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them a little wave.
    “That certainly was fun,” she quipped.
    “You have a strange sense of humor.”
    “But that’s what makes me so much fun.”
    I looked at my watch. It was well past three. “So much for a quickie.”
    She grabbed my arm and kissed me. “It was worth it.”
    “Maybe next time we can do it in a phone booth,” I said with a laugh.
    “If you can find one, I’m ready to go.”
    She enjoyed toying with the young cops. I hadn’t seen that side of her before, and I kind of liked it as long as that smile wasn’t turned on me. It was like a mutant power to turn men into mush.
    “I should get going,” she said. “I might be able to squeeze in a few hours of sleep before class.”
    I nodded, and she gave me a long passionate kiss.
    “Call me tomorrow, hero. I’ll be out of class around three.”
    “I’ll stop by your place.”
    “I probably won’t be there; gotta’ study with the girls at the library. We’ve got our first tests of the semester coming up.”
    “No problem. Just call me when you’re free.”
    She climbed into the Mustang, turned the ignition, and the big five-liter engine roared to life.
    “Be careful driving home,” I said.
    “Always.”
    She pulled away, then stopped and backed up, rolling down the window.
    “Ronan, if no one ever told you this before…behind that tough guy façade, you’re really a wonderful man.” With a smile, she zoomed off into the night.
    Something inside of me didn’t want to let her go. I had a nagging feeling that I needed to be with her at that moment. I should have listened to my instincts.

THREE
     
    When I came back from California, I spent a horrible month at my parent’s house. After about a week of listening to my father complain about his aching muscles, his vision, my mother, the washing machine, television, the Red Sox, the Big Dig, taxes, noises in the woods, and every other conceivable problem known and unknown to man, I had to find a house and fast.
    I called a friend of mine with the Drug Enforcement Agency I’d worked with in L.A. who recently bought a home in the area, and he recommended a good realtor named Fred. Over the next month, Fred and I became close personal friends; at least it felt that way as we spent what seemed like every waking moment together looking for the perfect house. The problem was I didn’t really know what I wanted. My brother wanted me to buy the house next to him, and I almost broke down and did.
    Good sense prevailed, however, and I realized living next door to relatives was a bad idea. The idea that I should live in the same town as my parents circulated through the family, but I had visions of them showing up unannounced on a far too regular basis. My father would be holding a six-pack of Budweiser and my mother a tuna casserole. I hated tuna and I only drank Bud in desperation. I crossed that option off the list with a thick black marker, to make sure it never saw the light of day again.
    To my family’s dismay, I finally settled on a blue four-bedroom Garrison Colonial with a detached two-car garage and loft located right on the river down on Pawtucket Boulevard close to the Tyngsboro line. They tried to talk me out of it, assuming a guy with my money should be living in a wealthy suburb like Andover; the city I had grown up in had become not good enough for me in their eyes. If they knew what I had paid for the house, they might have changed their minds. Real estate had gone crazy in the years since I’d left, and waterfront property has never been cheap–unless it was on the Merrimack in the days when the river smelled like a garbage dump.
    I never quite understood their whole line of thinking, especially since my parents lived there for over thirty years until they moved to Westford. It was fine during the down years, why not now when it made major improvements? Just because I had money certainly did not make me better than any other local.
    I was very happy with my new house. It had