Blues in the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

else that isn’t kosher.
    The restaurant has only a few parking slots. I pulled my used black Acura (preowned is the preferred euphemism) next to a white Suburban hogging one and a half spaces and wondered which car, if any, was Zack’s. I was twelve minutes late thanks to my two older sisters, Edie (the housewife/dance instructor) and Mindy (the attorney), who had been coaching me via a conference call about what to wear. My mom wasn’t involved. She’s a freer spirit, and she realized long ago that advising me would propel me in the opposite direction.
    Which it did. I had put on and quickly discarded my sisters’ choice—a conservative navy suit and virginal white camisole I’d bought for a cousin’s bar mitzvah—and replaced it with a black Lycra skirt hemmed well above the knees and a short-sleeved, scoop-necked clinging white silk sweater that stopped just short of offering a peek at my Wonderbra-enhanced assets. It was July, it was hot. Rabbi or not, this was me.
    With a last look in the Acura’s vanity mirror, I licked my Oh Baby M.A.C.–glossed lips and tousled my curls, wishing I hadn’t put off redoing my highlights. Then I locked the car and walked to the restaurant. Inside, I scanned the packed, dimly lit room, looking for the Zack Abrams I’d known, trying to imagine him twelve years older with thinning hair and a paunch, possibly with a beard now that he was a rabbi (I’d forgotten to ask Edie).
    I didn’t see him. I
did
recognize a psychiatrist who had told me at the end of our first (and only) date that although we’d both exhibited high levels of anxiety, he thought the evening had gone well and was interested in seeing me again—probably to administer a Rorschach inkblot.
    I’ve had worse dates. Like the depressed motivational speaker who didn’t stop talking about his ex-wife. Or the orthodontist who showed up at my door with toothpaste on his lips and offered to check my teeth for gum recession. Or the investment broker who ordered angel hair pasta and curled one strand at a time around his fork with intense deliberation until I wanted to strangle him al dente. I could write a book. Ron, by the way, was a great first date and an excellent boyfriend. He just turned out to be a shitty husband.
    And then I saw him. Zack, I mean. He’d been talking to an attractive young blond woman at a table across the room, and his back had been toward me. When he’d turned around, our eyes met.
    My heart thumped. It really did. He turned back to the woman and must have said something funny, because she laughed intimately. Same old Zack, I thought with a mix of disappointment and annoyance as he made his way around some tables. And then he was standing in front of me, taller than I’d remembered but no less captivating, fit and clean-shaven and Rupert Everett debonair in a black sports jacket, blue shirt and tie, and a black suede yarmulke much larger than the teeny colorful cotton ones a succession of girlfriends had crocheted for him. I’d never finished the one I’d been working on. Nineteen rows of tiny, intricately patterned stitches, and we were suddenly over.
    We stood there for a few seconds, not saying anything, just taking each other in, the way people do when they haven’t seen each other in years. At least, that was part of it. For a few seconds I was back again in his parents’ Pontiac, felt the heat of his lips on mine. My face was flushed, my palms clammy. I wondered what I’d do if he leaned over and kissed me, but of course he wouldn’t, he was a rabbi now. Which was just as well.
    “You look beautiful, Molly.” His gray-blue eyes stared into mine. “You haven’t changed at all.”
    “Neither have you.” His thick, wavy jet black hair had a sprinkling of premature silver at the temples and sideburns that I found sexy, like the tiny lines that formed around his eyes and mouth when he smiled, which he was doing now. His smile was magic.
    I don’t remember walking to our