“Where’s your young man?” Her mother glanced around the airport.
“Oh, Dante couldn’t be here. You’ll meet him…sometime.”
Her father, Nigel, asked, “Is he working? Or did he just not want to meet your parents?” He laughed. “Not that I want to meet anyone right now either.”
“No, he wanted to meet you, but something else took precedence. He…uh…he had to fly somewhere at the last minute. A family member died. He might be away for a while.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” her mother said. “We were looking forward to meeting him.”
Before they could get any further into it, Mallory said, “So where are your bags? Let’s get you home. I know how cruddy I feel after a long flight.”
Her father smiled. “I can’t wait for a nice hot shower.”
Her mother leaned toward her, side-whispering, “And a glass of brandy wouldn’t hurt.”
Mallory’s father didn’t have a drinking problem, but he had one to relax after a tough day, and those seemed to be fairly frequent. But this must’ve been the mother of all bad days. All the stress of the job must have been awful.
They got the bags and wheeled, carried, or rolled them to the cab. Mallory wanted to get help, but her father insisted they didn’t need it.
“Wow, you had a lot of stuff. I thought you didn’t.”
Her father laughed. “You never know how much crap you have until you have to pack it all up and move it.”
Her mother rolled her eyes. “So, it sounds as if you started your new job and it’s going well…” She was a master of changing the subject.
“I’ve been learning a lot. It’s on-the-job training, so to speak. I can have a great idea, but it doesn’t always translate the way I see it in my head. Of course, that can happen with a painting too. I’m just more invested in getting things exactly right. I need a few days to get everything just the way I want it. There are differences between working on a canvas and working on a computer. It takes a while to get used to it.”
When they reached the taxi stand, the driver popped the trunk open. As he loaded the trunk, Mallory wondered if they shouldn’t have asked for a van.
“How much stuff did you bring home anyway?”
Her mother laughed. “There were so many wonderful things there, and I just couldn’t leave them. I took a few of the smaller items and packed up some of the bigger ones to be shipped later.”
Mallory stared at her. “You mean there’s more?”
She giggled. “I bought a few things for your town house. How is it working out, by the way?”
“It’s working out just fine,” her father snapped. “I don’t build junk.”
“I never said you did, dear. I just wondered how Mallory was adjusting to living on her own in her own home.”
So, her father’s good mood lasted about ten minutes. That was some kind of a record. It didn’t take long to find a hot button and push it. At least she wasn’t the one who had set him off this time.
* * *
Kizzy’s father was intrigued when she brought home the map with the red circle on it and told him about Mallory. She’d had her make a blue ink mark as close to the exact location of her father’s construction project as she could. It was almost dead center. If one moved the dot to the other side of the river, it would indeed be the exact midpoint.
“So, how did you meet this girl?”
“She’s Dante’s girlfriend. Dante is Noah’s brother.”
“I see. So, where is Noah anyhow? I haven’t heard about him for a while. He didn’t forget you when they wiped his mind, correct?”
She forced a laugh. “Of course not.” Kizzy didn’t know whether or not Nick or Brandee had explained what had happened to him. Apparently not. Her father could have discovered the house in South Boston was now a pile of kindling, but maybe he didn’t care enough to check. That made it easier. She really didn’t want to say a firefighter blew up his own home.
She still wasn’t quite sure about the how. It happened so fast… She suspected it might have had something to do with his lab, but she didn’t know what he had already set up. Maybe a combination of chemicals that were dangerous when mixed were close at hand.
“I saw him the other day. He’s fine. Just, you know…doing his thing.”Yeah, growing up all over again.
