really have cash to spare for the tip saucer unless I planned to walk home.
“Well? What do you think?” asked Mom, eyes crinkling up adorably as she smiled at me via the mirror over the sinks.
I think this guy’s ball four, coming in high-and-outside and not worth a twitch of your shoulders. And we both know you’re gonna swing for it anyway.
The attendant turned on the taps in front of Mom, then unveiled a fresh bar of soap.
I twisted my own faucets quickly on. Feudalism creeps me out, no matter how vestigial.
“He seems like a very kind man,” I said. “And he obviously adores you.”
My mother lifted her dripping hands from the sink. The silent attendant draped them with a starched piqué towel, turning off the taps in lieu of a curtsy.
Mom was going to feel like shit when she bolted this time. Because he was nice enough, and she really never meant any harm.
“Larry sat me down to go over his portfolio last week,” she said, spritzing her wrists with the house bottle of Joy, “so I’d know you children would always be taken care of.”
“That’s touching, Mom.”
Too bad my mother was no gold digger.
Bet she even gives back the ring.
I dried my hands, watching her breeze out the ladies’-room door.
Smiling weakly at the aproned old lady, I dug out my last five bucks, trying to smooth out the bill’s wrinkles before I laid it gently across her little white plate.
We burst into our apartment an hour later, sans midlife lovebirds.
“Fucking Maine?” said Pagan. “In fucking February?”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” I said.
“What is she, nuts?” asked Pagan.
“Oh, right,” I said, “ news flash.”
She flopped onto the sofa. “Right out of her head.”
“Twisted,” I said. “Oobie-shoobie.”
Sue drew a pack of ‘21’ matches out of her pocket and held them up. “ Fuck shrimp cocktail. Who’ll join me in a bong hit?”
Dean called from Texas that night, around eleven.
“You got in okay?” I asked.
“Piece of cake, and all the guys at Chevron were impressed with my preppy coveralls.”
“Where’re you staying?”
“A Holiday Inn out by the refinery,” he said. “King Leisure Suite.”
“Ooooo… swanky.”
“Bed’s too big without you.”
“Same here,” I said, patting his empty pillow in the dark.
“How’d lunch go?”
“Mom’s getting married.”
“Again?”
“Who knows,” I said. “Maybe the fourth time will be the charm.”
31
Tuesday morning I came up the subway stairs into a biting rain. The sky was low and gray, and everyone around me kept their heads ducked against the sooty blast of wet.
Fall, already.
Skwarecki’s statue loomed beside me: a smugly chubby guy, knee-deep in naked dead chicks but draped in a Tarzan diaper to protect his own modesty.
Fat Boy’s right hand rested loose on the hilt of his sword, blade casually balanced across the top of his shoulder. Gripped in his left fist was a skein of hair, at the bottom of which a woman’s severed head dangled like a purse.
I bulled my way forward into the slanting rain, shoulders hunched. I could see the twinned concrete hulks Skwarecki had described in the distance. There was another sculpture out front, stainless steel and a lot more modern. The rainy wind made it whirl like a giant cheese grater.
The floor inside was dirty and wet. I got in line for the metal detector, scanning the crowd beyond until I saw Skwarecki waving at me.
“No raincoat?” she asked when I’d made it through. “What do you, wanna to catch pneumonia?”
We were in a tall atrium jammed with people. Dozens of voices bounced off the walls. Skwarecki walked point through the crowd, me trotting close behind. We passed several courtrooms. All I could see as we rushed alongside each set of glass-paneled doors was IN GOD WE TRUST writ huge on the far wall inside, above the head of a judge.
Skwarecki flashed her badge to some guy in a beige uniform and said, “She’s with me,” before he waved us ahead into a long hallway. The names on the office doors we passed were a global mishmash: Tsangarakis, Seide, Murphy, Chu, Lapautre.
We finally arrived at a reception area manned by a phalanx of no-nonsense-looking women whom my mother would have described as “salty old broads.”
The one in the middle held up one finger until she’d finished transferring a phone call, then grinned up at Skwarecki. “What brings you down here this fine morning?”
“Hey, Rosemary,” said Skwarecki. “We’ve got an appointment with Bost.”
“I’ll let her know you’re here.” Rosemary handed me a register to sign and gave me a bar-codedGUEST sticker for