Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) Read Online Free Page A

she could have bowed down and worshipped. She felt bold, alive, removed. She pictured various people she knew watching this scene in complete horror or crushing envy; she gave them all the finger behind Ruben’s broad back. He traced her cheek, her jaw, he grasped the ends of his scarf and drew her to him; he kissed her. His tongue was exquisite, ginger and peppermint, clean, tender, expertly wielded. The skin of his bare, muscled arms was baby soft, pampered, the complete opposite of the hardness he broadcast. There was no ashy dryness on Ruben Hyacinth. With their hands moving in perfect sync, they got her boots and tights off and his leather jeans lowered just enough.
    Â 
    When Claudia stepped off the elevator, her tights were twisted and her heart paced wildly inside her rib cage. The lunch bags she clutched contained a wilted sea of romaine. Tamara was waiting at the end of the hall, her hands on her meaty, sweatered hips.
    â€œHey. Fast & Sloppy,” she demanded. “Where have you been?”
    Claudia’s voice emerged from her jangled body in a strained falsetto. “I was picking up lunch.”
    â€œIt takes you forty minutes to pick up lunch? We were calling and calling the lobby, and Leonard wasn’t there. We are beyond starving.”
    â€œRuben.”
    â€œWhatever, Claudia.” Tamara exhaled loudly and shifted tack as she pulled the bags from Claudia’s arms. “Listen to me,” she tried. “You’ve been a little edgy these days. A little . . . unpredictable. Is everything okay?”
    â€œYour salad’s getting cold.” In an attempt to staunch the smell of sex currently snaking from her pores, Claudia folded her arms tightly.
    â€œI’m serious,” Tamara insisted.
    â€œEverything is fine, Tamara.”
    â€œBecause this is a small office, and when one of us has a problem,
all
of us have a problem.”
    â€œYou mean like when sorority girls get their periods simultaneously?”
    â€œOh
God,
no,” Tamara replied, her face contorting in a disgusted grimace. Then: “Kim told me you’ve been dealing with some problems at home. You know, with Mom.”
    â€œMom?”
Claudia repeated, incredulous. Edith was
Mother,
and always had been. And home was . . . not. She inhaled through her nose to the count of seven, held her breath for four counts, and as she exhaled through her mouth for the count of eight, just like the therapist at the college’s Health Services had once taught her, she processed Kim’s betrayal.
    Tamara’s eyes glittered with a different kind of hunger, one with which Claudia was familiar. Tamara wanted to get her mitts on Claudia’s fascinating drama so that with it she could recalibrate her own standing in the world and assuage her own uselessness and call it
help.
“Kim says you haven’t spoken to Mom in a couple of years.”
    Claudia shrugged. “True dat.”
    â€œHow old are you exactly, Claudia?”
    â€œForty.”
    â€œClaudia.”
    â€œTwenty-four.”
    â€œAnd what about your little sister?”
    â€œPhoebe?”
    â€œIs she still at home with Mom?”
    Claudia pictured Tamara’s frosted pumpkin head smashing against the pavement, after landing with a satisfying thud, having been launched from the fire escape. Kim would catapult and perish shortly thereafter, Tamara’s splayed and broken body serving as an ineffectual crash pad.
    Home with Mom.
Was that what they were calling Edith Mendelssohn’s house these days?
    Oh, the thrill when the brownstone had been purchased: the longed-for promise of respectability.
    How wonderful the word
brownstone
had sounded, how Claudia had steered every conversation toward it.
    The defeat when the house was first viewed: a metal gate for a front door; the back garden peppered with dead rats, used needles and condoms, and fresh cat shit.
    The unfinished basement where she and Phoebe had