Together Again(6)

                After they cleaned up the kitchen, Margo left, promising to join her mother and aunt the next day for lunch. But once at her hotel, she couldn’t settle down. She tried convincing herself it was jet lag or maybe nervousness about seeing people she hadn’t seen since high school. Eventually, she had to admit it was Tony keeping her awake.

                Born a month apart to next-door neighbors, they’d been childhood playmates as well as high school classmates. His sisters were her best friends; she’d learned to dance with him when they were barely teenagers. He’d made sure she had fun down at the shore the summer after her father’s trial. They hung out when she was back in Philly between college and law school. But somehow they never got beyond a close friendship, dinner-and-movie dates and some unforgettable kissing.

                Maybe it was geography. They had spent most of the past fifteen years on opposite coasts, after all. Maybe they were never in the same place in their lives at the same time. Whatever it was, she’d always told herself settling for a warm, affectionate friendship was a good thing. After all, a relationship between a police officer and the daughter of a mob lawyer probably wasn’t a match made in heaven.

                Then his sister Mary Ellen got married.





Chapter 2


                Her all-too-short night ended when the maid who wanted to make up the room knocked on the door. After a quick shower, Margo dressed and grabbed her messenger bag, heading downstairs to forage for caffeine and to make a stab at organizing her speech. A coffee cart provided her with her drug of choice; a phone call to her office should have gotten her the help she wanted. But her boss, Jeff Wyatt, wasn’t around, as he usually was on Saturday mornings.

                Instead she got Kiki Long, her favorite paralegal and friend, who was making a rare weekend appearance at work. No help in the speech-writing area, Kiki kept asking why Margo sounded so sleepy. Rejecting jet lag as an explanation, Kiki decided that Margo had met a man on the plane and fallen into his bed when she got to Philadelphia where she’d spent the night having the best sex of her life. As she always did when Kiki speculated on her life, Margo let her ramble. Then she left a message for Jeff.

                On her own to get her presentation started, she went through her files again and made a few notes before noticing the time. Breakfast coffee had run into the lunch date she had with her mother and aunt.

                Pushing through the door to Broad Street, she was greeted with both temperature and humidity already in the nineties, normal for Philly but rarely seen in Portland and never in June. Rose Festival, the city’s annual celebration of all things floral, often took place in weather referred to as “June-uary.” Any self-respecting Portland rosebush, not to mention the Rose Princesses’ hairdos, would wilt in Philly’s June weather.

                The restaurant where she was meeting her mom was near City Hall, a building she’d always loved, elegantly presiding over the crossroads of Broad and Market Streets. With a statue of William Penn on top and the forty-five-foot Oldenburg clothespin across the street, it outshone Portland’s more modest civic headquarters and its nearby elk statue. On the other hand, she could have done without the din of the six lanes of traffic adjacent to her path. Her adopted hometown’s narrower, tree-lined streets were quieter and much more gracious.

                Sometimes, though, she admitted as she strode toward her lunch date at a very un-Portland-like pace, she missed the more intense energy Philly generated. Portland’s low-key, polite atmosphere sometimes made her grit her teeth. Sometimes laid-back was just a little too … well, laid-back.

                Back in her hotel by mid-afternoon, she wondered where the day had gone. All she had to show for it was a credit card receipt for lunch and a bottle of her favorite Scotch. The nap she planned and a long soak in the tub afterwards would, she hoped, clear her head before the reunion  .

                After an hour’s sleep, she filled the tub and turned on the jets. The bubbling was soothing and she relaxed into the warm water, her head back on a folded towel. She was on the edge of another little snooze when the phone rang — Jeff Wyatt returning her call. They discussed ideas for her speech for long enough that, when she hung up, she saw she had only a half hour before Tony arrived. She hurried to get dressed, to get the papers tidied up in the living room of the suite and to get ice cubes.