Thursday's Child Read Online Free PDF

the waiter for another whiskey.
    â€œBobby, are you listening to me?” Maureen said suddenly. She was glaring at him.
    â€œSure, babe,” he said, although of course he hadn’t been.
    â€œWhat did I just say?” she challenged him.
    Robert tried desperately to think of anything he’d heard in the last ten or twenty minutes. Not one thing came to mind. So he just grinned and shrugged. “Sorry, Mo. It’s just that I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.” That wasn’t exactly the truth, either. He hadn’t been thinking about anything in particular.
    â€œWhat?” she asked, after a sip of the fancy water she drank all the time.
    â€œWhat what?” he said innocently.
    She sighed. “ What’s on your mind?”
    Robert played absently with the small diamond stud in his ear. “Ah, just things.”
    She almost pouted, although a liberated person like her would surely have denied any such thing. “You never share with me what it is you’re really thinking about.”
    Oh God. It always got to that eventually. But why tonight? And why was it that the fact that two people had a good time together, with some laughs and better-than-average sex, didn’t seem to be enough for some women? They always wanted to get inside his head and find out what he was really like. Robert didn’t understand this obsession at all; he certainly didn’t give a good goddamn about what was going on inside their brains.
    Meanwhile, she was obviously waiting for some kind of an answer.
    Robert was still trying to think of one—he was really hoping to get laid before the night was over—when the maître d’ appeared beside the table. “Excuse me, Mr. Turchek,” he said softly.
    â€œYes?” he answered with considerable relief.
    â€œYou have a telephone call, sir.”
    Saved by Ma Bell. Wonderful.
    He got up, giving Maureen an apologetic shrug, and followed the French guy across the room. Only then did it occur to him to wonder who the hell would actually call him there. Although he always gave the answering service a number on evenings like this, everybody knew damned well that he hated being disturbed. When he was alone with the phone, he picked up the receiver and said, “Turchek here,” letting whomever it was know by his tone that he wasn’t happy.
    â€œThis is the Ledgewood Convalescent Home, Mr. Turchek,” the crisp female voice said in return. “Dr. Randolph would like you to come over here immediately.”
    Robert, still half thinking about the upcoming hassle with Maureen, didn’t immediately absorb the meaning of the words. “I was there this afternoon as usual,” he said irritably. “If Randolph wanted to talk to me, why didn’t he do it then?”
    â€œThis is a crisis situation.”
    â€œWhat the hell does that mean?”
    â€œIt means,” she explained carefully but firmly, “that you should get over here as quickly as possible.” With that, she hung up.
    Robert listened to the dial tone for a few moments, but found there no answers to his unasked questions. Then, as he finally hung up, an unfamiliar sense of panic raced through him. This had never happened before, not in the years that Andy had been a patient at Ledgewood. At last, he moved, practically upending a waiter carrying a fully loaded tray in his hurry back to the table where Maureen was waiting. “I have to go, babe. A family crisis. Can you get a cab home?”
    â€œSure.” She looked bewildered. “But I didn’t know you had any family, Bobby.”
    Robert didn’t bother to answer as he threw several crumpled bills down onto the table and headed for the door.
    Dr. Alan Randolph, a tall man with a completely bald head, was in Andy’s room, along with another doctor whose face was vaguely familiar, but whose name Robert couldn’t remember at the moment. A nurse was there,