offered scholarships, advised by counselors what a shame it would be to waste a mind like hers, Lou had elected to stay home and work instead. Her baby sister had been diagnosed with some sluggish strain of autism and was being sent to a special day school that her mama, repeatedly passed over for a managerial post at Fed Ex, could ill afford. So Lou stayed on as a full-time employee at the video outlet whose absentee owner had neglected to convert his stock to DVDs, which meant that the store’s already skeleton clientele had dwindled to a handful of irregulars. As a consequence, the girl had ample time to pursue her reading of Carlos Casteneda, Ekhart Tolle, and Emanuel Swedenborg, though in truth she hadn’t done much reading lately. She preferred to view three-handkerchief romances starring Ida Lupino or Loretta Young from the outlet’s Adults Only section, though the films failed to move her either.
After the trial she’d thought, Now the grief will start, but it never did. There was the guilt, of course, due to the lack of grief, and there was the missing him; she did miss him, though she began to wonder why. After all, Bernie Karp was a very ethereal fellow with neither foot planted firmly on Mother Earth, and what had their hooking up been but a series of small frustrations ending in a large one? True, they’d shared certain common interests, but Lou was beyond all that now; she understood that to be alive was to be fettered to a dying planet where the only release was through some forbidden pleasure. “When’s the tragedy begin?” she’d asked herself, but in place of it, in place of a blast of sorrow that might rupture the glacier in her breast, she felt only an enduring lassitude. Nothing seemed to matter much anymore. Restless in her isolation, she began to seek out the company of unsavory types, syrup heads and aspirin freaks among whom she earned the reputation of being an easy lay. Though she viewed her own bad behavior as a betrayal of her departed boyfriend, Lou found that remorse somehow sweetened the mischief. Was she so angry with him that she wanted to desecrate Bernie’s memory? Well, yes. Yes, she fucking was. But she knew that anger wasn’t the whole of her motivation, and after a time there was little satisfaction in bad behavior either.
One evening, despite her misgivings, she went to see Bernie’s parents, though they’d made it abundantly clear at the trial that she represented associations they would rather not be reminded of. But time had passed and Mr. Karp had recouped his losses since the fall of the House of Enlightenment; he’d acquired an extra chin and an artificial tan which he displayed to good advantage in his TV ads. His wife, wearing a tangerine training suit, touted her enrollment in a Cardio Rebounding class (that involved weighted hula hoops and a mini-trampoline) in which she planned to sculpt her body to complement her blue-rinsed hair. Having apparently made a kind of peace with Bernie’s slaying, they welcomed Lou Ella cordially, inviting her into their home, where they sat on a deep-cushioned sofa holding hands. Skeptical, Lou thought they were either making a show of congeniality or had maybe had themselves lobotomized.
When she’d weathered the shock of their friendly greeting, she asked them in all sincerity, “How do y’all cope?”
They trod on each other’s answers, Mrs. Karp beginning again to praise the virtues of her exercise program while her husband claimed an absorption in business matters. Then a silence during which each, looking askance at the other, waited for their spouse to speak first, until both spoke simultaneously again.
“Pills,” asserted Mrs. Karp, as her husband admitted, “We visit the rebbe.” His wife gave him a subtle elbow to the kidneys, which he not so subtly returned. She swiveled toward him in a show of pique that just as quickly subsided, as she too confessed, “We visit the rebbe.”
The girl was dumbfounded and said so. Begging their pardon, she asked how they could bring themselves to take solace in the man who had wasted their boy. The wife shrugged her own puzzlement, then offered a muddled adage about forgiveness being the spice of life, while her husband declared almost defiantly, “He’s become like a second son to us.”
Taking heart from his impenitence, Mrs. Karp added, though still a little shamefaced, that they had recently begun discussing adoption proceedings. Then she leaned forward