“She’s fine.”
“No, I mean, like what’s her frame of mind? I mean, what’s she been saying about me? Did she say she’s going to come back?”
“She’s in the coffee shop with my friend Susan Silverman. She wants to see you and she wants us to be there and what she’s going to do is something you and she will decide. She’s planning, right now, I think, to stay. Don’t screw it up.”
Shepard took a big inhale and let it out through his nose. We went into the coffee shop. Susan and Pam Shepard were sitting opposite each other in a booth. I slid in beside Susan. Shepard stood and looked down at Pam Shepard. She looked up at him and said, “Hello, Harv.”
“Hello, Pam.”
“Sit down, Harv,” she said. He sat, beside her. “How have you been?” she said.
He nodded his head. He was looking at his hands, close together on the table before him.
“Kids okay?”
He nodded again. He put his right hand out and rested it on her back between the shoulder blades, the fingers spread. His eyes were watery and when he spoke his voice was very thick. “You coming back?”
She nodded. “For now,” she said and there was strain now in her voice too.
“Forever,” he said.
“For now, anyway,” she said.
His hand was moving in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. His face was wet now. “Whatever you want,” he said in his squeezed voice. “Whatever you want. I’ll get you anything you want, we can start over and I’ll be back up on top for you in a year. Anything. Anything you want.”
“It’s not up on top I want, Harvey.” I felt like a voyeur. “It’s, it’s different. They think we need psychiatric help.” She nodded toward me and Suze.
“What do they know about it or us, or anything?”
“I won’t stay if we don’t get help, Harvey. We’re not just unhappy. We’re sick. We need to be cured.”
“Who do we go to? I don’t even know any shrinks.”
“Susan will tell us,” Para said. “She knows about these things.”
“If that’s what will bring you back, that’s what I’ll do.” His voice was easing a little, but the tears were still running down his face. He kept rubbing her back in the little circles. “Whatever you want.”
I stood up. “You folks are going to make it. And while you are, I’m going to make a call.”
They paid me very little heed and I left feeling about as useful as a faucet on a clock. Back in the room I called Clancy in the Suffolk County D.A.’s office.
“Spenser,” I said when he came on. “Powers out of the calaboose yet?”
“Lemme check.”
I listened to the vague sounds that a telephone makes on hold for maybe three minutes. Then Clancy came back on. “Yep.”
“Dandy,” I said.
“You knew he would be,” Clancy said. “You know the score.”
“Yeah, thanks.” I hung up.
Back in the coffee shop Pam was saying, “It’s too heavy. It’s too heavy to carry the weight of being the center of everybody’s life.”
The waitress brought me another cup of coffee.
“Well, what are we supposed to do,” Harv said. “Not love you. I tell the kids, knock it off on the love. It’s too much for your mother? Is that what we do?”
Pam Shepard shook her head. “It’s just… no of course, I want to be loved, but it’s being the only thing you love, and the kids, being so central, feeling all that… I don’t know… responsibility, maybe, I want to scream and run.”
“Boy”—Harv shook his head—“I wish I had that problem, having somebody love me too much. I’d trade you in a goddamned second.”
“No you wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be taking off on you either. I don’t even know where you been. You know where I been.”
“And what you’ve been doing,” she said. “You goddamned fool.”
Harv looked at me. “You bastard, Spenser, you told her.”
“I had to,” I said.
“Well, I was doing it for you and the kids. I mean, what kind of man would I be if I let it all go down the freaking tube and you and the kids had shit? What kind of a man is that?”
“See,” Pam said. “See, it’s always me, always my responsibility. Everything you do is for me.”
“Bullshit. I do what a man’s supposed to do. There’s nothing peculiar about a man looking out for the family.
