And we just stood there for a couple of minutes, until Sarah whispered, “Let’s go upstairs.”
“But,” I said, “the food’s going to arrive in twenty minutes.”
She moved back, smiled at me. “How much time do you think you’re going to need, really?”
I nodded, took her hand, and turned her in the direction of the stairs. “You’ve got a point,” I said.
She reached up and lightly touched my forehead. “What happened to your eyebrows? There’s, like, half of them missing.”
“I’ll tell you all about it over dinner,” I said, and took her upstairs.
And over veal and pasta, I did. She said very little, stopped me only a couple of times to ask questions.
“Jesus,” she said when I finished.
I had left a couple of parts out. I did not give Sarah the details of Trixie’s confession. I hadn’t decided what to do yet with that bit of information.
And I also left out the part where Trixie opened up about her fondness for me. There was no need to get into all that, either.
Later, sitting with Sarah on the couch, I said, “I think I may quit the paper.”
Sarah turned and looked at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I don’t even know if Magnuson’ll take me back, take me off suspension, but if he does, I don’t know whether it’s right for me. And my being there, it’s not working for you, either. You’re going places. I mean, you lost the foreign editor thing this time, because of me, but there’ll be other opportunities. You’ve got more of a future there than I do.”
“That’s not true.”
“The thing is, Sarah, I don’t know whether I have what it takes.” I paused. “I don’t know whether I can tell the whole story.”
“What do you mean? About what?”
“About…anything. To be a half-decent journalist, you have to be willing to let all the secrets out, to tell everything. I haven’t been doing that. Not with some of the stories I’ve already done, not with the one about what happened up at my father’s place, and not with what’s happened this past week.”
“You’re just too close to these things. They’ve all been too personal. It’s different.”
I shrugged, looked down. “It’ll all sort itself out. As long as I’ve got you, it doesn’t matter to me what I’m doing.”
We hadn’t planned to make a dramatic entrance, but when Sarah and I walked into the kitchen, my arm hanging lightly around her nightshirted shoulder, her arm loose around my waist, thumb tucked into the waistband of my pajamas, I guess we made quite a picture for the kids, who were sitting at the table, eating toast and drinking coffee.
“Ooohhh, check it out,” Angie said.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Paul said. “Guys, get a room.”
“Where do you think we just came from?” I said.
Paul grimaced. I poured coffee for Sarah and me, opened the cupboard looking for cereal.
“How about eggs?” Sarah asked. Sarah makes great eggs.
“Won’t you be late to Home!?” I asked. She was the one heading off to work, not me.
“Fuck Frieda,” she said.
“But my heart belongs to you,” I said. Paul and Angie exchanged glances.
Sarah was leaning into the open fridge. “You want eggs or not?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want eggs.”
And so she made eggs. With cheese, and Canadian bacon, and toast and jam.
“I won’t be around for dinner,” Angie said. “Late lecture, then I’m hanging out with some friends.”
“Me neither,” said Paul. “After school, a bunch of us are going to this thing, and then we’re getting something to eat, and then we’re doing this other thing. So like, I could use a bit of cash. ’Cause I don’t have a job anymore, you know.”
The kids vanished. Sarah and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table, ate our breakfast, drank our coffee, glanced at the headlines in the Metropolitan. I didn’t even read Dick Colby’s story about me and Trixie and her arrest in Martin Benson’s death. Instead, I went to the comics page and read Sherman’s Lagoon.
We were alone, together, and things just seemed so right. That morning seemed like the dawn of something much more than another day. It had the aura of a new beginning. Handcuffed in a basement with a corpse, duct-taped in a barn in Kelton, tossed about by cops in a dead-of-night raid—all these things seemed like distant memories.
Things were good.
I should have savored the moment even more. It wasn’t going to last.
32