Page 50 of Homeport

She’d been too busy working to develop a wide range of tastes in books and music when she was in her teens and early twenties. A pregnancy, miscarriage, and broken heart all before her eighteenth birthday had changed her direction. She’d been determined to make something of herself, to have something for herself.

Then she’d let herself be charmed by slick-talking, high-living, no-good son-of-a-bitching Buster.

Hormones, she thought, and a need to make a home, to build her own family, had blinded her to the impossibility of marriage with a mostly unemployed mechanic with a taste for Coors and blondes.

She’d wanted a child, she thought now. Maybe, Lord help her, to make up for the one she’d lost.

Live and learn, she often told herself. She’d done both. Now she was an independent woman with a solid business, one who was taking the time and making the effort to improve her mind.

She liked to listen to her customers, their opinions and views, and measure them against her own. She was broadening her outlook, and calculated that in the seven years she’d had Annie’s Place, she’d learned more about politics, religion, sex, and the economy than any college graduate.

If there were some nights when, slipping into bed alone, she longed for someone to listen to her, to hold her, to laugh with her when she spoke of her day, it was a small price to pay for independence.

In her experience, men didn’t want to listen to what you had to say, they just wanted to do a little bitching and scratch their butts. Then yank off your nightgown and fuck.

She was much better off on her own.

One day, she thought, she might buy a house, with a yard. She wouldn’t mind having a dog. She would cut back on her hours, hire a bar manager, maybe take a vacation. Ireland first, naturally. She wanted to see the hills—and the pubs, of course.

But she’d suffered the humiliation of not having enough money, of having doors shut in her face when she asked for a loan, of being told she was a bad risk.

She never intended to go through that again.

So her profits were fed back into her business, and what she sliced off of them was tucked into conservative stocks and bonds. She didn’t need to be rich, but she would never be poor again.

Her parents had skirted the slippery edge of poor all of Annie’s life. They’d done what they could for her, but her father—bless him—had held on to money as a man holds a handful of water. It had continually trickled through his fingers.

When they moved to Florida three winters before, Annie had kissed them both goodbye, cried a little, and slipped her mother five hundred dollars. It had been hard-earned, but she knew her mother could make it stretch through several of her father’s get-rich-quick schemes.

She called them every week, on Sunday afternoons when the rates were down, and sent her mother another check every three months. She promised to visit often, but had managed only two short trips in three years.

Annie thought of them now as she watched the end of the late news and closed the book she’d been struggling to read. Her parents adored Andrew. Of course, they’d never known about that night on the beach, about the baby she’d conceived, then lost.

With a shake of her head she put it all out of her mind. She switched off the television, picked up the mug of tea she’d let go cold, and took it into the closet her landlord claimed was a kitchen.

She was reaching to switch off the light when someone knocked at her door. Annie glanced at the Louisville Slugger she kept by the door—the twin of one she kept behind the bar at work. Though she’d never had occasion to use either, they made her feel secure.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Andrew. Let me in, will you? Your landlord keeps these halls in a deep freeze.”

Though she wasn’t particularly pleased to find him on her doorstep, Annie slipped off the chain, released the dead bolt and thumb lock, and opened the door. “It’s late, Andrew.”

“You’re telling me,” he said, though she wore a plaid robe and thick black socks. “I saw your light under the door. Come on, Annie, be a pal and let me in.”

“I’m not giving you a drink.”

“That’s okay.” Once he was inside, he reached under his coat and pulled out a bottle. “I brought my own. It’s been a long, miserable day, Annie.” He gave her a hound dog look that wrenched at her heart. “I didn’t want to be home.”

“Fine.” Annoyed, she stalked to the kitchen and got out a short glass. “You’re a grown man, you’ll drink if you want.”

“I want.” He poured, lifted his glass in a half-salute. “Thanks. I guess you’ve heard the news.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.” She sat on the couch and slipped the copy of Moby Dick out of sight between the cushions, though she couldn’t have explained why it would embarrass her to have him see it.

“Cops think it was an inside job.” He drank, laughed a little. “I never thought I’d use that phrase in a sentence. They’re taking a hard look at Miranda and me first.”

“Why in the world would they think you’d steal from yourself?”

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