Free Hush Hush by Laura Lippman Page A

kitchen, pick up a frying pan, then whack Crow on the head.
    The problem with these naps, which Crow and Carla Scout took almost every weekday, was that they often lasted until Tess came home. Then Crow went to work, leaving behind a hyper child who, understandably, would not go to bed until ten o’clock. Tess had asked him repeatedly to put Carla Scout down earlier in the afternoon, in her own bed, or forgo the nap altogether, now that she was three. But Crow said he was simply following Carla Scout’s natural rhythms and she was a night owl like her father.
    Unlike her father, Carla Scout didn’t run a bar with live music.
    Tess stood in the doorway, aware that she was polishing a little grudge—and aware that her temperament required such grudges, that she needed to stockpile any evidence of Crow’s flaws. Because—surprise, surprise—Crow was an exemplary father, a natural parent. The perfect postmodern boyfriend, as her friend Whitney Talbot had once dubbed him, had segued seamlessly into the perfect postmodern father. He had standing to make pronouncements about Carla Scout’s needs because he was with her for a good part of the day, supervising her diet, arranging her playdates, channeling her energy in all sorts of creative and nurturing ways.
    Crow’s only real failing as a hands-on daddy was that the house was never as neat as Tess would like. He said he had read something somewhere about how clean houses were never happy houses. To Tess, this sounded like the kind of aphorism offered by an actress or a model, someone pretending to lead a normal life while employing a phalanx of factotums. Their house wasn’t dirty , not quite. Given its population of three humans and three dogs, it was relatively clean. But there was always something somewhere that needed to be put away. Toys, laundry, another load of dishes in the dishwasher. Tess should have taken advantage of this quiet moment to have a glass of wine or start dinner or—in the great tradition of mommies everywhere—have a glass of wine while starting dinner. Instead, she busied herself with the Brio trains and tracks that had been left in the middle of the sitting room.
    She dropped a wooden train on her foot and said a very bad word. She knew it was a bad word because Carla Scout opened her eyes and told her so.
    “Don’t say that, Mama.”
    “I won’t.” She held out her sock foot. “I have a boo-boo. Do you want to kiss it?”
    “No.”
    Carla Scout yawned, grabbed the hideous stuffed clown that washer constant companion—a kangaroo in a clown suit, known only as Clownie, for Tess had not wasted any effort on naming him, figuring the ugly thing for a short-timer when it was presented to Carla Scout on her first birthday. Naturally, Clownie became the toy, the boon companion, the One That Must Never Be Lost. If Tess had charged her hourly rate for finding and retrieving Clownie, Carla Scout’s college tuition fund would be much more robust than it was.
    “How ’bout a show?” she asked, sliding from the chaise without disturbing her father.
    “How many did you have today?”
    Her daughter was not really capable of lying—yet. But when she wanted something that she suspected she was going to be denied, she could and did launch into rambling arguments. “Daddy said, Daddy said, Daddy said—we watch MY show. A daddy show. We watched the show with the horsies. But that was a daddy show. I didn’t get to watch my show.”
    “Horsies?”
    “Horsies. ON DADDY’S SHOW.”
    “Black and white horsies?”
    Carla Scout thought about this. “Yes. And the men came and they said go and the horsies and they run. They run!”
    Go? Let’s go? But Crow would never have shown her The Wild Bunch . Tess had a brief pang, remembering how much her friend Carl, who had inspired Carla Scout’s first name, had loved that movie.
    She also remembered how his death had been almost too much like a scene from it. If her hands hadn’t been full of trains,