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  “No,” he told her quietly, “I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be married by then.”

  There was something odd in his voice. A note of sadness that she hadn’t heard coming from him in over five years now. Except when he spoke of Rachel.

  Was he going through a bad patch?

  Her ribbon of guilt grew into a sash. Maybe she could just call in sick tomorrow. The next moment, she vetoed the idea. If she called in sick, like as not, Rocky would turn up at her door after hours with a container of homemade soup from the deli that he frequented. And then he’d be annoyed because she’d lied to him.

  Mentally she brushed aside the scenario. “Is something wrong, Henry?”

  This time there was no pause, only assurance. Assurance that came so quickly, it didn’t reassure her at all. “No, nothing’s wrong.”

  Something was wrong, she thought, concerned.

  “Henry,” Elisha began, determined to coax her younger brother out of whatever stoic realm he had selflessly slipped into.

  As quiet as she was animated, Henry shouldered every problem in silence. He had ever since he had been a small boy. She was certain that couldn’t be healthy for him. More than that, she was afraid that someday he would explode, or implode or whatever the term for it was when you kept everything inside until there was no room for anything else.

  The upshot in either case was that he’d be ripped apart. Definitely not something she was willing to risk. More than anything else, even though he was younger, Henry was her rock. He always had been. Henry was the one constant she was sure of, no matter what else went on around her.

  But today being what it was, with fire drills and fires going off all around her, Elisha got no further than saying his name before the buzzer on her desk squawked loudly like a goose in heat, demanding her attention. Just the way everything else on her desk demanded her attention, she thought darkly.

  Exasperated, edgy, she dragged her free hand through her hair. She felt as if her brain was the center of a taffy pull and it was being yanked in every conceivable direction, keeping her from focusing, from making progress in any direction at all. There was just too much work and not enough her.

  One thing at a time, Lise. One thing at a time. Do what you can, as you can.

  It was a mantra she silently recited to herself when she felt utterly overwhelmed by all the things she had to do.

  She hated cutting her conversation with Henry short, but she needed to get going. The buzzer was to remind her about the meeting in the conference room that she was supposed to be attending in less than ten minutes. “Henry, my life is stuck in the fast-forward mode at the moment and I can’t even access ‘play,’ much less hit it, so I don’t have time to be patient and try to get this out of you by subtle probing and questioning. I’m going to ask you one more time. Is anything wrong?”

  This time, his voice sounded a little sunnier than it had a moment earlier. “Only that I don’t get to see you as often as I’d like.”

  She laughed dryly. “Now, why can’t I get a guy to say that to me?”

  There was a certain amount of give-and-take between them. There had been since they were both too young to cross the street alone. For the sake of the game, he played along. “I’m not exactly chopped liver, Lise.”

  “You’re not a guy,” she deadpanned. “You’re a brother. That doesn’t count.”

  The laugh was short, but it brought a warm feeling around her heart. “Thanks a lot.”

  He sounded better now, she decided, relieved. Probably whatever she thought she’d heard in her brother’s voice was just a product of her own exhausted imagination. Henry was fine. Henry was always fine. It was the first axiom of her life.

  The buzzer squawked again, louder if possible, despite the fact that there was no volume control on it. She frowned at it as if it were a living entity, subject to hurt feelings.

  “Look, I’ve really gotta go, Henry. I promise I’ll see you soon—at least before the next millennium. Give my love to the girls.”

  And with that, she hung up. The buzzer was squawking for a third time. The rest of her life was calling.

  It didn’t occur to her until later that she hadn’t made arrangements for dinner.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Here’s Elisha,” Elisha declared the second Henry opened the door to let her in. It was almost a week since he’d phoned her at the office, but the way she saw it, better late than never. “Doesn’t have the same ring as ‘Here’s Johnny,’ but the spirit is there,” she told him, stepping over the threshold.

