Brain Child Page 0,49

he leaned back, a smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

“Cute,” he said. “Real cute.” The smile spread into a grin. “He’s still working on them, isn’t he?”

Now it was Marge Jennings who frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you,” Dan said, chuckling. “You came in early and dummied up this set of answer sheets, didn’t you? Well, you went too far. Did you really expect me to buy this?”

“Buy what?” Marge asked. She stepped around the desk and repeated the process of checking the answer sheets. “My God,” she breathed.

Dan looked up at her, fully expecting to see her eyes twinkling as she still tried to get him to fall for her joke. And then, slowly, he began to realize it was not a joke at all.

Alex Lonsdale had completed the tests, and his scores were perfect.

“Get Torres on the phone,” Dan told his secretary.

Marge Jennings returned to her office, where Alex sat quietly on a sofa, leafing through a magazine. He looked up at her for a moment, then returned to his reading.

“Alex?”

“Yes?” Alex laid the magazine aside.

“Did you … well, did anyone show you a copy of those tests? I mean, since you took them last year?”

Alex thought a moment, then shook his head. “No. At least not since the accident.”

“I see,” Marge said softly.

But, of course, she didn’t see at all.

Ellen glanced nervously at the clock, and once more regretted having allowed Cynthia Evans to set up an appointment for her to interview María Torres. Not, of course, that she didn’t need a housekeeper; she did. A few months ago, before the accident, she would have felt no hesitation about hiring María Torres. But now things were different, and despite all of Cynthia’s arguments, she still felt strange about asking the mother of Alex’s doctor to vacuum her floors and do her laundry. Still, it would only be two days a week, and she knew María was going to need the work: starting next month, Cynthia herself was going to have full-time, live-in help.

But right now, María was late, and Ellen herself was due for what Marsh always referred to, with a hint of what Ellen considered to be slightly sexist overtones, as “lunch with the girls.” Of course, part of it was her own fault, for try as she would, she still hadn’t been able to train herself to think of her friends as “women”: they had known each other since childhood, and they would be, forever, “girls,” at least in Ellen’s mind.

Except Marty Lewis, who had long since stopped being a girl in any sense of the word. Ellen often wondered if Alan Lewis’s alcoholism had anything to do with the changes that had come over Marty in the last few years.

Of course it had. If Alan hadn’t turned into a drunk, Marty would have been just like the rest of them—staying home, raising her kids, and taking care of her husband. But for Marty, things had been different. Alan couldn’t hold a job, so Marty had taken over the support of the family, and made a success of it, too, while Alan drifted from treatment program to treatment program, sobering up and working for a while, but only a while. Sooner or later, he would begin drinking again, and the spiral would start over again. And Marty, finally, had accepted it. She’d talked of divorce a few years ago, but in the end had simply taken over the burdens of the family. At the fairly regular lunches the four of them—Carol Cochran and Valerie Benson were the other two—enjoyed, Marty’s main conversation was about her job, and how much she liked it.

“Working’s fun!” she would insist. “In fact, it’s a lot better this way. I never was much good at the domestic scene, and now that Kate’s growing up, I don’t even feel I’m robbing her of anything. And I don’t have to get terrified every time Alan starts drinking anymore. Do you know what it was like? He’d start drinking, and I’d start saving, because I always knew that it would only be a matter of months before he was going to be out of a job again.” Then she’d smile ruefully. “I suppose I should have left him years ago, but I still love him. So I put up with him, and hope that every binge will be the last one.”

And, of course, there was Valerie Benson, who, three years ago, actually had divorced her husband. “Dumbest thing