Roadside Crosses

say.”
    “Sure.”
    “Anne’s leaving.”
    “What?” She gasped.
    Michael O’Neil’s face was an amalgam of emotion: hope, uncertainty, pain. Perhaps the most obvious was bewilderment.
    “She’s moving to San Francisco.”
    A hundred questions filled her mind. She asked the first, “The children?”
    “They’ll be with me.”
    This news wasn’t surprising. There was no better father than Michael O’Neil. And Dance had always had her doubts about Anne’s skills at mothering, and about her desire to handle the job.
    Of course, she realized. The split-up was the source of O’Neil’s troubled look at the hospital. She remembered his eyes, how hollow they seemed.
    He continued, speaking with the clipped tone of somebody who’d been doing a lot of rapid-fire—and not wholly realistic—planning. Men were guilty of this more often than women. He was telling her about the children’s visiting their mother, about the reactions of his family and Anne’s, about lawyers, about what Anne would be doing in San Francisco. Dance nodded, concentrating on his words, encouraging, mostly just letting him talk.
    She picked up immediately on the references to “this gallery owner” and a “friend of Anne’s in San Francisco” and “he.” The deduction she made didn’t truly surprise her, though she was furious with the woman for hurting O’Neil.
    And hurt he was, devastated, though he didn’t know it yet.
    And me? Dance thought. How do I feel about this?
    Then she promptly tucked that consideration away, refusing to examine it right now.
    O’Neil stood like a schoolboy who’d asked a girl to the eighth-grade dance. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d jammed his hands into his pockets andstared down at his shoe tips. “So I was just wondering, about next week. A few extra days?”
    Where do we go from here? Dance thought. If she could hover over herself, looking down as a kinesic analyst, what was her body language saying? She was, on the one hand, deeply moved by the news. On the other, she was as cautious as a war-zone soldier approaching a roadside package.
    The appeal of a trip with Michael O’Neil was almost overwhelming.
    Yet the answer, of course, could not be yes. For one thing, O’Neil needed to be there for his children, completely there, one hundred percent there. They might not— should not—have been told about their parents’ problems at this point. Yet they would know something. Children’s intuition is a primary force of nature.
    But there was another reason for Dance and O’Neil not to share personal time in Los Angeles.
    And, coincidentally, it appeared just now.
    “Hello?” called a man’s voice from the side yard.
    Dance held Michael O’Neil’s eye, gave a tight smile and called, “Up here. In the back.”
    More footsteps on the stairs and Jonathan Boling joined them. He gave a smile to O’Neil and the two men shook hands. Like Dance, he was in jeans. His knit shirt was black, under a Lands’ End windbreaker. He wore hiking boots.
    “I’m a little early.”
    “Not a problem.”
    O’Neil was smart, and more, he was savvy. Dance could see that he understood instantly. His first reaction was dismay that he’d put her in a difficult position.
    His eyes offered a sincere apology.
    And hers insisted that none was necessary.
    O’Neil was amused too and gave Dance a smile not unlike the one they’d shared when last year they’d heard on the car radio the Sondheim song “Send in the Clowns,” about potential lovers who just can’t seem to get together.
    Timing, they both knew, was everything.
    Dance said evenly, “Jonathan and I are going to Napa for the weekend.”
    “Just a little get-together at my parents’ place. I always like to bring along somebody to run interference.” Boling was downplaying the getaway. The professor was smart too—he’d seen Dance and O’Neil together—and understood that he’d walked into the middle of something now.
    “It’s beautiful up there,” O’Neil said.
    Dance remembered that he and Anne had spent their honeymoon at an inn near the Cakebread Vineyard up in wine country.
    Could we just shoot these ironies dead, please? Dance thought. And she realized that her face was burning with a girlish blush.
    O’Neil asked, “Wes is at your mom and dad’s?”
    “Yep.”
    “I’ll call him. I want to cast off at eight tomorrow.”
    She loved him for keeping the fishing date with the boy, even though Dance would be out