  Warmth came rushing up to her, a direct contrast to the unseasonably brisk weather she’d left behind her outside. The beginning of April had brought snow with it, a rarity in New York, and although it was now almost all melted, the memory and the temperatures lingered on.

  Her cheeks stung for a moment until she acclimated herself, absorbing the warmth that the house had to offer. Both varieties of warmth, the physical and, more important, the emotional.

  No doubt about it, Henry’s home had a peacefulness that went beyond the comfortable spread of the twenty-four-hundred-square-foot layout, beyond the bricks and the concrete of the pleasant two-story building. There had been, and still was, love in this house, a great deal of love. She could feel it in every room.

  Henry and Rachel had been the happiest couple she’d ever known, as in tune with one another as her parents had been before them. And they had adored their two daughters. Andrea and Beth, in turn, despite an occasional display of willfulness from Andrea, had loved them right back with a fierceness reserved for the very young and very loyal.

  On those rare occasions when she felt that the world was too much with her, Elisha liked to retreat here for a few hours, to relax and recharge before venturing out again.

  In all honesty, a few hours was all she could take, because along with the love was a slow pace that would have driven her up a wall if she had been part of it for any extended period of time. She knew that for a fact because when she’d broken her leg three years ago, Henry had insisted that she stay with him and the girls to convalesce.

  She did.

  For a week.

  And then she went hobbling back on her crutches to the noise and breakneck pace that surrounded her Manhattan apartment. She needed the rapid pulse of the city, throbbing all around her, in order to feel alive. Slow and steady was wonderful if you were a turtle determined to beat a vain and slothful rabbit, but it definitely was not what she was about. So accustomed to moving fast, she even tossed and turned madly in her sleep. Or so Garry had claimed.

  “What’s all this?” Henry asked. He grinned and looked, for all the world, like a taller, male version of her, right down to the bone structure and coloring. He was eyeing the boxes she had in her arms. The ones she’d been struggling to keep from falling on the ground from the moment she had emerged from the taxi that had brought her from the city to his Long Island home.

  “Tribute,” she announced, willingly surrendering the booty into her brother’s open arms. “Conscience gifts. Call them whatever you want. This is to make up for the dinner I missed.”

  “You don’t have to try to buy us off,” Henry told her, setting the pile on the side table.

  “Sure I do,” she contradicted. Elisha slipped off her coat and tossed it over the back of the sofa with the ease of someone who knew she was home. She turned to face him. “Besides, I just like buying you and the girls things,” she told him for perhaps the hundredth time before her brother could protest again. “What else do I have to spend it on? I don’t own a house with a pool, so I can’t be lavishing all my money on a poolboy slash boy toy.”

  He looked thinner, she thought. As thin as he had right after Rachel died, when eating had ceased to be important to him.

  Everyone around her at the office was coming down with something. She wondered if Henry’d had the flu. It was just like him not to mention anything.

  The next moment, Beth came rushing up to he
r. At ten, the girl had dark brown hair and was slight for her age. Though brighter than her years, her maturity level had elected to remain happily ensconced in childhood for as long as possible. She still slept with a stuffed animal she’d had since she was two, a rabbit that looked every bit of his well-loved years.

  Coming up a little past her waist, Beth wrapped her arms around the aforementioned body part and cried, “Aunt Lise,” and “What d’you bring me?” in the same breath and almost at the same time.

  “Beth,” Henry looked at his daughter.

  “She has a right to ask,” Elisha said. “After all, it would be a terrible thing if I’d brought all those gifts and none of them were for her.” She caught Beth’s small heart-shaped face in her hand and tilted it up a little. “Right, kiddo?”

  “Right,” Beth agreed with a sharp nod of her head. And then she looked at her curiously. “What’s a boy toy, Aunt Lise?”

  Flashing a contrite glance in Henry’s direction, Elisha still laughed as she looked down at her niece. “Something a looker like you is bound to find out in another five, six years.” She laughed as she heard Henry groan. Looking at him over her shoulder, she said, “And you thought these were the tough years.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he answered. “I remembered what it was like with you.”

