Free Sudden Mischief by Robert B. Parker Page B

Charles River on the Cambridge side, near the Cambridge Boat Club. It wasn't really the head, it was just where the river, having encroached north into Cambridge, turned back west toward its birth in Dedham. But Cambridge is Cambridge and they thought it was the head.
    "Don't get giddy here," I said, "but have you heard from Brad Sterling?"
    "No."
    "I went to see him and he wasn't there and his office was closed. Do you know his home address?"
    "No."
    "You have any thoughts on his absence?"
    "Perhaps he's gone away for a few days."
    "Perhaps," I said.
    The ice was out of the river and the boat crews were on the cold water pulling hard while their coaches followed in small motor boats, yelling instructions through bull horns. Susan and I ran with the river on our left, the sparse Saturday-morning traffic moving on Fresh Pond Parkway to our right. Across the parkway some kids were out early throwing a baseball on the prep school field. It was still cold enough so that a ball off the handle would make your hands ring up to your shoulder.
    Susan ran beside me, on my left, so that my sword arm would be free. She wore a lavender headband and gray-lensed Oakley sunglasses and a gray sweat jacket that said Ventana Canyon on the left breast, and came low enough to cover most of her fanny, which, she contended, was ladylike when wearing shiny black tights. Her running shoes were white with lavender highlights, which explained the headband. She was in shape and she ran easily. Me too.
    "You work out before you met me?" I said.
    "No, I don't think I did," Susan said.
    "You play any sports as a kid?"
    Susan laughed.
    "Cute little Jewish girls, when I was a kid, did not play sports."
    "What did you do," I said.
    "We looked beautiful and our daddies took us to libraries and theater matinees and movies and museums and shopping and lunch."
    "No mommies?"
    "Mommy thought spending money was a bad thing. She always disapproved of the things my father bought me.
    "Did you have money?"
    "We had enough. The drug store did well, I think. I always thought we were… upper class, I guess."
    "I bet you were," I said.
    We chugged up over the Eliot Bridge and onto the Boston side of the river. Actually, I chugged. Susan glided.
    "It's funny to think of you," I said, "little Suzy Hirsch sitting at dinner every night with these two people that I don't know."
    "Thing is," she said, "I didn't know them either."
    "Not even your father?"
    "Especially my father. He was simply a playmate. He was never really a father. He never reprimanded or instructed, or even explained. If I was doing something he didn't like, he'd speak to my mother about it. She'd do the parenting."
    "Which she probably liked," I said.
    "Yes, I suppose she did. It gave her status, so to speak, in the family. And it gave her a chance to berate me in a socially acceptable way."
    "Probably a lot of parental discipline is disguised anger," I said, just to be saying something. I had no idea what I would accomplish by getting her to tell me about her childhood, but I liked hearing it. And it couldn't hurt.
    "Yes, she was quite careful about that. She would denigrate me, whenever she could. If I said something at dinner she would smother a snicker. But every time she did anything direct, she would give it the maternal spin. She had to protect me from my failures of character: `Oh Susan, you know how you are."'
    "And your father never intervened."
    "No. Parenting me was my mother's job. Besides, we had to protect her."
    "You and your father."
    "Yes."
    "From what?"
    "From breaking down. She was very nervous. That was the phrase, nervous. I suppose now we would say she was phobic."
    "Oh, Ma," I said. "You know how you are."
    Susan smiled.
    "Perhaps if you decide to give up professional thuggery," she said, "you could hang out your shingle."
    "Then could I say things like, she was projecting her own inadequacies onto you?"
    "Yes, only I think you need to deepen your voice a little more and say it more