“Sounds delicious, Darcy. What’s for dessert?”
“Cups of cold chocolate mousse. Gosh, I’d better stop talking and go home and start cooking. I work tomorrow, so I’ll have to prepare the mousse today.” She rose and took her car keys from her tote.
“Have you told Nash you’ve got a date?” Jordan asked.
“Jordan, it’s not a date!” Darcy sank back down into her chair. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap. No, I haven’t told Nash, but do I need to? We’re not exclusive—we haven’t said the magic L word. I’m absolutely not going to have sex with Clive tomorrow night. Mimi will be with us all the time.”
Jordan gave Darcy a long, challenging look.
“Okay, fine,” Darcy capitulated. “I’ll tell Nash tonight. But it’s not a date.”
—
Darcy didn’t want to tell Nash face-to-face because she was afraid she’d blush or look guilty or seem as if she was trying to manipulate Nash into being jealous and forcing him to tell her he wanted them to date each other exclusively. She didn’t want him to feel caged, and she didn’t want to feel caged, either. Okay, what she had with Nash sexually was like nothing else she’d ever known, but she’d hardly had a lot of sexual partners, and anyway, sex wasn’t everything!
She spent the day preparing for Tuesday night, then showered and washed her hair and finally, with a glass of wine in her hand, she hit Nash’s number. It was dusk outside; he would be home.
“Hey,” Nash answered. “I was getting ready to call you.”
“How was your day?” Darcy asked.
“Unusual.” Nash laughed. He was part of a crew working on the roof of a huge new house. They’d finished putting up the scaffolding and got up on the roof to shingle, and Juan, a huge, strong guy from the Dominican Republic, who could carry twice the weight of any other man, discovered that he had acrophobia. He’d never been up so high before, and when he looked out at the view, he became paralyzed. He couldn’t move up, down, or sideways. It had taken the better part of an hour for Nash and another man to get on either side of him, keep their hands on Juan’s arm, and slowly back him down to the staging platform. It was funny, but it was also scary, because each of the guys helping Juan could use only one hand to keep purchase on the roof, and moving Juan was like tugging a grand piano. Then, when they finally got Juan down to the staging platform, he threw up. The crew had to deal with hosing it all down, and that was disgusting. When Juan’s feet finally touched the ground, he fell over in a dead faint, coming one inch from a metal rod that could have slammed open his skull. They turned the hose on Juan to shock him out of his faint.
“Now,” Nash said, when they stopped laughing, “tell me about your day.”
Darcy took a sip of wine. A big sip. She and Nash had exchanged the briefest of romantic histories. He knew she’d been married and divorced. She knew he’d spent some time traveling around the country with a woman named Buffy. Darcy had restrained herself from any remarks about vampires, and she was secretly glad to know Buffy was now traveling in Europe. She wanted to tell Nash about her accidental meeting with Boyz in the grocery store today, but that was all so much. Too much for a casual phone call. Nash probably hadn’t even had dinner yet.
Besides, she needed to tell him about tomorrow night.
She decided to tell him the simple truth.
“I’ve spent the day shopping and cooking. I’m going to the chamber music concert tomorrow night with Mimi and her grandson Clive—they invited me to join them. So I told them to come over before the concert for a light meal.” She described the menu to Nash, emphasizing the care she was taking to make the food easy for the older woman to deal with.
“That’s nice of you,” Nash said. “Don’t make it too spicy. My grandmother enjoyed spicy foods, but as she got older, they gave her terrible hiccups.”
“Hiccups!” Darcy laughed, and suddenly she was flooded with a wave of affection for this man. “Nash, do you like classical music?”
“Some of it. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich. But chamber quartets make me kind of itchy.”
She laughed again. “I know exactly what you mean.” Impulsively, she added, “Nash, I have so much to tell you.”
“Good to know, but let’s save it for another time, okay? I’ve got to shower and eat and lie down. I’m exhausted from hauling around a three-hundred-pound man.”
After they said goodbye, Darcy took a glass of iced tea out to the backyard and stretched out on a lounger. Above her, the stars were just beginning to emerge as if the darkness were a curtain, pulling itself back to reveal their sparkle. Her conversation with Nash had been so easy. He hadn’t even asked about Clive. Well, what, after all, could he have asked?
She gazed around the table, imagining where she’d put the plates and glasses, wondering whether to use candles or the tiny delicate lights she had strung in the hedges. They ran on batteries, and she didn’t know how long they’d last. Candles, she decided. Besides, it would still be light out when her guests arrived.
9
The last piece of music the chamber quartet played was too fussy, Darcy decided. It made her feel fidgety—Nash had called it itchy.
Or maybe it was the realization that the concert was about to end, and she and Clive would help Mimi into the car and out of the car to the house on Pine Street, and then what would Darcy do? What should she do? Clive had driven his rented Subaru, and Darcy had sat in the backseat, of course, so that Mimi could have the front passenger seat. So that was the way they would drive home.
And then what? Should Darcy simply step out of the car, thank them for the concert, and walk across to her own house? She imagined how she would wave to them as she put the key in her front door.
Yes, that was exactly what she would do. This night was about Mimi.
Although…while they ate their dinner out on the patio, Clive had talked about the book he was writing about the blues. How the music was urgent, raw, visceral. Muddy Waters. Robert Johnson. Bessie Smith. How rock ’n’ roll grew out of the blues, how the Rolling Stones were influenced by the blues, how the lyrics were often simple and true, howls of pain because of lust or infidelity or alcohol or poverty. When Clive spoke about his subject, he seemed more alive and capable of passion.
“I didn’t know any of that,” Darcy said at the end of their meal. “I’ll have to listen to some blues sometime.”
It was a casual comment—she was stacking their plates on a tray to carry inside—and she didn’t mean to be asking for an invitation.
“Come over some evening,” Clive said. “I’ll give you a concert. I’ve got stacks of CDs.”
“And that’s an understatement.” Mimi chuckled.