  She had the good grace to wince a little. There were no two ways about it. She had been a hellion at seventeen, slipping out at night to hang around with her friends. She never did anything that would have gotten her standing in front of a camera holding a placard with a long number against her chest, but she had come close a time or two. She didn’t envy what lay ahead for Henry.

  Taking two of the packages she’d brought, Elisha presented them to her younger niece.

  Beth hurried off to the sofa, declaring, “Thank you,” and “Can I open them?” even as she began to do so with the bigger of the two gifts.

  “That’s what wrapping paper is for, honey. To rip off.” She watched the girl fondly as Beth made short work of the blue-and-white paper.

  “Wow, thank you!” she cried once she was looking down at a popular video game and the latest imprint of a classic children’s book. “I love them both.”

  “See?” Elisha turned to look at her brother. “One gift for the mind, the other for the soul.” She picked up two almost identically sized gifts and handed both to Henry. “Open yours.”

  Though it looked as if he would have rather waited until after dinner, when things were a little more settled, Henry did as she asked. He’d managed to remove only a little of the tape on the first gift before Elisha gave it away. “It’s Sinclair Jones’s latest thriller. I know you like him.”

  “I do. Thank you.”

  “Open the other one.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what it is?” he teased. “Save me the trouble of tearing off the wrapping paper.”

  “You don’t tear wrapping paper, Henry,” she accused. “You ‘remove’ it. Like a neurosurgeon carefully working his way through a maze of nerve endings. You’re supposed to rip it off. Like Beth.” The ten-year-old looked up at her and flashed a smile before going back to reading the first page about a little girl who lived in the Swiss Alps.

  “We all do things our own way,” Henry told her. He slid open the side of the second gift. The appreciative smile that curved his mouth was worth waiting for. She’d scored, Elisha thought. “The Life and Times of James ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok,” he read aloud. “Thanks, Lise.”

  She paused to kiss his cheek. “You’ve very welcome. Hey, if I can’t get good books for the people I love, what’s the point of working at a publishing house?” She looked around. By now, they should have numbered four, not three. “Where’s the other lovely member of the family?” Elisha asked her brother.

  “Right here,” Andrea answered. She walked in, her hands deep in the pockets of the jeans that had a tendency to reside on her hips rather than in the vicinity of her waist. “Hi.” She brushed a kiss against Elisha’s cheek, her eyes on the remaining two packages on the table. “Anything for me?”

  “Sorry, these are for the mailman,” Elisha told her, picking the packages up and holding them to her. Then she laughed and thrust them toward her niece. “Since he’s not here, I guess you can have them.”

  But before Andrea had a chance to open even the first gift, her father asked, “Did you finish your homework, Andrea?”

  The older girl’s hand dropped from her gift. She held them against her with her other hand, her eyes communing with her shoes rather than looking up at her father. “Almost.”

  “How many pages in an almost?” Henry asked in a voice that held the echo of endless patience. With Andrea, he found that he had to be. And at times, even that didn’t work. He knew she had a paper due in English the next day, a paper she’d been putting off writing for over three weeks now, ever since she’d gotten the assignment.

  “Two.”

  He was familiar with the game. “Two pages to go, or two pages done?”

  She didn’t stick out her lower lip, but Andrea looked petulant. Fifteen was the age for it, Elisha thought. Again, while she didn’t envy her brother, she did admire him.

  “Two done.” And then the girl, a carbon copy of her late mother with her delicate features and her long, silky blond hair, sighed dramatically as she went on the offensive. “I just don’t get it,” she lamented. “Why do we have to study Shakespeare anyway? Nobody talks like that anymore.”

  It was a familiar complaint. Not one that she had made herself, Elisha thought, but that was because she had fallen in love with the beauty of the written word only a little after she’d climbed out of her first crib. She’d taught herself how to read. Her mother had called her precocious. The real reason was that Elisha had been impatient. Too impatient to wait for her mother to read to her. So she’d learned how to sound things out on her own, asking any nearby adult to help her when she needed it. She was reading by four.

