Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good Read Online Free Page A

anything. I was thrilled when she said she’d consider the Children’s Hospital benefit.’
    ‘Who’s her best friend?’ he asked. ‘We could call somebody.’
    ‘Everyone likes her, but I don’t know about best friends.’
    He looked around again, paying attention. Message light blinking on a phone by the bed, windows raised a few inches, empty hangers on a closet door pull. They walked into the bathroom. Windows open a couple of inches. Drops of moisture on the glass door of the shower. A towel on the floor.
    He stooped and felt the towel—damp—then looked out to the rear lawn. That would be the studio, surrounded by a fairly ambitious garden with an open potting shed. Beyond, a dense thicket of rhododendron and oaks.
    ‘What do you think?’ asked his wife.
    ‘I think she’s in town or maybe she drove to Wesley; we need to get out of here.’
    ‘I pray she’s all right. Should we close the front door?’
    ‘Best to leave things as we found them. I’m sure she’s fine.’
    How did they manage to everlastingly insinuate themselves into other people’s business, Ireland being a prime example?
    She sighed; he declined to mention it.
    ‘Maybe we should do our shopping at the Local,’ she said, ‘and come by again before we go home?’
    ‘Good. Let’s do it, let’s go.’
    ‘I’d really like to check out her closet to see if Chester’s tux is in there.’
    ‘Good Lord, woman, leave off.’
    He took her hand and led her to the top of the stairs, and down they went. CherryGarcia.



Chapter Two
    I f not for her, he would eat the entire pint at one sitting. But she would seize it at the halfway point, preach him a homily, and stick it in the freezer behind lamb chops wrapped in butcher’s paper. A week might pass until she deemed it timely to let him finish it, straight from the carton.
    He hated this monitoring business, for her and for him, but where would he be without surveillance? Lost, he supposed, in some diabetic coma, as twice before. Lord knows, he hoped Wilson would be up to it if anything dire ever happened again. With Hoppy in South Sudan, he could be as
morte
as Chester McGraw with a mere slip of the fork.
    She waited for a northbound van to pass, and turned right on Main. ‘Remember you have an appointment with Dr. Wilson on Monday.’
    ‘Got it,’ he said.
    He hiked his pant leg and surveyed his right ankle. No swelling. Same with the left. What a life, when a man had to check his ankles and shoot himself with a needle and leave half a pint moldering behind the chops.
    ‘I meant to tell you,’ she said. ‘Olivia called. Lace will be home for fall break on October eighteenth.’
    ‘And Dooley comes in on the twenty-sixth and out on the twenty-ninth.’ He mused on the unfortunate juxtaposition of dates. Being in separate schools with different holiday schedules was tough on romantic, not to mention sleep-deprived, relationships. On the occasional long weekend, the round-trip drive time between UVA, where Lace was a sophomore, and UGA, where Dooley was a junior, was fifteen or sixteen hours.
    ‘We’ll have him all to ourselves for two days and three nights,’ she said. ‘And he seems happy about it.’
    ‘No mention of going out to Meadowgate?’
    ‘Not a peep. I think he misses us.’
    He couldn’t remember when they’d had Dooley’s company for two days running—given the boy’s fondness for disappearing out to Meadowgate Farm and honing his veterinarian skills.
    ‘What do you think about two dinners?’ she said. ‘One for Dooley and the young siblings, and Buck and Pauline, of course. I think it would be good for Dooley to spend more time with Jessie and Pooh. We know Sammy and Kenny won’t see their mother, so we could have Sammy and Kenny the following night.’
    ‘There’s Harley,’ he said.
    ‘He could come both nights.’
    ‘And what about Hélène the first night? She’s a terrific landlady, he says.’
    ‘Fun. How many is that?’
    She nosed the