spite of it and keep going. These people have welcomed her, and at her age, Jessie is grateful. She needs a context, so she can rest.
There isn’t much else she needs, except a new man that she can go to all their parties with; she wants this one to be a keeper, so that when push comes to shove, they’ll both be around to help each other die. Odd what passes for happiness. Jessie’s led several lives outside Fort Jude so far, starting as a Blackjack dealer in Vegas at nineteen – high-end table at La Mirage, she might still be there if she hadn’t started marrying up. Her men were all good in their own ways, just not good at love.
It’s time to decide which of the good old local boys will wear well, and settle down.
First, Brad. Wake him up. Ask.
Even though the smell is disgusting, she puts coffee on the bedside table and jiggers the alarm clock to go off in five. She opens the heavy, lined curtains so the room is bright and pushes aside the sliding door. Then she sits down to wait.
In a way, it’s kind of wonderful. Pavlovian. He slams the clock off at the first beep, stumbles down the carpeted steps from the bed and lumbers into the shower. He comes out toweling his head with that useless dick flapping under his slack belly.
God she despises him.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m supposed to see if you’d offed yourself.’
‘Why would I do that?’ He does not move to cover himself.
‘Call it wishful thinking.’ She tosses him a throw from Mildred Kalen’s brocaded chaise longue. ‘Give me a break. Put this on.’
Only a fool with no sense of how he is perceived by others would crack that lewd grin, like, woo hoo. ‘I thought I was giving you a break.’
‘While you’re at it, cover that smirk.’
He drapes the Afghan over one shoulder and lets it drop as he heads into the walk-in closet, finishing his turn with a stripper’s bump of that hairy butt. She hears hangers sliding on the rack, drawers opening, Brad farting. When he comes out, the shorts and polo shirt hide the worst of the damages. Matchy green, one of those golf outfits Orville left behind when Brad shipped him off to Golden Acres. He faces her in an old man’s coordinated colors. ‘What are you really doing here?’
‘Lucy Carteret.’
Offhand: ‘I heard she died.’
Jessie’s head snaps back. ‘Who told you?’
Lucy? Dead? How does word get around anyway, zeitgeist? Jungle drums? Or do these people communicate like certain kinds of trees – bamboo, she thinks – with a common root system deep underground, woody tentacles interlocking?
He doesn’t answer. Instead he burps a question like that old TV comic who played the belching drunk, ‘What about her?’
Fuck if she’ll tell him that Lucy’s kid is down here from the north, Brad may not know he exists. Let him sop up that information like some fucking tree draining its secret life from the sandy Florida dirt. Better yet, let the kid smack him in the face with it. Let this Dan Carteret track him down and put the fucking question, and when Brad answers, she hopes the kid beats the crap out of him.
She hates this but she has to stay until she gives him the last, hard shove down the road to hell. The question she came to ask, and, as it turns out, can’t leave until she asks. ‘So. That time. Did you rape her?’
He picks up the mug like a defensive weapon. ‘When?’
‘Don’t insult me. Did you?’
‘Did I rape you?’
Vile, she thinks. Filthy, she thinks. Bitter. Bitter. ‘You know fucking well what you did.’
Instead of answering, Brad says, ‘Shitty coffee.’
‘So did you? Rape her?’
Brad raises the mug to mask whatever is going on with his face, which is not necessarily completely under control. He looks at her over the rim, snarling, ‘Why would I do that?’
She does not have to say, ‘You have a history.’
Brad does not have to say, ‘I suppose you want to know if she enjoyed it.’
They have no need to dig up old shit. He does not have to respond with another insulting question, or force her to deconstruct the only possible response she can make to it. Instead she fixes him with a look that makes even Brad crumble. He seems to be melting all at once, a decomposing lump of flesh like Jabba the Hutt, or a monster from a kids’ picture book.