“After just a few days?” Jimmy asks.
“That’s what they’re saying,” Brigid says.
Jimmy says, “You know, you’re not nearly as good a liar as your sister is.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that, Jimmy,” Brigid says.
“My ass you don’t,” he says. “I was born at night, kid. Just not last night.”
He’s waiting for Jane when she comes walking out of the United terminal. Jimmy has a parking space right out front, having fake-badged the airport cop who’d told him to move along, he couldn’t stay there.
Jimmy grins at her before taking her bag.
“You look like shit,” he says.
Jane gives a sad shake to her head. “Well, mister, there goes your five-star Uber rating,” she says. “I’m going to write offyour rudeness to jet lag.” She kisses him on the cheek. “Oh, wait.I’mthe one with jet lag.”
Jane does most of the talking as they make their way out of the airport and toward the Belt Parkway, going into detail about Fiona Mills, making it sound as if the two of them had been on some sort of cruise.
“Seeing her,” she tells Jimmy, “was better than any medicine they gave me.”
Jimmy doesn’t respond, focusing the way he usually does on the Belt, the New York version of the Daytona 500. But his hands are tighter than usual on the steering wheel, and he knows it’s not just because of the traffic.
“Sounds good,” he says finally.
“Sounds good?” she says. “My friend coming back from the dead soundsgoodto you?”
“I don’t want to hear more goddamn happy talk about her!” Jimmy snaps. “I want to hear about you.”
“Whoa,” Jane says. “I know this sounds like a question you should probably be asking me. But are you okay?”
“Areyou?” he asks.
“All things considered, yeah,” she says. “The good news is that because of the drugs I’m taking, I don’t have to do another round of chemo. Bottom line? My prognosis is a lot better than when I went over there.”
“Is that so?” Jimmy says.
Before Jane can answer, Jimmy yells, “Stop lying to me!”
NINETEEN
“WHOA,” I QUIETLY SAY again to Jimmy Cunniff, who sounds more upset, and looks more upset, than he did the day I told him I had been diagnosed with cancer. “Where’s this coming from, partner?”
He is suddenly driving way too fast, nearly rear-ending a car in front of us in the passing lane as he hits the accelerator.
Norma Banks once told me that when she’s trying to read potential jurors, she studies “micro expressions.” But nothing about Jimmy’s face is micro, not the obvious signs of strain, most noticeably the red dots that appeared on his cheeks. If I didn’t know better—if I didn’t knowhimbetter—I might think he was about to do something I’ve never seen him do.
Cry.
“You need to slow down,” I say softly. “And not just in this car.”
He does slow the car now, gets his breathing under control. When he finally speaks again, at least he’s stopped shouting.
“We had a deal, okay?” he says to me. “Actually, we have a lot of deals, you and me, none of them written down, all of them understood. But at the head of the list, A No. 1, like they say in the song, is that we do not lie to each other.Ever.”
“When did I lie?”
“When you tried to put a smiley face on this shit and makeme think you’re getting better,” he says, “when we both know you’re not.”
