Free Lucky Leonardo by Jonathan D. Canter Page A

acceptable to the court?”

Chapter 15
    Chrissie came back to his house that night, after dinner at a new fish restaurant in the Back Bay which she’d heard about and wanted to try. Leonardo, feeling the noose loosened by his month’s continuance, asked if she would like to bring her mother and make it a party, but the request just irritated her. “You don’t want to meet my mother,” she said. “You’re just faking it. You don’t even want to meet me. You just want to get sucked off.”
    He started with a cup of clam chowder. She chose the double jumbo shrimp cocktail, “…because it’s the most expensive appetizer on the menu.” He had grilled salmon, and she the two-pound boiled lobster dinner, which she took her time with and did a nice job on. They had two beers each. She didn’t talk except to the waiter until after the plates were cleared, and until after she undid her bib and rinsed her fingers and patted her swollen belly and groaned in delight at the big meal she consumed.
    â€œLenny,” she then said, “I’m sorry for busting you. Has something been bothering you lately? Do you want to talk?”
    He was touched. She was a pretty girl who deserved better. That she settled for him, for now, with his cool heart and fidgety ways bespoke old wounds and frailties, and convalescence. He didn’t think he was doing her harm. He knew that before him there was a violent boy, which had to be worse. Obviously he was pleased to get sucked off, but he tried to be gentle and caressing in return, and he paid for her dinner which had to beat a kick to her head from her violent boy, and as far as he knew there was no evidence that a dead-end relationship with an older man was inherently worse than any other kind of dead-end relationship she might fall into.
    â€œI’ve had some difficult work issues recently,” he replied. “Thank you for asking.”
    â€œHelen told me you were in the newspaper because one of your patients tried to kill himself.”
    â€œThat Helen…” he said. They exchanged glances at the thought of funny Helen, curiously funny Helen.
    â€œDo you like Helen?” Chrissie asked.
    â€œShe’s…” Leonardo said.
    â€œI know…” Chrissie said.
    â€œThat night,” Leonardo went on, in a direction away from Helen, “was the night your mother came down for dinner. Remember? It was a bad night all around. For me, for the guy who almost killed himself, for you, for your mom. I’m sorry again…”
    â€œForget about it.”
    Later on they lay still on his bed in the darkness, her head resting on his arm, her body curled toward him, with the window opened a crack by her “…to allow the wind to speak.” It had a lot to say as it blew in from the north, whipping up fallen leaves and pressuring clinging survivors to take the plunge. All branches were swaying. The neighbors’ swings were creaking. A twig snapped.
    Chrissie was upright in a second, listening for more sound.
    â€œIt’s only the wind,” Leonardo whispered.
    She shook her head, and covered his whispering lips with her hand. The bottom of Leonardo’s bedroom window was only five feet above the back yard. The first time Chrissie entered the room, on a lovely May afternoon, wearing only panties and brassiere as a result of heavy petting on the living room couch, with Leonardo draped all over her cooing sweet nothings and rubbing his hands over and around her limbs in rapture at their smoothness and loveliness, and at his good fortune that they should be within his grasp, she abruptly spun away and went fast to the window, and examined it, and its height, and the view from it, and pushed it open.
    â€œYou know,” she said matter-of-factly, “I am visible to anyone standing in your back yard…and I think an athletic man could easily jump over the window sill and land in this