I built a five-cup pot of freshly ground Cinnamon Hazelnut. The rain was trying to beat in the windows, but the house started to feel warm. From the kitchen, I could look through the living room and out to the screened-in porch. Beyond the porch the bay was all in a charcoal gray and white-tipped uproar. The nearest buoy, a green can, was rocking back and forth like a dweeble. The only thing in the room besides the stove was a pull-out couch. I sat on it after Amanda sank down next to the stove and took a sip of her coffee, holding the cup with both hands. Somehow while I was fussing with stoves and coffee she’d managed to brush back her hair and smooth out her face. She wore Reeboks, clean, faded Wranglers and a chambray shirt under her cotton windbreaker. The shirt was opened to just below the top curve of her breasts. Her chest had seen a lot of sun—it was very dark with freckles that were almost black.
“So,” I said, for openers.
“I’m sorry I’m bothering you again.”
“You mostly bother me when you say you’re sorry.”
Self-effacement can be hard work on the receiving end.
“You like your privacy. I’m making you uncomfortable.”
“I’m just not used to other people sitting in my living room.”
“I understand that. I’ve lived alone.”
“Where’s Roy?”
“He had to go to the City.” She looked up as if unsure I believed her. “HQ keeps a pretty tight rein, so he has to go in two or three times a month. I took off early. They’ll cover for me.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
She busied herself petting and cooing at Eddie. He didn’t discourage her.
“Of course not. That bothers you?”
“Not really. I’m just not much for company.”
“I’m sorry. I should go.”
“No, I mean,
“I still should go. You’re probably busy.”
She started to stand up. I waved her back down.
“Nah. Drink your coffee. I got nothing else to do.”
“When we talked about Regina Broadhurst it got me thinking about my mother again. Not that I ever stopped. It’s all I’ve done since she died. They’re all dying. Our parents. Yours, mine.”
“It’s been five years since my mother went. I don’t think about it much.”
Amanda leaned back against the wall and looked at me through frustrated, anxious eyes. Tears rushed up into her voice.
“She was just a sweet, wonderful old woman. She made dolls for charity for Chrissakes.”
The impossible tangle of her emotions created an attraction current that drew her legs back against her chest. She pulled them to her and rested her head on her knees.
“I’m an engineer, not a shrink. But it looks to me like it all happened too quick for you and you got what they call unresolved issues.”
A couple sessions of court-ordered therapy and I’m fucking Sigmund Freud.
“I know. They have grief counselors, but Roy was really unhappy about the idea. Doesn’t approve of it.”
“Can’t say he’s helping out too much here.”
“No, you can’t say that.”
Eddie found people down at his level irresistible. He tried to lick her face, from which she gently demurred. I told him to bug off, so he went out to the screened-in porch, a little put out.
“It’s none of my business, but since you’re here in my living room, I guess I can say you should talk to somebody about this and to hell with Roy. With all due respect.”
“Maybe I can just talk to you.”
“Now I know you need help.”
She smiled at me. “You want me to think you’re just an old burnout.”
It’s amazing how pretty women who like you and wear rough chambray shirts and smell like fresh expectations can say anything they want and get away with it.
“Too burned out to think straight, that’s for sure.”
Even though I couldn’t stop thinking about Regina floating in that bathtub. She had wicked bad arthritis. Could hardly bend down. She had an old tin-lined shower stall off the kitchen that she could just walk into. My old man used the tub in that bathroom to clean fish. In return he’d leave her a few in the freezer. When I went through the house I saw a bathrobe hanging in the broom closet, which was right near the shower stall, along with a bunch of beach towels. I realized, standing there looking down at Amanda, that Regina never sat on the beach. And never had any guests. Those were her bath towels. Thirty-year-old beach towels she was too cheap to replace.
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know, Amanda. Old habits die hard. I spent most of my life solving engineering problems, which are like big, complicated puzzles. You have to noodle ’em out. Only here I can’t say there’s anything to noodle. I must be growing an imagination in my old age.”
“You’re not that old.”
Amanda smoothed the legs of her jeans down toward her ankles, pushing out the wrinkles and reinforcing the crease up her shins and over her knees. I thought of my daughter’s cat.
“I wish you could have met my mother. She was very strict, but she had a sense of humor.”
“I probably would’ve been a bit young for her.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I felt bad when I saw the tears pooling up in her eyes. I find it hard to talk about death without being sarcastic. Grieving relatives usually don’t find it too funny. I went into the bathroom next to the kitchen and got a box of Kleenex. I was able to keep my mouth shut long enough for her to blow her nose and mop up her tears.
“I think I would have liked her, too,” I said.
“How come?” she said, with a sniff.
“I can tell. Probably loaded with charm. A lot of it rubbed off on you.”
“Does that mean you like me, too?”
“Yes. It does.”
“That’s so amazing.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel so unlikable.”
For a brief moment, her history poured in from some other dimension, flowed around the living room, then drained away through cracks in the floor and special portals in the wall. It caused a lapse.
“So what made you come back to Southampton?”
She looked at me as if concentrating on my face. Evaluating. She scrunched up her mouth and looked away.
“Something bad,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“What about you?”
“Same here. More or less.”
“I thought so,” she said. “Want to know?”
“Nah. Enough of that stuff, okay?”
“Okay. If you want.”
The gray-black rain clouds outside made it even darker in the knotty pine room. I opened the woodstove and threw in a few more logs. We were washed by fire light and smoky dry heat. She took off her windbreaker and pulled up her sleeves. She hadn’t moved out of the way when I was stoking the stove. Her presence was beginning to unbalance the stolid resignation that decorated the inside of my cottage. I looked down at her and caught a glimpse of a tanned breast held softly in a low-cut flowered bra. I went back to the kitchen to exchange my coffee for something stronger. Something with little blocks of ice in it.
The phone rang. It was Sullivan.
“They gave me a note from a guy named Jimmy Maddox. That’s her nephew?”
