Something She's Not Telling Us - Darcey Bell Page 0,44
and cop cars.”
“Jesus,” says Rocco. “What was it? Some kind of workplace shooting?”
Why did his mind go directly to that? Because of the times they live in.
“Nah,” says the man. “More like some kind of workplace food poisoning. I clean my hands”—he produced a bottle of hand sanitizer from under the desk—“every half hour.”
“Thanks,” Rocco says. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He tries the next building and the next. Nothing like STEP. No one has seen Ruth; no one recognizes her photo; no one knows what he’s talking about. Yet he knows he left her here with those bags of kale.
A couple of times, he’d tried to look her office up on the internet. He’d been unable to find it, and Ruth said that they’d taken down their website. They’d been hacked, and they were undergoing a redesign. He hadn’t bothered to follow up.
Now he thinks, This will be easily straightened out, the mystery cleared up. He’s gotten things wrong before. He’s gotten people wrong. Especially women.
He would ask her tonight. Except that . . . it’s her birthday! Just in case things got awkward, it might be better to wait . . .
LIT BY AN enormous skylight, the restaurant occupies a cavernous repurposed garage. Straw mats and picnic tables cover the oil stains. Strings of lights are wound around posts and looped around scraggly trees in planters.
Rocco arrives early and waits at the bar. He watches Ruth cross the atrium. She’s dressed up in a black-and-red flowered dress and high heels. He sees how envious the other guys look when she kisses the lucky guy. That lucky guy being . . . him.
A waitress in a tight orange T-shirt and blue jeans shows them to their seats on benches, across from each other at a picnic table. There are people on either side of them. It’s hard to hear.
“Happy birthday.” Rocco hands Ruth the flowers, and she begins to cry. He’s always been squeamish about women’s tears, but tonight he’s so focused on the mystery of Ruth’s job that it hardly registers. The flowers look only a little worse for having been dragged around the city all day.
Ruth’s eyes are glistening as she gives the waiter a disarming smile and asks if he could please “do something” with the flowers until she can take them home. He agrees, whether he knows what to do with them or not.
Rocco wonders why his good mood has been so rapidly spoiled. Or maybe his mood wasn’t nearly so good as he imagined.
He can’t help asking, “How was work?”
Something in Ruth’s expression turns wary. Has she heard something in his tone? “Pretty quiet. Not horrible—for a change. What about you?”
“I was off today,” Rocco says.
“I know. I mean this weekend. How was your visit with Andrew John? What are you trucking into the city?”
“The first pumpkins,” he says. “The last summer squash. Apples and gourds.”
“Ooh,” says Ruth. “Let’s make a pie.”
The prospect of a pie sounds wonderful, until he remembers his . . . doubts. No point spoiling her birthday. He’ll ask about her job when they get back to her place. Or he can wait.
The meal is delicious, but the dishes have too many edible flowers for Rocco’s taste—nasturtiums in the ramen, a daisy peeking out from under the arctic char, violets atop the crème br?lée. He’s trying to think of a joke about being served the bouquet he’s brought Ruth. But nothing seems funny. He concentrates on not cross-examining Ruth. Let her talk about the circus, about Daisy. How wonderful it was! How much fun!
At the end of the meal, the waiter brings individual little chocolate cakes with sparklers shooting off splinters of light. Ruth’s face is as luminous as it was when she watched the trapeze artists sailing through the air.
But Rocco can’t forget his conversation with the doorman. Maybe she got Rocco to leave her and the kale at a place that wasn’t really her office. Maybe she was ashamed of her workplace. Maybe she’d been afraid that one of her coworkers would say something that would make Rocco think less of her. Probably it’s something like that. Still, he can’t help wanting an explanation.
Driving back to Ruth’s, he decides he might regret having sex with Ruth if he’s thinking that she might have lied about her job. It’s unfair to her and . . . distracting.
Strangely, it makes the sex hotter. Ruth has taken off most of her clothes, and then most of his clothes, within moments of