Cocktail Hour by Tara McTiernan Read Free Book Online Page A

different. Much older, in his early sixties, he was both someone she looked up to and someone she looked after. The looking-up-to part was what made their friendship possible: respect. He was a great senior project director: a natural analyzer and planner, excellent at designing research initiatives, and able to motivate a team without pissing them off. It was his sense of humor that was the secret of his success: his ability to laugh at everything, including himself. Everyone loved working for him, not just Sharon.
    The looking-after part of their relationship was the part that truly made them friends. It started when Alan’s wife, Margie, died of pancreatic cancer four years before. Through the treatments and her last days he’d been strong and steady, still managing to fulfill the requirements of his job from the hospital or home, working nights and weekends in order to get the job done. He’d seemed almost obtuse in his optimism during that time, his belief that she’d get through it, that the doctors didn’t know anything, that they predicted incorrect death sentences all the time.
    Then Margie died and he was gone: MIA at the office, significant delays in response to emails and phone calls, projects stalled. Sharon started covering for him, turning on the light and his computer in his office, making things up when queried, hoping no one knew. One day, when he had missed another important client meeting, she went to his house in New Canaan. She looked up where he lived on the office directory, which listed addresses as well as contact numbers, and drove over intending to give him a piece of her mind, fed up with being the one left holding the bag, especially now as it was becoming more and more obvious that he wasn’t around or even working from home.
    When she got there the house looked abandoned. The mailbox was half-open and starting to regurgitate all the letters, bills, and catalogs that had been stuffed into it. There was a pile of plastic-bagged newspapers on the front door step. The lawn hadn’t been mowed and was filled with the bald-headed sentinels of dandelions gone to seed. Stopping on the flagstone path that led to his front door, she considered turning around and going back to the office, forgetting about it, but then she remembered Alan and all the times he’d slapped her on the back when she pointed out something they could do to improve a study and said, “You’re good, Sharon. You’re really goooood. Damn!”
    She carefully kicked aside the landslide of newspapers in order to get to the door and rang the doorbell, the old electric ding-dong sound muffled inside the darkened house. She peered through the glass panes on either side of the front door, but saw only an empty gray-shadowed hallway containing a narrow table pressed against the wall with an empty vase centered on it. She wrapped her arms around herself and looked back at the yard. It was early October and the day had been warm, but now it was cooling quickly as the sun slid down in the sky and made long orange stripes on the ground between the trees.
    Just then the door opened and Sharon turned her head and saw Alan. Actually it was someone much older than Alan, maybe a brother who resembled him, and he was clearly ill. He stood in the door swaying and staring at her with red eyes, his mouth loose and wet looking, his face gray. The man mumbled something unintelligible.
    "Hello. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm looking for Alan Duffy? This is the address listed for him in our office directory," she said, speaking in a loud voice in spite of herself, knowing that not all old sick people had hearing problems, but unable to stop her own rude habit.
    The man blinked and shook his head. He mumbled again and then cleared his throat, making a loud phlegmy noise.
    Sharon resisted the urge to turn down her lips in a moue of disgust. She could swear he'd said something like "me" when he'd mumbled.
    He wobbled on his feet and said, his words