first when she was barely seventeen.”
“But aren’t you going to call the police?”
“Dude, just what is it about you and the police? Didn’t you and me already have this conversation?”
Cole wasn’t sure if PW had raised his voice because he was angry or because he was drunk.
A promise is sacred. Cole made a quick decision and plunged ahead.
“I saw them. I saw Mason—I saw them kissing—that’s how I know—”
To Cole’s astonishment PW laughed again.
He must be drunk. How else could he laugh?
“Listen to me, son. You think you’re the only one that’s got eyes in his head? You really think I didn’t know what was up with the two of them?”
Yes, he could see it now. That had been pretty stupid of him. He was seeing a lot, finally. No wonder he’d started to feel sorry for Starlyn.
“So you’re mad at Mason. So you go and make wild accusations, talking a heap of nonsense about kidnapping—and why? I’ll tell you why. Because you’re jealous. Because you think he stole your girl. Isn’t that what this is really about?” He punched Cole’s shoulder again, less playfully this time. “Like you had any business sniffing after her.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Cole said hoarsely. He was mortified that PW had used the word sniffing.
PW kept silent, as if to give Cole a chance to explain himself, and when that didn’t happen he sighed and said, “Look. I don’t mean to be harsh, but you got to understand this has nothing to do with you. We shouldn’t even be discussing the matter, it’s not fitting. I want you to promise you’ll put it out of your mind and leave it to your elders to worry about, okay?”
Cole nodded mechanically.
“Good. Now, let’s talk about something else. What do you hear lately from that aunt of yours?”
“I’m thinking about going to see her in Germany.”
In fact, until that moment he had been thinking no such thing.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Cole remembered that he had not yet passed on the news that his aunt was back in Berlin. He was about to explain when PW doubled over.
The attack this time was shorter but more vicious than the first. When it was over PW stood up, saying, “Let me go dry myself off.”
Left alone, Cole tried—unsuccessfully—to pray. All his other emotions were now swamped by a new fear. What if PW never got better? What if he could never live a normal life again? What if he just drank and drank and drank?
Cole was distracted by the appearance of a moth that had come indoors and kept banging into one thing or another until finally it knocked itself onto its back. Fantastically large, almost the size of a sparrow, it lay quaking on the floor, filament legs kicking furiously. Then it went still—not dead, Cole figured, just wiped out from struggling. It could rest there all it wanted; no harm would come to it. He resisted the impulse to pick it up. He’d been told that touching a moth or a butterfly could hurt its wings and maybe even kill it.
This time, unlike a moment before, and without trying, he found himself praying. He prayed to God not to be too hard on Starlyn, and if it turned out she was never coming back he prayed that God might bring her, somehow, somewhere to safety. Amen.
PW returned wearing a clean white shirt, left unbuttoned, and carrying a fresh pint of bourbon. He tousled Cole’s hair with his free hand as he sat back down on the sofa. He seemed to have forgotten what they’d been talking about before, and Cole did not remind him. They sat for a few moments without speaking. The second attack had so weakened PW that his arm shook just from the effort of bringing bottle to mouth.
“You know,” he said, staring straight ahead as if he were addressing someone other than Cole beside him, “God put men at the head of women because we’re the stronger sex. But it’s my observation that when it comes to physical pain women can take more. Think of Tracy.” Which Cole did very reluctantly, recalling the time he’d accidentally hit her in the chest. “People still talk about how brave she was when she had the cancer, and I can testify she was a real trouper when she got the flu. I just know she’d be able to deal with this neuralgia thing better than I can.”
Cole said nothing. A cosmic sadness was seeping into