Free On a Night Like This by Ellen Sussman Page A

said there were no weapons to use against this monster.
    Amanda looked around. “We’re making a scene.”
    “Let’s go. The dog is slobbering all over me.”
    They stood and headed back toward Casey’s car. The air around Blair seemed changed somehow—it was now so cold that it burned her skin.
    “Do you hurt? I mean, are you in pain?” Amanda asked quietly.
    “No,” Blair told her honestly. “I’m tired a lot. That’s all. So, I don’t really believe it, you know. Even now, walking on the beach, telling my daughter that I’ve got cancer, I think Luke Bellingham’s making a movie about someone else’s life, or that I’m in someone else’s nightmare. Because none of it feels true. So, I’m not telling you lies; I’m just trying to catch up to the truth myself.”
    Amanda put her arm around her mother and pulled her close. They walked like that, quietly, until they reached the car and headed home.
    Luke Bellingham was sitting on the front step of their cottage. He stood when they approached, then got knocked down by a racing Sweetpea. He scrambled to stand up again and offered Amanda his hand.
    “Luke Bellingham,” he said.
    “I know,” she said, shaking his hand. “I like your dog.”
    “Thanks. You look like your mother did when she was your age.”
    Blair watched the scene: handsome man wowing vulnerable girl, suitor wooing girlfriend’s daughter, golden boy/man reminding the lost soul what she never had and never would have.
    “You have no idea what I looked like in high school,” Blair interrupted. “You never even saw me in high school. The other night you thought I was blond and tall. Today you think I was a redhead. And even if we like your dog, we don’t need you coming around our house like you’re trying to renew an old relationship. Well, that old relationship never existed.”
    Blair stormed past Luke and stomped up the stairs to the cottage. She slammed the door behind her.
    And then she fell onto the couch under the front window and buried her head in her hands.
I’m dying,
she thought.
I just told my daughter I’m dying.
    By the time Blair dressed for work—in her white chef’s jacket and checked pants, wearing her beloved red high-top sneakers—Amanda was off to her job at the café, and Luke and Sweetpea were long gone.
Back to the woods,
she hoped.
Wherever that is.
Montana? Wyoming? Far away from the Haight and her heart. Far away from Amanda, who had gone gaga at first glimpse. Who was angry at her mother for pissing off Mr. Hollywood. Easier than being angry at her mother for dying.
    Blair heard the phone ring, let the answering machine pick up, didn’t even wait for the message.
I’m outta here,
she thought, glad to be going to work, where she was always too busy to think.
    She walked the ten blocks to the restaurant, early enough to be the first one there. Leon, the pastry chef, had left a note along with the pies and cakes he had created that day:
Blair, it doesn’t matter that I’m nineteen. It only matters that I’m crazy about you. Yours, Leon.
    Leon had never met Blair. He came in the morning, early, and spent hours concocting his delicacies for the evening dessert. He left hours before Blair arrived and somehow he had begun the tradition of leaving her love notes with his raspberry tarts and his lemon soufflés. Blair wrote back every so often, leaving her notes in the bin of flour, telling him all the reasons he shouldn’t love her.
    Men kept inventing her. Leon and Luke.
    She started her work routine, setting up the materials for her sauces and side dishes, checking the fish and meat delivery, putting everything in place for the fun and games to begin.
    She was going to try something new today—a tuna tartare, too fancy for this little café, but she had seen the recipe in
Gourmet,
imagined its taste in her mouth, adapted the recipe for something spicier. And Daniel had OK’d the order for sashimi-grade ahi with the promise that she give him the first