Stepdog by Mireya Navarro Read Free Book Online

one pointed the blow-dryer at my hands as I finished my manicure. When we heard the knock on the door my three roommates rushed to take their seats. Showtime! And there he was, showered and crisply dressed in a white cotton shirt and jeans, just off a plane and completely unfazed. He wore a big (sexy) smile and confidently (and sexily) walked into the room, saying hello to everyone while I blurted out introductions and apologized for not shaking his hand.
    â€œI just did my nails,” I said lamely.
    He just kept looking at me, oblivious to my roommates and their winked approvals. That night, we dined in Santa Fe, strolled on the Brooklyn Bridge, and had pineapple vodkas in Red Square. Despite our fake world travels, everything between us felt natural and real. We spent hours talking about our lives. Jim and I shared a common background. We were both semireligious—not pious, but observant of traditions. We were both extremely close to our families. His mother, Levona, had died a few years earlier of lung cancer, but he still had his father, an engineer, and two brothers and a sister. He even grew up in hot and humid weather like I did, in his case in Florida, in one of the few Jewish families then living in Fort Lauderdale.
    Jim had come to journalism in a roundabout way. As a restless teenager, he moved to Vermont for college and then spent a year in Europe, with his best buddy, Ken. They picked grapes in Provence, moved boxes in a wine cellar in Germany, and worked in a ski shop in the French Alps. After all that excitement he returned to the States to complete a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and cultural anthropology at Middlebury College. He was foggy about what he wanted to do, until he got into the literature program at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus and later the Bread Loaf program at Oxford University in England. He got the confidence to consider writing for a living and enrolled at Columbia’s journalism school. Upon getting his master’s, he lucked out. He landed an overnight-shift job writing and editing for the international wire service at AP/Dow Jones. Six months later, he was asked to open their Hong Kong bureau.
    Jim had a girlfriend, whom he married, and they moved to Asia. The
Times
hired him less than four years later and brought him back to New York to cover Wall Street in the wild 1980s. He wrote a book about the collapse of E. F. Hutton, the venerable brokerage house, and went back to Asia to work for the
Times
’s Tokyo bureau. During his five and a half years in Japan, he and his wife adopted a girl, Arielle, and then a boy, Henry. Jim said he had always wanted to be a father. He was a natural. When I came along, he had already been divorced six years and was a self-sufficient single father who cooked, did laundry, coached softball, helped with homework, and worked as a national correspondent for the
Times
bureau in Los Angeles.
    He had it all, almost. Like me, he was in a good place professionally but was missing a steady relationship. His dating record didn’t seem to be any better than mine. While I dated insurance scammers, he went out with porn stars. Okay, one porn star. They attended a screening of
Boogie Nights
. For “research,” he said, just to get an expert’s opinion on the movie’s accuracy in depicting the skin trade. The porn star—surprise!—showed up three-quarters naked, so, naturally, he took her to an outdoor restaurant on Sunset Boulevard where his date could stop traffic.
    I laughed as he told the story over our pineapple vodkas at the Mandalay hotel in Vegas and felt completely at ease and happy. He said nothing about a crazy dog. We were having such a great time that when we tried to say good night we couldn’t. I decided to live for the moment. But the next day, Jim had to work. We were up and running early in the morning, trying to make it to the Hoover Dam in time for Jim to report a news story about increased