Die Before I Wake. Laurie Breton

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СКАЧАТЬ whether I should regale his mother with the whole sordid truth or a slightly sanitized version thereof.

      Beneath the table, Tom slid his foot over to touch mine. His reassuring smile gave me strength. I glanced around the table at all the expectant faces, all these people waiting with bated breath for the life story of the anonymous woman who’d quite literally blown into their lives on the winds of a hurricane.

      I speared the potato and put it on my plate. “Well,” I said as I sliced it in two and slathered it with butter, “I’m pretty much alone in the world. Or I was, until I met Tom.” I gave him a shaky smile, and he returned it full force. “I was divorced about a year ago. Before I married Jeffrey, there was just my dad and me. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, left us when I was five years old. Dad died six months ago. Liver cancer.”

      I didn’t bother to elaborate. I didn’t tell them that Dad had died of a broken heart and too much boozing. Let them read between the lines if they wanted to. I’m all for honesty, but some skeletons are better left in the closet.

      I ate a bite of potato. “My father was…” I trailed off, wondering how on earth to describe Dad in words that normal people would understand. People who’d never had the privilege of knowing him, with all his quirks and oddities. “Very independent. A freethinker. A little to the left of center.”

      The girls watched me with wide eyes. Jeannette’s brows were drawn together into a small frown. Probably wondering if there were some family history of severe mental illness that was about to infect her future grandchildren. Directly across the table, Riley seemed curious, waiting. “He was a musician,” I said.

      “Ah,” Riley said, as though that explained it all.

      “A musician?” Jeannette said. “How interesting.”

      Having grown up as Dave Hanrahan’s daughter, I understood only too well that interesting was a euphemism for horrifying. I speared another piece of potato. When I saw the affection and approval in Tom’s eyes, I decided to go for broke. Dabbing my mouth with my napkin, I said, “He was pretty well known at one time, until his career went south and my mother left him. When his career tanked and his band broke up, my mother ran off with the drummer. At that point, his life sort of fell apart.”

      That was a polite way of putting it. The truth was that after my mother left, Dad drank himself to death. It took him twenty-seven years, but Dave Hanrahan was nothing if not persistent. The day she walked out the door, he decided that life was no longer worth living, and he spent the rest of his days proving the validity of that theory.

      “Good Lord,” Jeannette said, looking as though she’d swallowed a persimmon.

      I knew that my life—or, to be more accurate, my father’s life—sounded like a train wreck. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded, but I could understand Jeannette’s horrified expression.

      Beneath the table, Tom’s ankle looped around mine. Riley appeared intrigued, so I directed my next words at him. “All the money disappeared. We barely survived. But he was a great dad. The best.”

      “Are you going to tell us?” Riley asked. “Or are you keeping his identity a secret?”

      “No secret,” I said. “His name was Dave Hanrahan.”

      Riley’s face changed, the way it often does when people first hear my father’s name. “Get out of here! The Dave Hanrahan? The front man for Satan’s Revenge?”

      “That would be my dad.”

      “The guy who wrote ‘Black Curtain’? Oh, man. Tommy, remember how we used to play that record over and over and over? That guy was the epitome of cool. We all wanted to be him.” Riley braced his elbows against the table and leaned forward eagerly, his eyes focused on me, everything and everybody else forgotten. “You must’ve had an amazing childhood,” he said. “Hanging around with all those musicians. Listening to their music. Their stories.”

      I opened my mouth to answer him, but I never got the chance. The lights blinked and, from outside, there arose a massive splintering sound, a roar so deafening that it sounded like a freight train passing through. The ground actually shook, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that the earth itself had opened up and revealed the gateway to Hell.

      Then the window behind me imploded.

      Two

      “It’s not that big a deal,” I said. “Really.”

      “You’re lucky to be alive.” With intense concentration and quick, efficient hands, Tom dabbed antiseptic on the gash on my cheek while I tried not to wince. “Another six inches, and—” He closed his eyes and muttered something indecipherable. Darkly, he added, “I knew I should’ve cut down that damn tree last spring.”

      He capped the bottle of antiseptic, picked up a Band-Aid, and held my chin in his hand to size up the injury. “It’s too old,” he said, turning my head to the left, then to the right. “Too brittle. Too dangerous.”

      “It was just a limb.” A big one.

      “Next time, it’s apt to be the whole tree. Damn thing took ten years off my life.”

      “I’m fine. Honest.”

      “You talk too much. Hold still.” He tore open the Band-Aid, peeled off the paper backing, and gently applied it to my cheek. Sitting back to admire his handiwork, he said, “There. You’ll probably live to talk a little longer.”

      I gave him a radiant smile and said, “My hero.”

      He grimaced. Crumpling the Band-Aid wrapper, he said, “Some welcome you got. If I were you, I’d run as fast as I could back to Los Angeles.”

      “What? And miss all the excitement around here? Surely you jest.”

      Humorlessly, he said, “It’s usually a lot more boring than this.”

      “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’ll stick around for a while and see for myself.”

      He shoved the bottle of antiseptic back into his first-aid kit. “Tomorrow, I’m calling the tree service and having that pine cut down.”

      “It seems a shame. It’s probably been standing there for a hundred years.”

      “And I’d like to make sure that you’re standing for another hundred.” He closed the lid on the kit and zipped the cover. “The tree goes. Don’t even bother to argue.”

      “I suppose you’re saying that because you believe a good wife always obeys her husband.”

      Some of the somberness left his face. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he said, “Do you have any idea how tempted I am to say yes?”

      I smiled. “But you’re refraining.”

      “For now, anyway. We may have to revisit the issue at a later date.”

      “Nice save.”

      “I thought so.”

      The sound of rattling glassware and cutlery drifted in from the kitchen. “Now that СКАЧАТЬ