down about it, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to upset you. Why don’t you let me take you out to dinner to cheer you up?”
But Jenna wasn’t ready to let the matter drop. It was stuck in her mental craw. She picked it up from an oblique angle. “I talked to Kitty about death right after Christopher was born. She was so happy about the baby, which is understandable. But she just seemed so lighthearted…I can’t explain it. I wanted to know how she did it. I was curious — ”
“Bloodlessly curious, no doubt,” Frank murmured teasingly.
Jenna ignored him and continued, “I just wanted to understand what was going on in her mind, I guess. So I asked her, straight out, how she was able to cope with the loss of her two boys. And do you know what she told me?” Jenna felt tears gathering at the corners of her eyes and blinked, not wanting Frank to see them. “She said that she’d realized that people come into our lives when we need them. And when we no longer need them, they leave. Denny and Bud had been hers as long as she needed them. And now the baby had come, because she needed him. And, she said, so did I.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Frank’s eyes glinted as he stroked his mustache. “And who decides when these people come and go? God, I suppose?”
Jenna looked away. “You don’t believe in God.”
“No, I wish I did. And you don’t either, if I remember correctly.”
“No,” Jenna said softly. And if Frank saw the sadness in her eyes, he gave no sign of it.
“People come and go in our lives because life is random. It’s not God, and it’s not even Fate. Life is just X — it’s the unknown factor.”
She found the strength to smile. “So sayeth the mathematician.”
“So sayeth.” He smiled back. In the yellowing light of the kitchen, he looked handsome and very, very kind. “And now, my beautiful savage, where shall we go to dinner?”
C HAPTER S EVEN
I T WAS ALMOST DARK WHEN A DAM got home. He had left Christopher’s party as soon as decency allowed, giving Kitty a kiss good-bye and Bill a brief hug, promising to come to dinner the following week.
He had not bothered to say good-bye to Jenna. He figured that she would know, better than anyone, why he had chosen to leave early.
Fortunately, Kitty had not renewed her insistence for Adam to stay with her and Bill. She’d been too busy with cake and presents and all the bliss of being with the boy she thought was her grandchild.
Adam made his way back to the city, a different man than when he’d left it. As he let himself into the apartment, he was thankful for two things: first, that his roommate Pete was off with a girl, so Adam had the place to himself, and second, that there was plenty of ice in the freezer. He fumbled out of his shoes and pulled back the drapes that covered the high, wide windows. As he looked down at the quiet streets, a tide of bitterness rose inside him, blotting out the twinkling lights below.
How neatly he had seen his future lined up: Marry Jenna, be a father to Bud’s son, float happily through the rest of his life on the cloud of a suburban dream.
Well, he had been brought neatly back to earth, now hadn’t he? And he didn’t want to ponder what had gone wrong, didn’t want to think about Jenna or the ruthlessly efficient way she had dissected him. He just wanted to get lost in a soft ocher oblivion.
He turned away from the window and reached for the bottle of bourbon that Pete always kept handy. The amber liquid splashing over ice cubes caught the light of a table lamp. When he drank, it was fire and ice in his throat.
Adam gripped the glass. He was a man at sea, tossed by waves of furious emotion, without compass, and with no land in sight.
* * *
He stumbled to bed in the gray light of pre-dawn and awoke at noon on Sunday with the need to see something beautiful. At least he knew where to find it. He stood under a hot shower for ten minutes, forced down some breakfast and a pot of black coffee, then
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