The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [2]
“Remember how you used to say you would love to take time off just to read and watch movies?” Crow asked her now, continuing to bustle around the room, putting a vase of flowers on the mantel, then moving them to the windowsill. For a straight man, he was alarmingly in touch with his inner Martha Stewart. He seemed to have inherited the nesting phase that would normally be Tess’s, but that was true even before her diagnosis. He had wanted to paint the baby’s room, throw a shower. Tess, falling back on the traditions of her mother’s Jewish family, insisted it was bad luck.
“I used to say a lot of things.” Interestingly, she had never said she wanted to be a mother, but she did not remind Crow of this. His joy at the news had been unadulterated. If he ever had any fears or doubts about fatherhood, she never saw them. Crow, reliable as sunrise, was not one of the Jordan Baums of the world—right? She had not planned to be a mother, but she had not planned not to be a mother. Her whole life was governed by accidents—her career, her relationship, even this house that she so loved. It made sense that her future daughter would continue this pattern.
And if her daughter turned out to be a precocious pain in the butt in the bargain—well, she knew whose DNA that was, too.
Crow said: “With Mrs. Blossom now working for you full-time, you can afford to take the time away from the office. You were comfortable with her taking over during your maternity leave. What’s an extra two months?”
“Two months of reduced billings. Prodigy though Mrs. Blossom may be, she’s only one woman.”
“One woman ran your business for years,” Crow said. “Everything will be all right.
“You don’t know that.”
“No one knows anything, in the end.”
Those words could be a comfort or a curse. For once, Tess decided to accept the comfort. The sun was beginning to set, and although her porch faced east, she could see the effect in the amber light that filtered through the still-green leaves. The porch was cantilevered out from the house, which was built into the side of a steep, wooded hill, so it felt like a tree house. Rock-a-bye, Tess, in the treetops. Surrounded by books and Crow’s towering stack of Criterion Collection DVDs, she could improve her mind while her body held her here. She could read the great books, study maps of the world, attack the ideas—philosophy, economics—she had bypassed in college.
Or she could stare wistfully out the window, into the park, where the local dog walkers were beginning to file in. A week ago she had been among them, exercising her greyhound and Doberman, Esskay and Miata. How she missed that, she thought, forgetting all the times she had complained about the chore, how often she’d yearned to sleep in while the greyhound bathed her with hot, fishy breath. (Part of the reason she was on the sun porch was that Esskay would not fight her for the chaise longue, the way she did for the queen bed in the master bedroom.) Yes, she had longed for time off, for a chance to read more, to be absolved from the morning walks that fell to her. But she had imagined herself on a beach, not shaped like a beach ball.
Her eye was drawn to a miniature version of Esskay, a prancing greyhound, a true gray one, whereas Esskay was black with a patch of white at her breast. The little dog wore a green jacket belted around its middle and moved with the cocky self-confidence of someone used to being noticed. As did its human companion, in a tightly cinched celery-green raincoat that was a twin to the greyhound’s. Hard to tell the woman’s age at this distance, but Tess could make out sleek blond hair, a wasp-waisted figure. She was the kind of pretty-pretty woman who would be called a girl into