  “They did once,” Elisha pointed out. “And who knows, maybe no one’ll talk like you do now in another hundred years.”

  The expression on Andrea’s face was the last word in skepticism. “Yeah, right.”

  Now, there was a challenge if she’d ever heard one. “Nobody says groovy anymore or talks about the cat’s pajamas,” Elisha said.

  On the sofa, her finger marking her place, Beth looked up and laughed at the expression. “Cats don’t have pajamas.”

  Unless they’re in cartoons, Elisha thought. “That’s what they said in the forties.”

  Beth’s face became solemn and thoughtful. She looked a great deal like Henry when she pondered things. “Cats had pajamas in the forties?” the girl asked.

  Elisha did her best to keep a straight face. “It was a more innocent, less complicated time.”

  “Sounds boring,” Andrea said. “Just like this play I have to do my report on.”

  Her interest piqued, Elisha asked, “Which play are you doing?”

  “Romeo and Juliet.”

  A section of the past came flooding back to Elisha. In high school, the drama class had put on the play and she had landed the role of Juliet. She had some very fond memories of rehearsing the kiss Juliet gave Romeo in an attempt to share the poison she thought he still had on his lips. Tommy Leonetti had some very definite ideas about just how “dead” Romeo was supposed to be at the time. She wondered if Tommy was still a great kisser.

  Banking down her thoughts, she looked at her older niece. “You should be able to relate to that.”

  “Why?” There was almost contempt in Andrea’s voice, but it was aimed at the Bard and the story she had to sludge through. “I wouldn’t be dorky enough to get married at fourteen.”

  A little gentle education was called for here. Not to mention a helping hand with the report. Making up her mind to tackle both, Elisha looked at her brother. “How long until dinner?”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  “Okay, then.” Elisha sl
ipped her arm around Andrea’s shoulders, leading the girl back to her room. “What I meant by you being able to relate to this story is that Romeo and Juliet rebelled against their parents.”

  Andrea looked at her, a spark of interest entering her eyes as they left the room. “Cool.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Henry said nothing on the subject throughout dinner, a simple but palate-pleasing pot roast. Neither did she. Instead, the conversation around the dining-room table centered on a variety of items that were of interest to the girls.

  But as soon as Beth had run off to test out her new video game and Andrea had excused herself to talk to her girlfriends, Henry looked at her knowingly. “You did the rest of the paper for Andrea, didn’t you?”

  She knew better than to make eye contact with him. Henry had a way of staring a person down to the point where the truth just popped out of its own accord. She’d often thought he’d missed his calling as an interrogator, although as a lawyer, it did come in handy at times.

  Elisha studied the delicate pattern on the white tablecloth as she said, “No, I guided her through the rest of the paper.”

  He sipped the last of his mineral water, his eyes still on his sister’s face. “So the report is written?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed softly and shook his head. “You did it for her,” he repeated.

  Elisha looked up from the white-on-white swirls. Henry had her and they both knew it. “I didn’t physically sit and write it.” A grin quirked her mouth. “She types faster than I do.”

  “But you dictated.”

  It was an old game. She was determined not to cry uncle, at least not completely.

  “Maybe some of the words,” she allowed, then quickly followed up with, “Can I help it if she likes the way I phrase things? Really, Henry, she’s a very bright girl, just a wee bit lazy when it comes to planting her bottom on a chair and doing the work.” She knew she wasn’t telling him anything new. No man was as up on his kids and their habits as Henry was. “Hell, I deal with that almost every day.” Slowly, she began to gather up the dishes, stacking them on one another as she talked. “You have no idea how many writers talk a good book, but when it comes right down to sitting there and facing a naked page, or trying to get from point A to point B, they become like willful children. Anything’ll distract them so they don’t have to deal with that emptiness.”