Flirting With Pete: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Connie. Caroline had always been the perfect mother, secure in every regard except that having to do with Casey’s father. Given her present situation and the fact that her life savings had been decimated by medical costs, she would feel threatened by so lucrative a bequest from Connie.
    Eager to change the subject, Casey opened her mouth to tell Caroline about the office crisis. Before a word had come out, though, she thought twice. Crises came and went. She didn’t need to burden Caroline with the latest. Caroline’s energies were better spent on recovering.
    So she sat quietly for a while, alternately working those rigid fingers into a semblance of flexibility and warming them against her neck. When Caroline was sleeping comfortably, she gently tucked the hand under the sheet and kissed her mother’s cheek.
    “A townhouse means nothing. You’re what counts. You’re all the family I have, Mom. Get better for me?”
    In the darkness, she studied her mother’s face. After a minute, she slipped silently from the room.
    Leaving the Fenway with a deep ache inside, she walked ten minutes in the direction of the river to the small one-bedroom Back Bay condo that she had bought two years before and was still wondering if she could afford. The issue would be moot if she moved to Providence to teach, but she wasn’t up for grappling with that decision tonight. By the time she had gone through the mail and heated a Lean Cuisine, she was wiped out. With a client due at eight the next morning, she went to bed.

    *
    She didn’t get to Beacon Hill on Thursday, because when she wasn’t seeing clients she was rehashing the Stuart thing with Renée, Marlene, and John. Stuart’s wife claimed she had no idea where he was, and the bank claimed that there had never at any point been seven months’ rent in the partnership account. No amount of back-and-forth in their own conference room was productive. The four of them were getting nowhere but under each other’s skin.
    “Didn’t you look at the bank statement?” Marlene asked John.
    “Me? Why me? It was Stuart’s job.”
    “But you’re the psychiatrist. You’re the senior person. You were the one who wanted this office.”
    “Excuse me? I wanted Government Center, not Copley Square.”
    “How are we going to come up with another twenty-eight thousand?” Casey asked.
    “Try thirty-eight. Our landlord tacked on interest, plus he wants the next two months up front.”
    “We could take out a loan.”
    “I can’t afford another loan.”
    “Well, then, what’s your suggestion?”
    “Move somewhere smaller.”
    “How? We still need four offices, a conference room, and space for a bookkeeper.”
    “The bookkeeper can work at home.”
    “Which is an invitation for her to steal from us, too?”

    *
    Casey left the office at six, so tightly wound that she headed for the Y. She needed yoga far more than she needed to go to Beacon Hill, and when the class was done, she was too relaxed to think of Connie Unger. Desperate for pampering, she treated herself to dinner with two friends from the class, and by the time they had laughed their way through a bottle of Merlot, it was too late to go anywhere but to bed, and there but briefly. She was on the road by six Friday morning, heading for a workshop in Amherst.
    It was evening before she returned to her car. When she accessed her messages during the drive home, voice mail from her partners expressed more of the same quibbling, and suddenly she was tired of it. Relocating to Rhode Island to teach would certainly be an escape from the mess.
    She didn’t answer their calls. The pettiness embarrassed her— and that, even before she considered what Cornelius Unger would have said about such a discordant group. She had failed again, he would say. He had never been robbed by a partner.
    Of course, he had always practiced alone. And Casey could do that. She probably would if she took the teaching job, because she would only see