The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [45]
Coleman slipped on a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and opened the bag. She reached deep inside, fished around for a second, and came back out with the prize in hand, glittering from her fingers in the light.
Ellis impulsively kissed her on the cheek. “You are great. I really appreciate it.”
Ann Coleman patted him on the shoulder, resealed the bag, and threw it back onto the pile. “Happy to help. Any son of Doris’s is a friend of mine. Remember, though . . .”
He held up his hand as if swearing on the Bible. “I know. Not a word. Not even to Mom.”
Back upstairs, Ellis found Nancy and Doris laughing together and chatting as he walked into the room, dangling the pendant from his outthrust hand. His mother’s eyes widened with pleasure.
“You got it back. I don’t believe it.”
He walked over to the bed, hung it on the bedpost, and then, laughing, pushed the bed in her direction, thereby maintaining the six-foot proximity rule.
“How did you do it?” Doris asked, smiling and slipping the pendant over her head.
“I’d tell you,” he said, “but then I’d have to ki—” He stood before her, frozen, his expression stunned.
She laughed at him. “Kill me? Too little, too late, Ellis.” She looked meaningfully at Nancy and added, “And I thought we were getting along so good.”
Ellis stammered. “Jesus, Mom . . .”
She shook her head. “I’m kidding, sweetie. It was a good line. I guess you had some help out there.”
He sat down, his embarrassment still evident. “I sure did, but they swore me not to tell.”
She touched the pendant at her throat. “Well, I’m grateful. I always thought this pendant kind of holds us together, considering where it came from—puts a little Rosie in the room.”
Ellis ducked his head and stared at the floor for a few moments before saying, “Yeah.”
“She tried, Ellis,” his mother said. “In her own messed-up way, she made this possible, you and me, after all these years.”
He looked back up at her. “I’m happy for that.”
“And,” Doris continued, “maybe that made it possible for the two of you to meet up, huh?”
Ellis reached out to his side and took Nancy’s hand in his own, a gesture she wasn’t sure she could ever remember coming from anyone else.
“If it did, then I guess I can live with it,” he said.
Nancy looked at his profile, already weather-beaten in his late thirties, a mix of maturity and childishness. His was like the heart of a boy beating inside a tired bear of a man, and she felt, then and there, that maybe she could be the one to help influence which extreme won out.
Taking her along in the process.
Chapter 9
Several days following his visit to his mother, Ellis woke up and turned his head. Nancy was sleeping beside him, her breathing deep and regular. The blond hair across her forehead was still damp from the sweat of their lovemaking. Slowly, he propped himself up to look at her, flat on her back, naked. This was the fifth time they’d been able to do this, sneaking away and grabbing anything from a few minutes to just over an hour, and he still couldn’t decide if it was the best thing ever to happen to him, or the makings of the worst mistake of his life.
It wasn’t just fear of discovery that gnawed at him, or the inevitable pain, loss, and probable damage that would result. He’d suffered all three so often they’d acquired a natural taste. It was more the uncertainty of when they’d smack him in the head. Ellis didn’t consider himself a born loser, as Mel so often insisted, but more a man unusually prone to poor luck. It was the constant haplessness of his state that dogged him. He was forever feeling like a vole in the middle of a busy highway, unsure which way to turn and all but certain to end up under someone’s wheels.
He continued to admire Nancy’s sleeping form, recognizing also that perhaps his tendency to self-destruct wasn’t always quite as random as he liked to think. He’d made choices along the way, often loaded with risk, of which this was a perfect example.
This time, however, he felt pretty good about the result, and used that to all but disable