.”
“Shocked,” Stephanie cut her off. “I’m shocked. But I’m not heartbroken. I’m not even sure I’m sorry.”
Abby and I took a minute to pretend we weren’t looking at each other, but Stephanie noticed.
“Don’t get me wrong, I never wished him dead,” she said. “But things hadn’t been good between Louis and me for a long time. He had affairs. A lot of them.”
I coughed, because it gave me time to think. Stephanie offered me a sip of her beer, but I shook my head. If I drink anything after nine o’clock, it’ll be followed by a Maalox chaser before bed. “I never knew you were married to Cra. . . to Louis.”
Stephanie grinned. “It’s okay, Aaron,” she said. “I know you called him Crazy Legs. Even though I never knew why.”
Abby stood up and walked to me, put a hand on top of my head, the way you would with a little boy who’d just done something precocious. “Aaron never knew why, either,” she told Steph. “He explained it to me, and I still don’t know why.” They shared an “oh, those men” look.
“How’d you end up married to Legs, anyway?” I asked, trying to shift the conversation away from me as the stereotypical man.
Stephanie stopped grinning and stared into the neck of her beer bottle for a moment. “Well, we dated a couple of times senior year after I broke up with Michael. I didn’t think much of it, but Louis. . . well, Louis was persistent. Anyway, after graduation, I went to Montclair State, back before it was a university, and Louis went to NYU. So he’d come over, or I’d go into the city, and after a while, it got to be a regular thing.”
I decided to ignore Abby’s look and ask a question. Hey, I’m a reporter. We do that. “I think what I meant was, what did you see in the guy? I mean, we always thought he was kind of. . .” I quickly remembered that Legs was dead, and that stopped me.
“. . . an asshole? Well, that’s because you were guys.”
“We still are. Kind of.”
“Louis was always nicer to a girl he wanted to impress than he was to anybody else,” Stephanie said. “You didn’t get to see what he was really like until he had gotten what he wanted out of you.”
Abby sat down next to me. “I assume you mean he wanted sex,” she said. Stephanie nodded. I gave Abigail an “I-thought-you-said-to-shut-up-and-let-her-talk” look, and she gave me a look with language you can’t print in a family newspaper.
“But it was more than that,” Steph went on. “He decided he wanted me to marry him, even after I slept with him. He thought I’d look good on his arm, so he kept up the charming act. God, this is an awful way to talk about the recently murdered, isn’t it?” She stood up. “Where do I throw out the beer bottle?” she asked, sniffling a bit.
“Don’t worry about it,” Abby said. “Do you want another one?” Stephanie shook her head. “I drank at the reunion, and I still have to drive back to the hotel tonight.”
“You could stay here,” Abby answered. “We have a sofa bed.”
“No. I’ve already taken up enough of your evening. I should go,” said Stephanie. “I have to drive back in the morning. Fact is, I would be driving back now, but both my sons are out of town, so I don’t have to be there for them until tomorrow.”
“Back to D.C.?” I asked, and she nodded. “Was Legs in the government?”
“He is. . . was, the head of a big political foundation, People For American Values,” said Stephanie. “He actually became pretty important. Not as important as he thought he was, but important.”
People for American Values. Somewhere in the back of my knee-jerk liberal mind I remembered something, but couldn’t classify it. I probably grimaced, and stored that bit of confusion away until I could ask Abby, who knows everything.
Stephanie picked up her jacket from the banister hook and put it on. “Isn’t there anything we can do to help you?” I asked, but she shook her head.
“You’ve already done it,” she said. “You were here when I needed you.”
“We live here,” I said.
She laughed, and kissed me on the lips, gently. It wasn’t a sexual thing, but it got Abigail’s attention. Nobody who isn’t me would have noticed, but she did narrow her eyes a millimeter or two.
“What bothers me more than anything else,” Stephanie