was going to keep them out of the house long enough for Max to leave but my mind was working overtime as I watched them make their way from the driveway to my side.
They were damp and looked a little bewildered as to why I was sitting in their backyard. “Hi,” Jackson said, a question in his voice. His hair gel had made his hair harden into a weird helmet that made him look like an extra in a Pompeii reenactment.
“Hey,” I said, drawing out the syllable for as long as possible. “Hey.”
Terri looked at me and furrowed her brow. Jackson produced an umbrella and gallantly put it over her head, leaving me to get soaked. “What are you doing, Alison?”
I got up from my crouch next to Trixie. “It started to rain and I saw the dog and she was wet and then I thought ‘gosh, the dog is wet,’ and so I felt bad and then I thought I would come out here and get her and then I saw you drive up,” I babbled. I cast a nervous glance at the house but couldn’t tell if Max was in or out. “Wow!” I screamed as loud as I could, hoping that she could hear me. “It’s really raining!”
Jackson stared at me as if I had gone insane. “Well, we’re back now so we’ll take Trixie inside.” He took the dog by the collar and pushed her in the direction of the house. Trixie stayed firmly planted by my side.
“And I need sugar!” I cried. I pushed a wet lock of hair off my forehead.
“Okay,” Terri said. “Come inside and I’ll give you some sugar.”
I followed them inside and stood at the edge of their kitchen, next to the sliding door, trying not to get their gleaming wood floors wet or muddy. Terri went into the kitchen and rooted around in the maple cabinets for sugar. She produced an entire five-pound bag and pushed it at me. “Here. Take the whole thing.”
“Oh, I couldn’t!” I hollered, hoping that my voice was carrying throughout the entire house.
“Yes, you can!” she hollered back, convinced of my sudden onset of deafness.
I stalled for another minute, looking around the kitchen, which was attached to a large family room with a stone fireplace. Their wedding portrait, re-created in oil paints, had a prominent place over the mantel. It appeared that the antebellum South had been their theme. Terri was seated on what looked like a toadstool with a parasol at her feet; Jackson stood over her with one hand on her shoulder, the other in the pocket of his suit vest. He was sporting a Vandyke goatee/soul patch sort of thing on his chin which he had since had the good sense to shave off. Yuck.
I put my hand on the door handle and pushed the slider aside. “I’ll be going now. Thanks for the sugar.” I stepped through the door and back out in the rain, offering a prayer that Max was out of the house and safe somewhere.
She was sitting at my kitchen table, in exactly the same place in which I had found Ray, waiting for me to return. She looked disappointed. “No bloody chain saws,” she said. “But did you get a load of the toadstool and the parasol?”
Crawford met his daughters at Grand Central Station early Sunday morning. The girls, twins, were going to be seventeen in a few months and their mother had finally relented to letting them take the train from Greenwich to Grand Central with the caveat that their father meet them at the train doors and make sure they were seated on the right train when it was time to go home. Crawford waited on the track, right where the third car would open its doors; it was their plan and it was foolproof. The doors would open and they would race out, as always.
Meaghan and Erin Crawford had been born three minutes apart in the midst of a December snowstorm; their mother had been escorted to the hospital by two police cars, her husband walking a beat somewhere in the Bronx and unable to get back to the Upper West Side to get her there himself. He arrived just in time to see Erin, then Meaghan, be born, the first blond, the other dark.
The train doors opened and Meaghan, a full six feet, preceded her smaller sister. She jumped into his arms and kissed him, forgetting that she was almost as tall as