“Do you know why he sent the picture to your minis ter?”
Cissy took another big inhale and let the smoke out, still with her back to Jesse. She seemed to he memorizing every detail of the neighbor’s lawn. Jesse was quiet. It was going to come, he knew that. All he needed to do was wait.
“Yes,” Cissy said. “I
know.”
“Can you tell me?” Jesse said.
Cissy took a last drag on her cigarette and dropped it into the sink, turned on the water, flicked the disposal switch, and watched the butt disappear. Then she shut off the disposal, turned off the water, and turned from the sink.
The high color had left her face. Her eyes seemed larger than Jesse remembered.
“I am going to have to tell you things that mortify me,” she said. “I will. But you have to promise not to he judgmental.‘’
“I won’t be judgmental,
Cissy.”
“No, I think you won’t.
It’s why I think I can tell you.”
Jesse nodded gently and waited. Cissy stood at the sink and folded her arms.
“You have to help me, Jesse,”,
she said. “You have to help me say these things.”
Jesse stood and walked over to the sink and put one arm around Cissy’s. shoulders. She stiffened but she didn’t move.
“I was a cop,” Jesse said,
“in the second-largest city in the country. I have heard stuff you can’t even imagine. I
have seen stuff you don’t even know
exists.“
She nodded slowly, her arms still folded, his arm still around her shoulder.
“You’re human, Cissy. Humans do
things that they’re ashamed of. They get in trouble. They need help. I don’t want to get too dramatic here, but that’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m
supposed to help you when you get in trouble.”
Cissy nodded again. Then they were both quiet, Cissy hugging herself, Jesse’s arm around her shoulder.
“I have been married to Hasty for
twenty-seven years.”
Cissy said softly. “I don’t know
if I love him, sometimes I don’t even know if I like him, but we’ve been together so long.”
She fumbled another cigarette out of the package and lit it.
“I think Hasty likes sex. I know I do. But somehow we don’t seem to like it with each other. When we have sex it’s… technically correct, I guess. But it is not much else and we don’t have it very often. I feel very stiff and cold and awkward having sex with Hasty.”
She smoked for a tim, watching the exhaled smoke drift toward the ceiling.
“The longer we have been together, the
odder Hasty has become. He was an important young man from a good family when I first met him. All this business with Freedom’s Horsemen…”
She shook her head.
“It occupies him more and more every year.
I needed sex. And, I guess there is something very wrong with me, some of the kind of sex I needed.”
“No reason, right now, to decide if
there’s something wrong with what you needed,”
Jesse said.
“I know. I tell myself that. I took a
series of lovers.
of them were nice normal men who were happy to nice normal things with me.“
She took in some smoke and blew it out. actually met Jo Jo through Hasty. He came to the one day. He and Hasty talked business in the den I brought them some beer. The way Jo Jo looked at It was like he knew. I could feel his look go right my clothes. Right through everything I pretended
I knew he saw me. And I let him know I
