Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

meant. “Huh?”
    “Over there. Next to Shirley Temple.”
    A quick, dismissive glance at the caricature. “Oh, yeah.”
    “Don’t you like it?”
    She shrugged. “It’s O.K., I guess.” After a beat, she added: “Shirley hates hers.”
    One of his gingery eyebrows leapt noticeably. “She’s a friend?”
    She nodded. “She lives here, you know.”
    O.K., maybe “friend” was stretching it, but Shirley had been on the show once, and Mary Ann had chatted with her extensively at the French Impressionist exhibit at the De Young. Anyway, she was certain the ambassador wouldn’t approve of that pouty-faced portrait with the dashiki and the cigarette. Mary Ann had told D’or as much when they hung the damned thing.
    Burke’s eyes roamed the room. “I like this.”
    She nodded. “It’s kind of a media joint.”
    “Yeah. So you said.”
    At the moment, she realized, the wattage of the lunching luminaries was embarrassingly dim, so she made do with the material at hand. “That showy blonde,” she muttered, nodding toward the front room, “is Prue Giroux.”
    He had obviously never heard of her.
    “She was in Us last month. She took some orphans to Beijing on a peace mission.”
    Still no reaction.
    “She’s a socialite, actually. Kind of a publicity hound.” He nodded. “How ’bout the priest?”
    “Father Paddy Starr. He has a show at my station. Honest to God. ”
    “Honest to God, he has a show? Or that’s the name of it?” “That’s the name of it.”
    He smirked.
    She smirked back, feeling a little queasy about it. She hated how rubey all this sounded. Burke, after all, was a practicing New Yorker, and the breed had a nasty way of regarding San Francisco as one giant bed-and-breakfast inn—cute but really of no consequence. She made herself a curt mental note not to gossip about the locals.
    “How’s Betsy?” she asked, changing the subject.
    “Brenda.”
    “Oh. Sorry. I knew it was B.” She mugged and rolled her head from side to side. “Burke and Brenda, B and B.”
    “She’s doing fine. Got her hands full with the kids, of course.”
    Wouldn’t she just, thought Mary Ann.
    “She wanted to come with me this time, but Burke junior came down with flu, and Brenda didn’t trust the housekeeper to manage without her.”
    “God, I know what you mean!” She seized his wrist lightly. “We have this Vietnamese woman. She’s really dear, but she can’t, for the life of her, tell the difference between Raid and Pledge!”
    His laughter seemed a little strained, and she worried that the remark had come off as racist.
    “Of course,” she added, releasing his wrist, “I can only speak one language myself, so…anyway, her family had a rough time over there, so we figured it was worth a little extra trouble.”
    “You have a kid or two of your own, don’t you?”
    “One. How’d you know?”
    His smirk came back to life. “I saw you with her on Entertainment Tonight. ”
    “Oh…you saw that?” It was good to know, anyway, that he’d seen her on national TV. At least now she knew he didn’t think of her as completely local. Even if that ET segment had been about local talk-show hosts.
    “She’s a cute little girl,” he said.
    For an unsettling instant she flashed on Shawna’s tarty makeup of the day before. “Well, she’s a lot bigger now, of course. That was over three years ago.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I bet she looks more like you than ever.”
    She smiled at him benignly, hoping he wouldn’t make a big deal out of this. “She’s not my biological daughter, actually. We adopted her.”
    “Oh. Yeah.” He did his bashful wobble again. “I guess I knew that.”
    “I don’t see how you could, really.”
    “Well, maybe not.”
    “Her mother was a friend of mine. Or someone I knew, anyway. She died a few days after Shawna was born. She left a note asking me and Brian to take care of her.”
    “How wonderful.”
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s a great story. She’s a lucky little girl.”
    She shrugged. “Brian was a little more crazy about the idea than I was.”
    This unraveled him noticeably. “Still…you must…I mean, I’m sure it took some getting used to, but…”
    She smiled to put him out of his misery. “I’m learning,” she said. “It’s not terrible. It’s O.K., actually. Most of the time.”
    “How old is she?”
    “Oh…five or six.”
    It took him forever to realize she was joking. “C’mon,” he said