Free No One Needs to Know by Kevin O'Brien Page A

death.
    Brian got a five-day furlough to attend the funeral. They drove to Spokane and cleaned out her mother’s apartment. Laurie found a manila envelope full of restaurant recipes her mother had scribbled down for her. When she was growing up Laurie had figured Teri had done that just so she could enjoy a restaurant-quality dinner at home—courtesy of her daughter. And of course, she’d probably enjoyed flirting with those chefs, working her charms on them to get their culinary secrets.
    But it wasn’t until Laurie found the manila envelope in Teri’s sad little apartment that she realized her mom had collected those recipes all these years for her—to encourage her to become a good cook.
    Teri hadn’t any insurance. There were medical bills and funeral costs. Brian had been worried about them going broke if she’d stayed in Europe another five weeks. And now here they were, broke anyway.
    After Brian left again for Afghanistan, Laurie took on waitressing shifts at the Superstar Diner. She sometimes worked sixteen-hour days—cooking for eight hours, and then washing up and changing into a uniform to wait tables.
    She could hardly afford it, but Laurie hired a private investigator in Seattle to track down the whereabouts of Arthur Serrano. Suddenly, it seemed more important than ever to find her father. If nothing else, Laurie figured he should be told that Teri was dead.
    It didn’t take long for the investigator to find her dad.
    “Art Serrano passed away seven years ago, Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” the man told her over the phone.
    He’d never remarried. He’d been with several different bands in several different cities—until he got sick. He’d left what little he had to a woman he’d been living with in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the time of his death.
    The investigator asked Laurie if she wanted the woman’s name and contact information. She told him no thanks.
    She had never been so miserable and lonely as she was in those months following her mother’s death. A part of her still resented Brian for making her return to Ellensburg. She’d rather have been miserable in Europe. But then, of course, her mother still would have tripped in that Safeway parking lot, and within the week she would have died alone in her apartment. Living in Ellensburg had at least allowed Laurie to be with her mom at the end. Besides, she really couldn’t be too angry at Brian—not when she thought about where he was, not when she considered the very real possibility that he might not come back.
    Tad McBride first started showing up at the Superstar Diner in late September. Something about the season change—with a chill in the air and it getting dark earlier—made Laurie even more melancholy. She was strangely drawn to the cute, dark-haired twentysomething man. Maybe it was because he seemed even lonelier than she was. Or maybe it was because the first time she waited on him, he looked up at her. “Thank you for the smile,” he said. “I really needed that today.”
    He came in every few nights, and always sat alone by the window. He spent most of his time writing—not on a laptop, but in an old-fashioned spiral notebook. He was one of those breakfast-for-dinner guys. He usually ordered the Kevin Bacon waffle with the Samantha Eggar scramble on the side.
    Soon they were on a first-name basis. She found out that Tad’s constant scribbling in that notebook was a novel in progress. He told her it was his attempt at another Catcher in the Rye. He admitted he’d had a “sort of nervous breakdown” a year before, and was still seeing a therapist. He lived in a studio apartment near the CWU campus, and worked as a custodian there. It was his “fallback job” until his novel sold. His parents were dead, and he had an older brother who lived on the family farm near Cle Elum—only Tad didn’t want anything to do with him. “He’s bad news,” Tad said. “My shrink helped me realize that Ryder’s pretty