Read Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You for Free Online

that looked like giant Tinker Toys.
    As Mary Ann entered, her eyes made a clandestine dash to the wall behind the maître d’s stand. There a row of caricatures alerted newcomers to the restaurant’s more illustrious customers. Her face was still there, of course—why had she worried that it wasn’t?—sandwiched comfortably as ever between the renderings of Danielle Steel and Ambassador Shirley Temple Black.
    The maitre d’ looked up and smiled. “There you are.”
    “Hi, Mickey. I’m expecting a guy…”
    “He’s already here.”
    “Ah. Great.”
    The maitre d’ leaned forward conspiratorially. “I put him at the banquette in the back. There’s a table available in the front room, but Prue’s there with Father Paddy, and I thought”—and here he winked—“it might be a little quieter back in Siberia.”
    She rewarded him with a rakish chuckle. “You’re way ahead of me, Mickey.”
    “We try,” he said, and smiled wickedly.
    Grateful for this promise of privacy, she fled to the back, while Prue and the priest yammered away obliviously. When she reached the furthermost banquette, Burke Andrew leapt to his feet and hugged her awkwardly across the table.
    “Hey,” he said. “You look great.”
    “Thanks. Look who’s talking.”
    He let his head wobble bashfully. She caught a glimpse of the troubled youth who had left her for a career in New York. Most of that person was gone now, with only the broad shoulders and great hair (strawberry blond and receding heroically) remaining to trigger her memories. His earnest collie face, once such a blank slate, had developed crags in becoming places.
    He sank to the banquette and studied her for a moment, shaking his head slowly. “Ten years. Damn.”
    “Eleven,” she said, sitting down.
    “Shit.”
    She laughed.
    “And you’re a star now,” he said. “They’ve got your picture on the wall and everything.”
    She thought it best not to know what he meant. “Huh?”
    “Over there. Next to Shirley Temple.”
    A quick, dismissive glance at the caricature. “Oh, yeah.”
    “Don’t you like it?”
    She shrugged. “It’s O.K., I guess.” After a beat, she added: “Shirley hates hers.”
    One of his gingery eyebrows leapt noticeably. “She’s a friend?”
    She nodded. “She lives here, you know.”
    O.K., maybe “friend” was stretching it, but Shirley had been on the show once, and Mary Ann had chatted with her extensively at the French Impressionist exhibit at the De Young. Anyway, she was certain the ambassador wouldn’t approve of that pouty-faced portrait with the dashiki and the cigarette. Mary Ann had told D’or as much when they hung the damned thing.
    Burke’s eyes roamed the room. “I like this.”
    She nodded. “It’s kind of a media joint.”
    “Yeah. So you said.”
    At the moment, she realized, the wattage of the lunching luminaries was embarrassingly dim, so she made do with the material at hand. “That showy blonde,” she muttered, nodding toward the front room, “is Prue Giroux.”
    He had obviously never heard of her.
    “She was in Us last month. She took some orphans to Beijing on a peace mission.”
    Still no reaction.
    “She’s a socialite, actually. Kind of a publicity hound.” He nodded. “How ’bout the priest?”
    “Father Paddy Starr. He has a show at my station. Honest to God. ”
    “Honest to God, he has a show? Or that’s the name of it?” “That’s the name of it.”
    He smirked.
    She smirked back, feeling a little queasy about it. She hated how rubey all this sounded. Burke, after all, was a practicing New Yorker, and the breed had a nasty way of regarding San Francisco as one giant bed-and-breakfast inn—cute but really of no consequence. She made herself a curt mental note not to gossip about the locals.
    “How’s Betsy?” she asked, changing the subject.
    “Brenda.”
    “Oh. Sorry. I knew it was B.” She mugged and rolled her head from side to side. “Burke and Brenda, B and