Chapter 10

I'd deliberately not told Cinda what kind of pizza I like, and she hadn't asked – but then with her mind on getting back to work, and faced with the odd notion of hosting a de facto employee who was paying for supper, that didn't surprise me. I get these notions sometimes – to see how someone will react. Probably someone with more brains than I have could draw useful conclusions from subtleties of response, but I do it just out of curiosity. I want to know how someone will react, just like I want to know other things – what the surface of Mars looks like, what happened to Amelia Earhart, whether anyone besides Grover Cleveland will ever have two terms separated by someone else's presidency, where a runaway child went. Curiosity is part of why I'm a detective, when I could have done any number of other things all these years and when I quite frankly have so much money that I never have to work again.

She'd done pretty much what I'd have done – she'd gotten one pepperoni, and one with everything. Pepperoni is safe, and everything is good too. I like both, and when I buy frozen pizzas – I keep a few in the freezer for times when I'm hungry but Cecelia's not available to cook – I get equal numbers of each, with perhaps the odd other kind once in a while for variety.

She'd done it right. Some people dig out actual plates, and forks even, when eating pizza, but Cinda had laid out paper plates and stacks of napkins. Pizza isn't neat food – it's food for when you don't mind maybe getting grease and sauce on your clothes. I haven't worn anything in years that it would upset me to get grease and sauce on. Cinda, on this occasion, was wearing an old pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt that had, apparently, once been pink. Her apartment showed money, and was right on the edge of being one of those places you're afraid to go into lest it suddenly look lived in, but she knew how to approach pizza.

I don't have a perfect memory, and normally when I'm getting info from someone I take notes. But writing while eating pizza is a job for the ambidextrous, and that's something I'm not. I'm so left-handed that I can't even eat pizza with my right hand. So I didn't bother trying to take notes. I knew that as long as I wrote down what I'd learned within an hour or two of hearing it, I'd not lose it, and once we were done eating I'd grab the notepad I'd set on Cinda's sofa and put it down in more permanent form.

It was nice getting home at a reasonable hour. And when I did I found a surprise. Cecelia had of course known I wouldn't be pulling a shift that night, and she'd asked a neighbor across the park – we live across the street from Inez Park – to take Darlia for the night. I'd told her I'd be eating with Cinda, and knowing that I'd get home pretty well stuffed with pizza she hadn't cooked anything special. But there was ice cream and pecan pie, and she made me a cup of Earl Grey afterwards.

We sat on the sofa, me with my tea and her with a cup of coffee, touching from shoulders to knees. My feet were up on the coffee table, but Cecelia never puts her feet there, or almost never anyway. She had been telling me about what she'd done during the past couple or three days – she'd put up some preserves, and baked bread, and gone over the books of one of Albuquerque's rescue missions. Though she doesn't work for money anymore, money is what she's good at and what she studied in college, and she volunteers her services to several organizations around town – a couple of rescue missions, and two or three churches including our own, and a battered women's shelter. It's her way of working to change the corner of the world she lives in.

She finished what she was saying, and finished off her coffee. "Are you done with your tea, Darvin?"

I looked into the cup, saw that only a couple of swallows remained, and drank them. "Now I am."

"Then let me put the cups in the sink." She took them both into the kitchen, and I heard her run water into them. Normally we wash dishes in our house when we're done with them, but with just a couple of bowls, a couple of cups, and a few spoons we were leaving them until the next day.

Instead of sitting back down on the sofa when she got back, Cecelia sat on the coffee table, facing me. "Do you know what I'd like, Darvin?"

"Nope."

"I would like it very much," she said, "if you would..." She stopped, and then leaned forward and whispered it into my ear. Someone once swore to me that blacks can't blush, but Cecelia can – and she did just then. She doesn't turn red, but she does get definitely darker, and I saw it creeping up out of her collar and into her face.

I grinned. "I'll never get used to the way you can be calm about describing horses and cows and pigs, but when it comes to talking about us, you go all girlish."

"I am a girl – or at least I'm female. And I would prefer to be shy about this rather than becoming brassy."

I took my feet off of the coffee table and sat forward. I took her hands in mine, and kissed her firmly. "I prefer you the way you are too, C. And you know what? I'd like that too."

And she took me by the hand and led me out of the living room.

I got up at a more reasonable hour the next morning, and got dressed before going out in the living room. Cecelia was, of course, up before me, and I could smell recent cooking. When I got to the living room Cecelia was in her rocker reading – I tilted the book up to see the title; it was, apparently, a scholarly work on Christina Rossetti's poetry. She's Cecelia's favorite poet; I like her work too, but my favorite is Walt Whitman. And at that I don't read scholarly analyses of Whitman's poetry. Even if I cared about all that stuff, which I don't, I don't have the temperament or the education or the intelligence for it.

I sat down on the sofa and put on my socks and boots, and looked up to find Cecelia watching me. "Are you preparing to sally forth and slay dragons?" she asked.

"No dragons, C – nor even slay. I don't want to ever run acrost a dragon, and slaying, if it's gotta come, can come later. I'm just gonna observe a rat."

"Then I approve. St. George may be a hero to some, but assailing a dragon with nothing but a shield and a sword seems to me an unnecessarily periculous venture, and the prospect of you returning upon your shield merely demonstrates that I am not a Spartan – I find it an appalling concept."

I thought for a second of playing Sir Galahad and begging to risk the peril, but I have learned a little in 11 years of marriage. I realized she wasn't in a Monty Python mood, and so I kept the joke to myself. Instead I said, "I ain't too eager to get hurt neither, C. You know me – I like coming home in one piece."

Now she smiled. "Yes, so you can fash me with your ostensibly illiterate English."

I raised my eyebrows. "Cecelia, normally you haul out the 93-syllable Latin words; what's with Scots all of a sudden?" My mother had Scottish ancestors, and I've maintained something of an interest in that side of my heritage – not enough to fork out three or four hundred bucks for a kilt, in which I'd probably look silly anyway, but enough that I recognized the word.

"I strive to rotate my vocabulary, so as to keep all the words fresh. Do you object?" She was grinning now, the full-out grin that means she's really enjoying herself.

"Only to you always getting the better of me. But I don't guess you're gonna quit that, are you?"

"Of course not, Darvin. To allow you even one second's peace would be to abandon my responsibilities as your wife. After all, your training is yet incomplete."

"Yeah, it won't be done till I fall at your feet and address you as 'Your Majesty, Queen of the Universe.'"