• • •
In her rental car and headed toward Center City on I-95, Margo went over, again, what she had ahead of her. The shoes she’d packed said it all — Manolo Blahniks for a high school reunion she’d been conned into attending, mid-heel pumps for the conference where she was to give the still-unwritten presentation and the flats she wore to please her mother who hated running shoes. No shoes were needed for the other thing niggling at the back of her mind.
In Portland, where she was a thirty-something deputy district attorney, Margo’s colleagues thought it was great she was going for a longer-than-usual visit with her mother. She’d explained her reluctance was because she didn’t like the summer weather. But it wasn’t just the weather she didn’t want to face. There was the world of Daisy Keyes to deal with.
“Daisy” was what her maternal grandmother, for whom she was named, had called her. It was the literal translation of Margherita, her given first name. Margo was grateful no one else had joined her abuelita in that folly. What the hell had she been thinking? Daisy? Really?
What made it worse was she thought of herself as a wilted daisy that last year of high school, at the mercy of people and events over which she had no control. Now Margo would be spending an evening with people she largely avoided when she visited her mother, all of whom she was sure remembered only too clearly what had happened that year.
But a suite at the Bellevue would help. No memories there. And, she noticed as she looked around the lobby while waiting to register, no guy in a blue blazer either. She crossed her fingers that she’d seen the last of him. All she had to do was unpack and freshen up and she’d be ready to face whatever was waiting on Fir Street.
• • •
Margo and her mother, Dolores Campbell Keyes, had grown up in the same house in South Philadelphia. The three-story row house with a marble stoop and a deep-set entry had been her mother’s dowry when she married Kenny Keyes. Nothing about it had changed since her grandmother had lived there, except the rest of the neighborhood.
After circling the block for only five minutes, Margo found a semi-legal parking spot, made sure nothing valuable was visible and locked up the car. As she approached her mom’s house, a man called from the direction of the darkened entry immediately adjacent to it, startling her.
“Welcome home, counselor,” he said.
“Tony?” She stopped, her eyes searching the row of houses. “Is that you?”
Tony Alessandro — Anthony Salvatore Alessandro to the DMV, Detective Alessandro to his employer, the Philadelphia Police Department — stepped out of the shadowy entry of the house next to the Keyes’ residence. The boy-next-door for all of Margo’s childhood, Tony had grown up into one of the best looking men she’d ever known — classically handsome features that would be at home in a Roman temple; hair so dark it was almost black; brown eyes that could make her knees buckle with one look. A mouth that made kissing a sacrament.
He came down the steps with the easy grace of an athlete and met her at the end of the short walkway to his mother’s house. Greeting her with a hug and a lingering kiss on the cheek he said, “It’s been a long time since Mary Ellen’s wedding last fall.”
And there it was, the last thing making her nervous about this trip. Mary Ellen’s wedding. When he’d danced with her all night before sneaking her out of the parish hall to a dark Sunday school classroom where he proceeded to kiss her senseless, making her mouth burn for his, her breasts ache for him to touch them and her whole body melt into a wet and wanting puddle. If his nephew hadn’t dragged him away, she was sure they’d have ended up naked in his bed. Or on the floor of the classroom.