words slurred together, Wecommendtoalmightygodourbrotherthomas, and that a little glint of sunshine caught the lid before it disappeared from view. Then it was all mercifully over and we turned away from Tommy and from each other. I shook hands with the Randolphs without meeting a single eye. My mother was there too, although the twins were both in college, Leo at Harvard (the Lightfoots were Harvard men) and Vanessa at Skidmore, and couldn’t come. Or perhaps it was thought best that they didn’t come, tender lambs as they were. Meanwhile, my father had avoided the affair on principle—he hadn’t attended the wedding, and he damned well wasn’t going to attend the funeral—so it was just the two of us on my side, mother and daughter, against the various Randolphs, and I’d like to say that we forged a bond in that moment, that this harrowing encounter brought us close together at last.
But you see, I was still so shocked, so numb with horror at myself. I couldn’t speak to my mother at all. I caught her glance only once as they nestled Tommy’s coffin in its eternal hole. During the service, they had left the casket open, because a well-placed shot behind the ear leaves your face remarkably unscathed and Tommy’s face was the only noble part of him, and as I’d stared at his waxy skin and his eyes for the last time, his lashes that remained as long and lush as in life, I’d felt terrifyingly little emotion. Maybe a speck of pity, that was all. So I was reflecting on this apathy as the breeze nudged my widow’s veil, wondering whether it meant I was a monster, a sociopath or whatever they called them, and I happened to glance at my mother just as she was glancing at me, and I saw at once that she knew exactly how Tommy had died. Mothers know, don’t they? They gave birth to you and suckled you and tended every inch of you. They can peer straight through your eyes and part the drapes of your soul.
I remember looking away and thinking, Well, that’s that. I can’t return home, not ever. She’ll have it out of me, one way or another, and once the deed was committed to words, once it floated free of my mouth and into the atmosphere, it became truth. I had killed my husband with my own hand and a .22 caliber revolver I’d procured myself and hidden in the bedside table. I had killed Thomas Randolph. So my mother and I walked away from that cemetery without saying a word to each other, not a blessed word. She’d returned to my childhood nest in Great Neck, and I’d found a room in a cheap hotel in Murray Hill, and I hadn’t seen her since.
Come to think of it, maybe that was why I felt this shiver of memory as we sped along West Bay Street. Why the smell of leaves returned to me, the rotting earth, the fear, the breeze that was nothing like the tropical draft that swept against us from the road. Not fear or premonition, or anything like an echo from one husband to the other. It was the opposite. I recalled Tommy’s funeral because at that moment, standing before his grave, I’d decided I never would confess. I never would tell a living soul what had happened in Bakersfield.
Surely no person existed whom I could trust like that.
When we came to my bungalow, Thorpe stopped the engine and dismounted to help me from the sidecar. The heat billowed from the asphalt, the wind sang. The surf was picking up; you could hear the noise all the way from the road.
To my surprise, the doorknob turned before I had the chance to insert the latchkey. “Hello?” I called.
“Miss Lulu?”
“Veryl!” I went down the hall, just as she emerged from the study, duster in hand. “You’re still here? Aren’t you supposed to be finishing up at the Prince George?”
“They give me the day off,” she said. “Why, what that on you finger?”
I looked at my left hand and saw, rather to my shock, a slim gold band adorned with a row of tiny diamonds. “I got married.”
Veryl put her hand to her heart and took a step backward.
“You see, Thorpe came home last night, as I’m sure you noticed, and he asked me to marry him—well, didn’t exactly ask—”
“Oh, Lord, Miss Lulu.”
“I’m still rather shocked, myself.”
“Oh, Lord. Where he at?”
“Putting the motorcycle out back.”
I