing the eclectic assortment of people gathered at Pink’s so early in the morning. There were the disheveled partiers coming off benders, none of them looking nearly as good as the couple at the scenic overlook had; tourists checking off an LA landmark before the line got too crazy; a truckload of landscape workers; and a TV host and his crew filming a live segment.
He and Melody stood out most of all, though, a lovely young woman in a dress with fully inked arms and a black bruise under her eye that makeup and sunglasses couldn’t entirely conceal; and her dubious companion, a man with half a face who drove an iconic piece of American automotive history.
Melody slurped orange soda through a straw angrily, as if she was punishing the soda and the straw. “What a bitch. I want to strangle her myself.”
“There are two sides to every story. Yuki’s been through a lot.”