The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Patrick threaded the belt through his jeans. “It doesn’t have to be a state secret,” he said. “You are allowed to . . . you know.”

  Alex glanced at him. “Have sex?”

  “I was trying to come up with something a little less blunt,” Patrick admitted.

  “I’m also allowed to keep things private,” Alex pointed out.

  “Guess I ought to get back the deposit on the billboard, then.”

  “That might be a good idea.”

  “I suppose I could just get you jewelry instead.”

  Alex looked down at the carpet so that Patrick couldn’t see her trying to pick apart that sentence, find the commitment strung between the words.

  God, was it always this frustrating when you weren’t the one running the show?

  “Mom,” Josie yelled up the stairs, “I’ve got pancakes ready, if you want some.”

  “Look,” Patrick sighed. “We can still keep Josie from finding out. All you have to do is distract her while I sneak out.”

  She nodded. “I’ll try to keep her in the kitchen. You . . .” She glanced at Patrick. “Just hurry.” As Alex started out of the room, Patrick grabbed her hand and yanked.

  “Hey,” he said. “Good-bye.” He leaned down and kissed her.

  “Mom, they’re getting cold!”

  “See you later,” Alex said, pushing away.

  She hurried downstairs and found Josie eating a plate of blueberry pancakes. “Those smell so good . . . I can’t believe I slept this late,” Alex began, and then she realized that there were three place settings at the kitchen table.

  Josie folded her arms. “So how does he take his coffee?”

  Alex sank into a chair across from her. “You weren’t supposed to find out.”

  “A. I am a big girl. B. Then the brilliant detective shouldn’t have left his car in the driveway.”

  Alex picked at a thread on the place mat. “No milk, two sugars.”

  “Well,” Josie said. “Guess I’ll know for next time.”

  “How do you feel about that?” Alex asked quietly.

  “Getting him coffee?”

  “No. The next time part.”

  Josie poked at a fat blueberry on the top of her pancake. “It’s not really something I get to choose, is it?”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “Because if you’re not all right with this, Josie, then I’ll stop seeing him.”

  “You like him?” Josie asked, staring down at her plate.

  “Yeah.”

  “And he likes you?”

  “I think so.”

  Josie lifted her gaze. “Then you shouldn’t worry about what anyone else thinks.”

  “I worry about what you think,” Alex said. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re any less important to me because of him.”

  “Just be responsible,” Josie answered, with a slow smile. “Every time you have sex, you can get pregnant or you can not get pregnant. That’s fifty-fifty.”

  Alex raised her brows. “Wow. I didn’t even think you were listening when I gave that speech.”

  Josie pressed her finger against a spot of maple syrup that had fallen onto the table, her eyes trained on the wood. “So, do you . . . like . . . love him?”

  The words seemed bruised, tender. “No,” Alex said quickly, because if she could convince Josie, then she surely could convince herself that what she felt for Patrick had everything to do with passion and nothing to do with . . . well . . . that. “It’s only been a few months.”

  “I don’t think there’s a grace period,” Josie said.

  Alex decided that the best road to take through this minefield was the one that would keep both Josie and herself from being hurt: pretend this was nothing, a fling, a fancy. “I wouldn’t know what being in love felt like if it hit me in the face,” she said lightly.

  “It’s not like on TV, like everything’s perfect all of a sudden.” Josie’s voice shrank until it was barely a thought. “It’s more like, once it happens, you spend all your time realizing how much can go wrong.”

  Alex looked up at her, frozen. “Oh, Josie.”

  “Anyway.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you—”

  “Let’s just drop it, okay?” Josie forced a smile. “He’s not bad-looking, you know, for someone that old.”

  “He’s a year younger than I am,” Alex pointed out.

  “My mother, the cradle robber.” Josie picked up the plate of pancakes and passed it. “These are getting cold.”

  Alex took the plate. “Thank you,” she said, but she held Josie’s gaze just long enough for her daughter to realize what Alex was really grateful for.

  Just then Patrick came creeping down the stairs. At the landing, he turned to give Alex a thumbs-up sign. “Patrick,” she called out. “Josie’s made us some pancakes.”

  * * *

  Selena knew the party line—you were supposed to say that there was no difference between boys and girls—but she also knew if you asked any mom or nursery school teacher, they’d tell you differently, off the record. This morning, she sat on a park bench watching Sam negotiate a sandbox with a group of fellow toddlers. Two little girls were pretending to bake pizzas made out of sand and pebbles. The boy beside Sam was trying to demolish a dump truck by smashing it repeatedly into the sandbox’s wooden frame. No difference, Selena thought. Yeah, right.

  She watched with interest as Sam turned from the boy beside him and started to copy the girls, sifting sand into a bucket to make a cake.

  Selena grinned, hoping that this was some small clue that her son would grow up to act against stereotype and do whatever he was most comfortable doing. But did it work that way? Could you look at a child and see who he’d become? Sometimes when she studied Sam, she could glimpse the adult he’d be one day—it was there in his eyes, the shell of the man he would grow to inhabit. But it was more than physical attributes you could sometimes puzzle out. Would these little girls become stay-at-home Betty Crocker moms, or business entrepreneurs like Mrs. Fields? Would the little boy’s destructive behavior bloom into drug addiction or alcoholism? Had Peter Houghton shoved playmates or stomped on crickets or done something else as a child that might have predicted his future as a killer?

  The boy in the sandbox put down the truck and moved on to digging, seemingly to China. Sam abandoned his baking to reach for the plastic vehicle, and then he lost his balance and fell down, smacking his knee on the wooden frame.

  Selena was out of her seat in a shot, ready to scoop up her son before he started to bawl. But Sam glanced around at the other kids, as if realizing he had an audience. And although his little face furrowed and reddened, a raisin of pain, he didn’t cry.

  It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don’t like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn’t speak that language. They didn’t learn it as children and they didn’t manage to pick it up as adults, either. Selena remembered last summer, when Jordan had gone fishing with an old friend whose wife had just filed for divorce. What did you talk about? she asked when Jordan came home.

  Nothing, Jordan had said. We were fishing.

  This had made no sense to Selena; they’d been gone for six hours. How could you sit beside someone in a small boat for that long and not have a heart-to-heart about how he was doing; if he was holding up in the wake of this crisis; if he worried about the rest of his life.

  She looked at Sam, who now had the dump truck in his hand and was rolling it across his former pizza. Change could come that quickly, Selena knew. She thought of how Sam would wrap his tiny arms around her and kiss her; how he’d come running to her if she held out her arms. But sooner or later he’d realize that his friends didn’t hold their mothers’ hands when they crossed the street; that they didn’t bake pizzas and cakes in the sandbox, instead they built cities and dug caverns. One day—in middle school, or even earlier—Sam would start to hole himself up in his room. He would shy away from her