You Have the Right to Remain Puzzled Read Free Page B

she’d never offered any. Particularly since she’d given up drinking.
    Seeing his veiled hint had once again failed to get a rise out of Cora, Harvey ventured, “Have they set the date?”
    “No, they haven’t.”
    “Oh? How come?”
    “He hasn’t asked her yet.”
    Harvey blinked. “But. . .”
    “But what?”
    “I heard they were engaged.”
    “Oh, they are. He just doesn’t know it yet. That’s not important. I’ve married men who didn’t know it till they reached the altar.”
    Harvey looked positively scandalized.
    Cora took a slurp of her latte.
    “Ah, I’m keeping you from your coffee,” Harvey said.
    “No, actually I’m keeping you from yours.”
    Harvey’s eyes flicked toward the bakery. Cora could read his mind. Having failed once again to satisfy his heart, he was looking to satisfy his stomach. Harvey murmured his excuses, and went into the bakeshop.
    Cora saluted his departure with her latte, and con-gratulated herself on her powers of deception. In point of fact, Sherry and Aaron hadn’t set the date because Sherry was having last-minute jitters. That was no big deal. Cora had
always
had last-minute jitters when contemplating matrimony. There were so many points to consider. Was the gentleman one considered espousing even marginally better than the specimen one had just divested oneself of? Was the loss of alimony of the outgoing more than offset by the income of the incoming?
    Cora smiled at the remembrance of the old turn of phrase, which had occurred to her in between some sequence of husbands or other in one of her more sober moments. The term
incoming,
neat enough in itself, also conjured up the image of a nuclear attack. Cora furrowed her brow, trying to recollect which of her husbands had deserved the comparison to an ICBM. Henry, surely, though he’d had other flaws. As had they all.
    “Miss Felton.”
    Roused from her musing, Cora looked up to find a woman with a stroller, one of the gaggle of young mothers who hung out in the bakeshop to swap stories of Junior’s latest whatever. Cora always regretted not having children. Not enough to
have
children, but still. She enjoyed the idea of someone else having children.
    The mother in question had short-cut blond hair, a thin, attractively anemic-looking face, and anxious eyes of a greenish-blue variety.
    The child in question was in that gray area between not-capable-of-taking-that-first-step and rushing-headlong-across-the-busy-street. It was dressed in a neutral tan playsuit, offering no useful clue as to its gender. Cora had trouble telling the difference, whichwas one reason why she had always begged off babysitting. One of many reasons.
    Cora was mentally loading up phrases like
your baby
in case the mother didn’t offer an appellation, or the name was equally androgynous, like
Pat
or
Shelly.
She was also wracking her brain for the least clue as to the woman’s identity. Cora had seen her many times. Surely, one of the other young moms had addressed her by name. If so, Cora couldn’t recall it.
    Cora dug into her vast vat of knowledge for some mode of address that would not frighten the woman.
    “Yes?”
    That frightened her. “Oh, dear,” the woman said. “You have your coffee. I’m intruding.”
    “Don’t be silly,” Cora said. “You have your coffee too. At least I’m not trying to push a stroller.”
    The young mother had a Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand, a paper bag in the other. “Yes, but you’re not intruding on me. Oh, dear, I mean . . . I’m not sure what I mean.”
    The bench outside Cushman’s window was unoccupied.
    “Why don’t you sit down and tell me briefly what the trouble is?”
    As if on cue, the baby began to bawl at the top of its lungs. The young mother looked mortified. “Oh, dear. Stop it, Darlene.”
    Ah. There was a silver lining to the ear-piercing cloud. Darlene. Cora filed the information away. The baby was a girl. Either that, or destined for a rather rocky childhood.
    The