Page 27 of Moonlighter

“Bite?” she offers, which means I’m staring. She digs the spoon into the vanilla ice cream, sweeping it through a bit of caramel sauce, and catching a chunk of fresh mango. Then she offers it to me.

I open my mouth like a bird, just to see what she’ll do.

Alex rises from her chair and leans over the table to feed me. As I sweep a cold spoonful of wonder into my mouth, her cleavage is right at eye level. That’s where I’d rather put my tongue, damn it. Forget the ice cream.

This is going to be the longest week of my life.

“Tennis courts!”Alex says on the walk back. “I’ll call the concierge and see if we can get a slot. You still play, right? And tennis works with your fitness goals.”

“Sure,” I say, because why not? A couple of hours watching Alex’s sleek legs maneuver, just out of reach, a few yards in front of me? What’s a little more torture between friends? “Here’s what we should do—hire a tennis pro, and then hide from him in the shrubberies.”

“Why would—” She breaks off as she remembers how we used to pull this very trick on Martha’s Vineyard. “Oh my God. I wassucha brat.” She puts a hand in front of her mouth and laughs. “My poor father. I don’t think I did one thing he asked for that entire year.”

“Not like he was around to notice.” That just slips out. I was such a bitter kid that summer. Our fathers basically abandoned us to the help so they could fly around the world and do whatever it was they did.

“That was the summer of the telecom merger,” she says as we pace across the sand. “We didn’t see much of them, did we?”

“Nope.” Alex’s father was still running the cable empire that Alex now commands. And mine was trying to get his fledgling security business off the ground.

“Guess they didn’t have much choice,” Alex points out.

I only make a grunt of acknowledgment. This period of my life isn’t something I talk about. Alex’s mother had passed away when she was seven. By the time I met her in Massachusetts, she was used to being the only child of a single dad. It was familiar.

But I was still raw.

My mother had left the previous September, just after Max and I headed back to school. I don’t know why, but I’d spent the year convinced she’d turn up again by summer. To my mind, surviving the school year without her was a personal test. If I passed, the reward would be her reappearance.

I have no idea where I got that idea. But I was crushed when it didn’t happen.

“Do you get along with your dad?” Alex asks now.

“Sure. I guess. He and Max are really tight, because they work together. But dad and I are solid enough.” Except when he tries to get me to talk about my future. And then I’m only annoyed.

“What about your mother?” she presses.

“What about her?” I grumble. “Is this an interview?”

“Sorry,” she says quickly. “I just wondered when you saw her again after that summer.”

“The answer is never.”

“Oh.” And now Alex is clearly wishing she hadn’t asked. “Sorry.”

“Thanks, but I’ve had twenty more years to get over it.”

“Still.” Alex shrugs. “You never really get over that. I didn’t, anyway.”

It surprises me that she’s willing to say so. Max and I never mention our mother.Never. Max would no sooner say her name aloud than he’d admit to being afraid of snakes. And hehatessnakes. Come to think of it, I know more about how my brother feels about snakes than about how he feels about Mom.

And I’m exactly the same. I don’t speak her name because it gives her too much power. But the wound is still deep. She left us and never looked back. Not only was it hurtful, it’s shameful. Who does that?

Once in a while, my dad brings it up. He says he blames the age difference between them. He didn’t start a family until he was forty, and she was twenty-five. As a young man, he was a military intelligence officer for the US Navy. After that, he became the chief of police in the New Jersey town where I grew up. So by the time he met and married my mom, he was ready to settle down.

“She wasn’t in the same place,” he once said, in a dramatic understatement.

I remember my mother as someone who was always dissatisfied. With me. With dad. With the house where we lived. Still, it took me by complete surprise when she walked out.

It was a Sunday. There was football on TV. Dad got a call and announced he had to make an unexpected trip into town. That happens a lot when you’re the chief of police, and none of us was surprised.