Page 35 of Summer Lessons

Mason laughed. “I thought I was being smoother than that.” Dane had been happy to do it. And so had Carpenter.

“You could have just come eat with us,” Skipper said reprovingly. “Me and Carpenter don’t bite.”

“Yeah, but I wanted to quiz you shamelessly about your friend, and that’s easier to do when you don’t feel like you’re being a rat fink. So, my office? I promise I’ll have something delivered. Anything you want.”

“Thai food?” Skipper asked hopefully. “I keep trying to get Richie to try it, but he says nobody he’s known has eaten it and lived. I’m hoping ifIeat it and live, then maybe we don’t have to eat pizza all the time.”

“What’s wrong with pizza?” Mason asked, although he’d hit the age where the onions gave him gas.

“Ponyboy keeps getting into it.”

“Ponyboy?”

“The puppy. He can reach the counter, you know.”

Mason had known they weregettinga puppy. He hadn’t realized it had happened already. “What kind of puppy?”

“We have no idea, but they told us it was eight weeks old, and it’s already the size of a pony.”

“And it likes pizza.”

“The only things it likes better than pizza are garbage and cat shit.”

Mason laughed, genuinely delighted. Skip and Richie had apparently seized each other’s hand and decided to trot boldly into the future, even if the future was filled with unknown quantities such as Thai food. And dogs.

“Well, I look forward to you telling me all about it,” he said, happier now even if Skip didn’t know a damned thing about Terry.

“See you at lunchtime.”

He rang off and looked up to see Mrs. Bradford waiting in his doorway.

“Did you have a good weekend, Mrs. Bradford?”

“Can’t complain, sir. The mister and I drove up to the snow.”

Mason blinked. “Did you go skiing?”

She gave a shudder. “Good Lord, no. We sat inside the bed and breakfast, drinking hot chocolate and looking out the window, going, ‘Oh, look. Snow.’ It was thrilling.”

“I imagine so,” he laughed. A part of him wondered if maybe the two of them hadn’t found other “thrilling” things to do while looking at the snow, but the thought of Mrs. Bradford and sex would knock him off his game for maybe the rest of his life.

And he wasn’t doing great as it was.

“How was your weekend, sir?”

Mason sighed. “I played golf,” he said, unable to shake the confusion in his voice. “But that was Saturday. Sunday, my brother and I tried to redecorate one of the guest bedrooms.”

“Tried?”

Mason shrugged. “Well, we succeeded, but I went with green and cream, thinking it would be handsome?”

“As it should have been.”

“I picked the wrong….” He shuddered. “Green.”

“How bad could a green be, sir?”

He closed his eyes and shuddered again. “Like an olive barfed on a rotten lime.”