Free Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The by John Lescroart Page B

kids’ll be up in five hours, Dismas. It’s going to seem like five minutes.’
    His hand was around the glass, on the mantel over the fire. He was aware that he was leaning on it for balance.
    Frannie was right. Tomorrow — another in the seemingly endless procession of them — would come too soon. Freeman was right too. He was burning out.
    He sighed, left the half-empty glass where it was on the mantel, let her lead him back down the long hallway to their bedroom.
     

5
     
    Hardy wasn’t going to acknowledge the fatigue, the slight headache, the buzz behind his eyes. He had set his internal alarm for six-thirty, and it didn’t fail him.
    Of David Freeman’s words the night before, the ones that had the most impact were those concerning the children — Hardy had chosen to have them, and he could choose how he lived with them.
    He was failing there, with his kids, lost in some downward spiral he didn’t quite understand. He wasn’t taking any joy in them, in Frannie, in his life. Certainly not in his work. He didn’t know if it was only a function of attitude, but he knew he’d recognized it at last.
    Maybe all of that wasn’t too far gone to reclaim.
    He didn’t even know any longer where his black pan was. The cast-iron fryer weighed ten pounds and was the only physical legacy of Hardy’s parents, Joe and Tola, who’d died in a plane crash when he was nineteen. For years — all through his first marriage and second bachelorhood — he had cooked almost everything he ate in that pan.
    He’d kept it perennially on his stove, shined until it looked more like hematite than iron. He never put any water in it, just scraped it with a spatula, wiped it down with salt, then rubbed it with a rag. Even when he used neither oil nor butter, nothing Stuck to it. The pan had been one of his treasures. He told Frannie when they first got together that it was the symbol of who he was.
    If that was true now, he thought, he was in trouble. He didn’t know where it had gone. He had searched the kitchen and finally found the pan under his workbench on the landing that led down the stairs and out to their backyard. Sometime in the past few years — and he hadn’t even noticed — Frannie had moved it out of the kitchen. He didn’t cook at home anymore. He was always working. And the damn thing was too heavy for her to lift. She’d essentially thrown it out.
    This morning Hardy didn’t go through his routine: shower, dress in his suit and tie, coffee. Instead he pulled on his old jeans and a faded Cal Poly sweatshirt, slipped into his Top-Siders and, keeping quiet, first went in search of the black pan.
    Twenty minutes later he had the French crepe batter made and the table set for breakfast at the kitchen table. He fixed a cup of coffee the way Frannie liked it, with real cream and two thirds of a spoonful of brown sugar, and brought it in to her, placing it beside the bed, waking her with a kiss on her cheek.
    Rebecca — they called her the Beck — was Frannie’s child by her first husband, but Hardy had adopted her as his own. Now the nine-year-old lay on her back, covers off, mouth open. Her brother, Vincent, was seven and had his own room at the very back of the house, but for the past several months he’d been sleeping on a futon on the floor of Beck’s room. He was entirely covered by his comforter. Hardy stepped over him, sat on the side of the Beck’s bed, and leaned over, hugging her. ‘Maple syrup,’ he whispered. ‘Crepes.’
    ‘Crepes!’ She was immediately awake. Her arms came up around him and squeezed and then she squiggled free. ‘Vincent!’ she yelled. ‘Daddy’s making crepes.’
    Vincent was up and on him before he knew what hit him. He was knocked backward, wrestled down onto the futon in a jumble of arms and legs and tumbling, kid-smell and laughter.
    With a roar he grabbed at both of them, holding them to him, tickling whenever he could get a finger free. He caught a knee in the