Gilia won Judy over that first Monday.
“His wife treated him poorly,” Judy said as she poured my coffee.
“She must have had bad tastes,” Gilia said.
“It was because his kitty passed on and he was vulnerable.”
Both women looked at me with obvious sympathy. I ate it up.
“When did your kitty die?” Gilia asked.
“Two years ago, the last weekend of March.”
“You must have really loved her.”
“My cat’s name is Judy,” Judy said. “We’re very close.” Gilia didn’t ask why a waitress named Judy had a cat named Judy. Instead, she went into what kind, how old, what do you feed her, don’t you just love it when she lies on your neck and purrs.
“You must have a cat yourself,” Judy said to Gilia.
“I have a Siamese named Beaux, but he thinks he has me.”
In no time flat Judy was bringing extra strawberries for the strawberry pancakes and not charging for coffee. “This one won’t get jealous of a passed-on cat and leave you,” Judy said.
“She’ll find another excuse,” I said, and they laughed as if I were kidding.
When it came time to go, Gilia waved to a man who sat a couple tables over, reading a
“Mike, there’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Gilia said. Mike was a little guy with muscles and a narrow mustache.
“Mike Newberry, meet Sam Callahan. Mike’s the detective who’s been researching your life.”
He held out his hand, but I hesitated a moment, unsure if it’s proper form to shake with the man who’s tailing you. Were we supposed to be adversaries or just two people trying to get by? In the end, I decided it didn’t matter and shook his hand anyway.
He pretended not to notice my hesitation. “I’ve heard so much about you, I feel like we’ve already met,” Mike said.
“How is Wanda?”
His mustache crinkled into a frown. “Angry.”
“Is she taking care of her health?”
“She was drinking like a fish, but I couldn’t see as it bothered her health.”
“What is she doing?”
Mike folded the paper under his arm. “Mostly she bad-mouths you. She thinks you did something terrible to her.”
I looked at Gilia. “I was monogamous, I swear.”
“You’ve got me convinced,” Gilia said.
“I never did her any disservice.”
Mike cleared his throat—a male habit that has always irked me. “She thinks you were holier-than-thou.”
You can’t win with a righteous woman. You either mess up and give them cause for hatred, or you don’t mess up and they call you a goody-two-shoed wimp.
“Listen, Mike,” I said, “it would be nice if you didn’t mention Gilia in your report to Skip. Her family might not understand.”
“
Mike smiled, showing slick teeth. We were playing on a field he understood. “I think that can be arranged.”
“In fact, how would it be if I pay the same fee Skip is paying, then, instead of wasting your time following me, you could stay home and watch television, and every evening I’ll telephone a report of my day?”
He rubbed his chin, as if he’d once had a beard. “You’ll report everything? Not hold back the dirt Mr. Prescott wants to hear?”
I gave him the innocent face, which works a lot better on strangers than daughters. “Why would I hide anything?”
“Except me,” Gilia said.
“This way you collect from Skip, you collect from me, and your time is free to take on more clients.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Mike said.
“Quite reasonable,” Gilia said.
“How much do you want for the down payment?”
“Drink like a fish” is one of those expressions that won’t stand up to close scrutiny, along the lines of “work like a dog” or “sweat like a pig.” Obvious questions come to mind. A more exact wording might be “Wanda’s psyche is immersed in fluid, much like a fish is immersed in water.”
Drinking like a fish wasn’t a habit Wanda picked up after leaving the manor. She specialized in sticky liqueurs—flavored schnapps, Grand Marnier, that sort of thing. When we first met she used to drink herself comatose and pass out with my penis clutched tightly in her fists—or fist if I wasn’t hard. If I tried to roll over or, God forbid, get up to take a leak, she would squeeze like vise grips on a hose. At the time, I took this as a sign of love, but five hundred miles of pedaling the Exercycle 6000 brought me an insight: Wanda is afraid of being alone. The sticky liqueur and tight penis hold combine to give the illusion of beating back the void.
Maurey Pierce drank like a fish throughout college and that farcical marriage to Dothan Talbot. After her dad was killed by her horse she wallowed in the bottle until social services took her other child, Auburn, away from her and she reached that crossroads where you either lose everything that matters and die or you go to meetings in church basements the rest of your life. Maurey chose meetings.
At Auburn’s custody hearing Maurey and Dothan each paraded out a Goddamn plethora of witnesses to show the other was an immoral, unethical, unfit sleazeball. Maurey flashed her clear blue eyes at the judge and convinced him she was a cleaned-up sleazeball, or recovering sleazeball, as she put it, so she won custody of Auburn, and in the parking lot outside the courthouse Dothan slapped her in the ear and Lydia decked him with a Sage Graphite II fly rod case. A baseball bat couldn’t have knocked him any flatter.
Except for a month-long backslide when her mother died, she’s kept to the clean liver program ever since. The bender at Annabel’s death surprised me some because Maurey and her mother never got along that well, even more so than the average parents and children who don’t get along. Basically, the thing came down to they were both in love with the same man, Maurey’s father, and they never worked out the jive you’re supposed to work out about that.
The summer Maurey was pregnant by me, Annabel fell off the deep end, mental hygienically speaking, and she never quite came back. She lived a foggy, scattered existence more or less held together by pharmaceuticals and Maurey’s little brother, Pete. Six years ago Annabel buffed her Thorazine with too much Halcion and tried to fly off the Snake River bridge. Maurey got drunk and disappeared, then a few days later Pud Talbot disappeared, and before I made the connection, they reappeared together.
I turned jealous jerk and gave her grief over noodling another Talbot and we went eight months without speaking before we had an emotional best-friends-in-spite-of-you-being-an-idiot reunion where we hugged and cried and pledged eternal trust. Eternal trust or not, Maurey still hasn’t told me what happened during the missing month. Sometimes I daydream that I was the one who went after her instead of Pud.
Trolling town looking for someone to talk to. Manic-depressives have all the luck; they soar between crashes. The best us regular depressives can do is battle our way up to normal every now and then. Talking about Alice had left me bummed and flat, and while you’d think the new friendship with Gilia would pep me up, I was in one of those states where even when something good happens you dwell on the fact that it can’t last. After bitter experience, I’d found the black states can be lightened somewhat by massive exercise, being around cheerful strangers, or seeing
Which is why I trolled Battleground to the Baskin-Robbins corner in search of the happy, pregnant girls. My hope was they went for ice cream about the same time every day and their giggles would improve my outlook.
Fat chance.
Babs sat alone on the bench, tears dripping from her pink chin onto a rocky road sugar cone. She whimpered,
