The Wanderer. Робин Карр

me as Cooper, but she called me Hank. I’d bet she knows the acreage on Ben’s place.”

      “That would be my guess,” Mac said.

      Cooper ate a little more grouper. “And I bet I could get laid for a couple hundred acres.”

      Mac turned toward him and, with the slightest smile, said, “You can get laid for just talking about it.”

      Cooper tried not to laugh, as Ray Anne was still working the room, taking a run on the bar, then stopping off at tables. “This common with her?”

      “I think so,” Mac said, eating more of his dinner. “You’re the first newcomer we’ve had around here in a while, however.”

      “You ever, um, experienced that?”

      “The attention? Or the payoff?” Mac asked.

      “Well, since we’re sharing confidences...”

      “Cooper, I work in this town. My kids go to school here, my aunt’s a teacher here. Lou’s known Ray Anne a long time. In a word, no. I have truly dense areas in my brain, but not that dense. Really, she’s not my style. I never did have a mother fixation.”

      “I never had a mother who looked like that,” Cooper said.

      They ate in silence and by the time Cooper pushed away his plate, Ray Anne had left the restaurant. “So, Mac, did the family desert you tonight?” he asked.

      Mac sat back. “Not exactly. It’s Lou’s bunco night with some good friends from Coquille and she’ll be out late. I picked up a pizza for the kids and ran for my life.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I stood at the door, threw it in and said I’d be home in two hours. They jumped on it like starving hounds.”

      “Two whole hours?” Cooper asked with a laugh.

      “I have to check homework. If I don’t check homework, Lou’s on me like a cheap suit.”

      “Checking homework. That can’t be so bad.”

      “You checked homework lately, pal?”

      “Whose homework do you think I’d check?”

      “Well, that’s not the point, Cooper. The point is, it’s torture. If I were in school now, I wouldn’t have graduated sixth grade. In short, I’d rather give up a nut. But that’s the price of fatherhood.”

      * * *

      Lou stood in front of the bathroom mirror in only her panties, gently lifting her breasts. Then she took a side view and sighed. Although they were small, she felt they drooped to an unflattering degree; they used to be perky. She let them go. Then with her fingers gently pulling at her cheeks, back toward her ears, she wondered for the millionth time if she could look ten years younger with a face-lift.

      “Lou, come back,” Joe called from the bedroom.

      I’m not greedy, she thought. Just ten years.

      She sighed again and went back to the bedroom. Joe Metcalf was fifty and, besides being handsome, he was in terrific shape. George Clooney shape. He was strong as an ox, wide-shouldered, flat-bellied, with long legs, big wonderful hands and beautiful teeth. As she approached the bed, he turned off the TV and opened his arms. “What were you doing in there?” he asked, his lips going immediately to her neck.

      “We call it freshening up,” she said, tilting her head back to give him more of her neck.

      “I bet you were brooding.”

      “Now why would you say that?” she asked, pulling back.

      “Because it’s something you tend to do. I think all our problems would be solved if you brought me out of the closet. Why are you keeping me a secret, Lou? Why am I still ‘bunco night’?”

      She hesitated. It was so complicated. Mostly it was his age—ten years younger. Even though his hair would be gray if he grew it out, with that shaved head, he could pass for forty-five. “I don’t want the kids to feel vulnerable, to feel like my attention could be sliding away from them.”

      “It won’t, Lou. We’ll spend whatever time together is reasonable for you. I have kids, too.”

      “Yours are on their own.”

      “Thank God,” he said with a sigh. He rolled onto his back but he kept an arm around her. Joe was the divorced father of a son and daughter, twenty-five and twenty-three, respectively. “They still have way too many needs, however. A wallet drain.”

      “They’ll be married with children before you know it,” Lou said. “And so will mine. And I’ll feel like a great-grandmother. Oh, my God.” She dropped her head onto his naked shoulder.

      He laughed at her and his hand found her ass. “Best-looking great-grandmother in the state, maybe the country.”

      She lifted her head, messy red-gold curls flopping around. “When you’re seventy I’ll be eighty. Eighty.”

      “Christ, like you’re screwing a nineteen-year-old. I hope I live to seventy. I can’t wait to see what you bring to eighty!”

      Lou and Joe had met through an online dating service. They made a date for coffee and he looked, well, mature. When she asked, “How old are you?”, he answered, “How old do you want me to be?” She had answered, “Fifty-nine,” and he said, “Consider it done.”

      It was weeks before she learned the truth. She thought he just looked damn good for his age, which men had an annoying tendency to do. It had been programmed that way by the world—men became distinguished while women faded and aged.

      He’d been divorced for ten years, had tried dating from time to time but nothing really clicked and he wanted to meet someone he had things in common with who would join him for movies, dinner, social things. Oh, he liked to eat, went to movies seldom, but... “Okay, the truth? I wanted to have sex again before I died. With someone I liked.”

      What a coincidence. So did she.

      He was a retired air force colonel who now worked for the Oregon State Police as a trooper. It was his mission to retire, for the second time, at sixty. And now that he’d recovered from his divorce—his ex was remarried and his kids had completed college—he could count on a comfortable old age. Part of his job in Coos County was to assist the Sheriff’s Department. That was a little close for comfort for Lou.

      “I don’t see why,” he argued. “Police people are like a family. They intermarry all the time.”

      “Marry!”

      “Well, we have to be going somewhere!” he said. “Besides, Mac and I get along fine. He likes me. We work well together when we have to.”

      “Let me think, let me think!” she had pleaded. She’d been pleading that for a year.

      But Lou’s little secret was that this was all she’d ever wanted. If she’d met him when she was twenty-one, she’d have married him in a heartbeat—provided he hadn’t been eleven. She’d have been a good wife to him. In fact, what she’d always wanted was a home, a spouse, kids. Crazy as it seemed now, she’d never even come close. She had been twenty-five when her brother and sister-in-law had Mac, thirty-five when their deaths left him orphaned and she became his parent. She’d been only forty-four when Mac came to her and confessed his girlfriend was pregnant, and fifty when Cee Jay left him and the three kids. While raising Mac’s kids was hard work—cutting into her social life and sleep, costing time and money—if she could, she would kiss Cee Jay for giving her these precious children.

      Once or twice a week, she met Joe. Sometimes they went out for dinner, sometimes they stayed in, sometimes they even went somewhere other than his house for the night. She stole a long weekend from her family to go to Victoria with him—that was fabulous. He brought out her best self and she adored him. She just didn’t want to saddle him with an old woman, which she felt she would be before long. And she didn’t want