Picture This Read Free

cushion. “What did you tell her? How can you possibly know if this is true? Did Bob ever tell you this, or that there was even a chance of a child?”
    â€œNo. No to everything. I told her that I’d call her back,” said Rocky. She described the phone conversation, line for line. Tess made her repeat it all twice.
    â€œIn the rush of this, we should not forget that Natalie didn’t show up when Bob was alive. It is worth noting that she had a lot of years to look for her biological father. Why now?”
    â€œBecause she was a kid and probably she didn’t have access to all her records until now. Because she was probably trying to survive,” said Rocky. Why did she say “survive”? Rocky didn’t know anything about this girl. She didn’t know what she was expecting from Tess, but it wasn’t immediate doubt. Rocky pulled closer to the as yet unknown girl.
    â€œDon’t bite my head off. I’m just saying, here’s something to remember. I’m not sure what it means either. Promise me, in the rush of things, that you’ll remember the odd coincidence of death and emergence,” said Tess.
    A cloud blew past, and a sudden ray of sunlight caught Rocky. In the single-minded need to talk with Tess, she had forgotten her baseball cap and sunglasses.
    â€œI heard something in her voice, a catch, the way Bob’s voice broke when he heard that a college friend had been killed in a motorcycle crash, this very guarded place that only showed up once every few years, and each time I heard it I wanted to weep. How could this girl have sounded the same?” Rocky wriggled on the plastic version of an Adirondack chair and pulled her knees up, hugging them as if the temperature had dropped.
    Tess tilted her head in response to a sound in the dense brush. “Pileated woodpecker. We don’t get those very often.”
    â€œTess! I don’t care about the damned woodpecker, pileated or not. Someone just told me that Bob had a child.”
    â€œI know, dear. If I were you, I’d grab at anything that smacked of my dead husband. Given what you’ve told me, you had the kind of marriage that doesn’t come around that often. You miss him unbearably, and you think that you heard a strand of him in a stranger’s voice. What are you going to do?” Tess wore a straw hat with a rawhide tie under her chin. She had tucked her considerable white hair under the hat, exposing her slender neck.
    â€œI feel like my brain is sizzled. I’m trying to sit on my hands so I don’t call her back this instant. That’s why I came here, so you could slow me down and help me think.”
    â€œThere you go again, imagining that I’m wiser just because I’m older. I can tell every time this happens. I hate to disillusion you, but age doesn’t make you more brilliant. It’s being willing to step into the unknown that will keep you from premature aging.”
    Cooper lay between them on his belly, flicking his deep brown eyes from one woman to the other. Rocky let her hand fall to his favorite spot at the base of his spine, and she rubbed with familiarity.
    â€œI want whatever you’ve got. Help,” said Rocky.
    â€œIf you need someone else to say it, then I will. Wait twenty-four hours before you call her back. Can you do that?” said Tess, adjusting the string on her hat.
    Rocky sighed. “I can try. But I can’t stop thinking about her voice.”
    â€œLet me give you something else to think about,” said Tess. “Distractions are highly underrated. Isaiah said he’s fielded a complaint about you this week. Something about insulting a guy in the post office.”
    â€œI didn’t insult him. I just described, as the animal control warden, what I’d have to do to his car if he didn’t stop leaving his dog inside with the windows rolled up. That’s not an insult, it was descriptive