Free Kiss Her Goodbye by Wendy Corsi Staub Page A

knows, Erin thinks she quit smoking last spring. Maeve isn’t about to start smoking again in front of her. After all, her daughter is at the age when she might decide to pilfer a few cigarettes to sample.
    That’s how Maeve herself got hooked—about twenty years ago. You’d think seeing her own mother wasting away from lung cancer would destroy her own recent craving, but it hasn’t.
    â€œMom?”
    â€œIn here,” she calls, frowning as she notices a film of dust covering the table. Sissy was here all day yesterday. For what Maeve—ahem, Gregory —pays her an hour, you’d think the place would be spotless.
    To be fair, Sissy is far more efficient than Marta, who broke her leg in a car accident back in—when? September? August? Time has been rushing by, as usual.
    And unlike Marta, Sissy doesn’t eat Maeve out of house and home while she’s here. She never even touches the Atkins-friendly store-bought tuna salad Maeve keeps on hand and offers the cleaning lady weekly for lunch. Marta used to devour it, along with whatever else she could find in the fridge and cabinets.
    Erin pops her blond head into the den.
    â€œHow was the biology tutoring?” Maeve turns down the television volume with the remote.
    â€œIt was good. What are you watching?”
    â€œJudge Judy.”
    Erin rolls her eyes. “I’m going up to take a shower.”
    â€œWhy don’t you wait until later? I thought we could go out for salads at Ernesto’s.”
    â€œI’m not hungry.”
    â€œYou’re not?” That’s a switch. Erin is usually starved when she gets home from school at her regular time, let alone more than two hours later.
    â€œNah. I had a big lunch. It was spaghetti day.” Her daughter disappears, her footsteps pounding up the stairs.
    Damn. Maeve craves a chicken Caesar salad almost as much as she craves a cigarette. She could always drive over to the restaurant alone . . .
    No, she can’t. There’s something pathetic about a divor-cée dining out solo. Especially in a trattoria filled with couples and young families.
    The phone rings just as she turns up the volume again. She presses Mute and trades the remote for the cordless phone on the end table. It strikes her that if she weren’t so hungry, she could spend the rest of the night in this spot without having to get up.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œMaeve?”
    â€œKathleen. Hey, want to go get chicken Caesar salads? It could be girls’ night out.”
    Ignoring the invitation, her friend asks, in a low voice, “Is Erin home?”
    â€œYou want to talk to Erin?” Maeve asks, puzzled.
    â€œNo, it’s just . . . Jen got home a few minutes ago . . .”
    â€œSo did Erin.”
    â€œWhere did she say she was?”
    â€œAt school, getting extra help with biology. Amber’s mother brought her home.”
    â€œDid you see her?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œAmber’s mother dropping her off.”
    â€œKathleen, I did back-to-back spinning and Pilates classes this afternoon. I haven’t moved from this chair since—”
    â€œMaeve, I think they lied to us. Jen said the same thing Erin told you. But I was watching for her to come home, and I didn’t see a car dropping her off. She walked down from the main road. She said Amber’s mother left her at the end of the cul-de-sac but why would she do that?”
    â€œI don’t know . . . maybe she’s lazy?”
    Kathleen is silent.
    Maeve shakes her head. “Kathleen, they’re fourteen.”
    â€œJen’s not.”
    â€œShe will be in a few days.”
    â€œWeeks.”
    â€œYou’re nitpicking, you know that? Maybe they did lie. But how are we supposed to prove it? And what could we do about it? Anyway, who are we kidding? We did the same thing at that age. Worse.”
    All right, Kathleen wasn’t that bad. Her father was too strict, and she