Chapter 6: Public Breakfast

"She's on the roof!" Barrett shouted, as we got out of the car.

He swung the flashlight up at the third floor.

I looked where it pointed.

A window was open on the third floor.

Melody leaned out of it in a gray nightshirt, holding a bowl of cereal.

"I'm in the kitchen," she called down. "This is the kitchen window. The roof is above me."

"She was on it a minute ago!" Barrett said.

"I was making a snack."

Ansel looked at Barrett, and then at the window, and then at me.

He didn't say what he was thinking, and I didn't think anything loud.

We stood in the gravel while an entire house of lights burned for a bowl of cereal.

"I'll check her pulse," Ansel said wearily.

"You're an angel," Barrett said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Gordon Collier came down the front steps then, and put a hand on my shoulder.

His hand was warm and dry.

"Leona," he said. "You must be exhausted."

"A little."

"Come to the foundation breakfast in the morning. Barrett is speaking, and I'd like you to hear it."

It was not a question, but he made it sound like a kindness.

I went.

I am not proud of it.

The foundation breakfast was in the ballroom of the Collier Hotel, with two hundred donors and a podium and a screen.

I sat at table one in a gray dress with a bandaged wrist.

Ansel sat beside me with his hands folded and no tie.

Barrett took the podium at nine.

He had a note card, which he did not read.

"Friends," Barrett said. "I want to talk about the person who has been there for every skinned knee and every heartbreak I've ever had."

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