embarrassing, vulgar, or comic.
Carlo and I were none of those.
While he dozed afterward, as always, in grateful lust I thanked him silently, from the center of my soul, for letting me live in his normal world. For giving me this new self, different from the one defined by any of the other women I had been.
But gratitude for the present invariably came with memories of the past where I’d learned my lessons. One of the things I brooded about: Paul, gentle, widowed Paul of the cello and the truffle oil, of the two cherubic preschoolers, Paul repulsed by me despite his best efforts. As gently as he could even though he thought I couldn’t be hurt, See, Brigid? You stare into the abyss of depravity, and sooner or later it begins to stare back. The abyss is where you’ve lived for so long you’ll never escape it. I fear it too much to live there with you. I can’t expose my children to you.
I was still terrified to think I might destroy my relationship with Carlo the way I had destroyed my relationship with Paul and determined that I would do nothing to make that happen.
Paul was the last man I tried to be honest with, twenty-two years ago. I still wonder what made me leave that crime scene photo on the kitchen counter. I didn’t expect the children would find it.
Two
Paul was right, your past doesn’t die. Hell, it doesn’t even wrinkle.
About a week after the rock-sex episode, I’m sunk into the overstuffed cushions of Jane’s shiny brown brocade couch, sipping coffee from a Grand Canyon souvenir mug from one of their vacations while pondering how hard it could be to bake something, a pastry or something. As I paged through one of Jane’s cookbooks her scent wafted up at me, honey and flour, and I wondered whether she would approve of me. Not for the first time I resisted the urge to just once go to my e-mail, key in [email protected], and ask her.
The doorbell interrupted my thoughts with “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and I cringed. I hate music, but I couldn’t figure out how to reprogram the doorbell.
I found Max Coyote on my front porch. Deputy Sheriff Coyote was half Pascua Yaqui tribe and half Columbia University anthropologist on his mother’s side. He and I worked a few cases together when I was still with the Bureau. Unlike many in law enforcement, he didn’t think FBI agents were total assholes and was part of the reason I stayed out here. We had become friends of a kind; I’d even told him about Paul over one too many Crown Royals, but this would not be an invitation to dinner.
The Pugs frisked and barked. “Hey guys, it’s just your uncle Max,” I said as I opened the screen door.
“Carlo home?” he asked, walking in and looking around comfortably, the way you do when you know people well enough that it’s okay to be nosy.
“He’s checking the price of gin at Walgreens. You here for poker or philosophy?”
Max and Carlo had met at a house party and hit it off, maybe were better friends even than Max and me. They would get together once a month and teach each other what they knew about Bertrand Russell and Texas Hold’em. Max was quite good at complex thought. Carlo kept losing his shirt.
Max didn’t answer right away, pausing instead to stoop and rub each grateful Pug between its bulgy eyes with his thumb before he moved aside one of the too-shiny purple pillows that lined the back of the couch and settled down. He had been at the house enough so that he no longer made fun of Jane’s peacock feathers in the oriental vase, but he did pick up the cookbook I’d been looking at and sniffed the stain on the bread pudding recipe.
“How’s the cooking coming along?” he asked.
“I’m still discouraged by ingredients like crème fraîche,” I said, taking the book from him and thwumping it shut. I put the cookbook on the coffee table but something about him made me stay standing. “Why are you stalling?”
He sighed, looked mournful, but that was his default expression so I wasn’t too concerned yet.
Not too. Having lived in a world where the news was usually bad, I asked, “Why do you want to know where Carlo is?”
Now focused like a man on a mission, he again ignored the question. He put a hand on each of the Pugs that flanked him. I had