“What did you ask me?” Carole
said.
“Where Jo Jo got the cash. Hundred and
fifty-five thousand is a lot of money. It was even more in 1986.”
“I don’t know,” she
said.
Jesse nodded.
“Jo Jo come around since he and I had that talk?” Jesse said.
“No.”
“How are the kids doing?”
Carole shrugged.
“You talk to a shrink at all?”
“How’m I supposed to afford a
shrink,” Carole said.
“My HMO pays a hundred bucks for
counseling. You know how far that goes?”
Jesse nodded.
“How are you getting by,
financially?”
Again Carole shrugged. It was a particular kind of shrug.
Jesse had seen it often. It was not a gesture of surrender or even of defeat, those were long past. It was a gesture of numbness. It meant no hope.
“You got any family?”
“My mother’s dead,”
Carole said. “My father’s in Florida with my stepmother. My father sends me some . money.”
“If Jo Jo’s not paying what
he’s supposed to you can take him to court.”
“Sure, and pay a lawyer, and have the judge tell Jo Jo to pay and have him not pay, and maybe come around later and beat the shit out of me?”
“I don’t think he’ll do
that again,” Jesse said.
“Maybe not if you’re around, he
hasn’t bothered me since that time. But how long you going to stay around here?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse
said.
“How come he’s scared of you
anyway?” Carole said.
“I mean, look at him. Look at you. How come he doesn’t get you for slapping him around?”
Jesse looked at the little boy, sucking his thumb on his mother’s lap. How much of all this did he hear? Probably all of it. How much did he undetand? Probably too much of it. What could Jesse do about that?
“Well,” Jesse said.
“I’m a cop, which carries a little weight, and I carry a gun, which may have a lot of weight.”
“Jo Jo’s got a gun. He used to
have two or three around here.”
Jesse ,nodded.
“So what is it,” Carole said.
Jesse looked at the boy again. Nothing to do about that.
“Jo Jo’s a fake,” Jesse
said. “Alone at night, when he can’t sleep, sometimes, for a minute he knows it. And he knows that I know it too.”
“A fake?”
“Sure. He’s strong, and
he’s cruel. And that’s a dangerous combination. But he isn’t really tough.”
