“She needed to tell someone.”
“Dammit, Tina, she said it to me. Right after. To make me go along with her.”
“But never since,” Tina said. “Not once. Why is that, Charlie? You two have never gone near what happened. Not in nine months. If you had, I think this whole thing about her father would have come out. She lost him and can’t risk losing you.”
Schmidt felt discovered. Exposed. Without their talking about it, he had hoped time would wear away the meaning and risk of Kettle Falls. Wouldn’t time eventually bury it? If he were honest, Schmidt had known all along it wouldn’t.
“She talks to you, not to me,” he said finally. “What’s that mean, Dr. Freud?”
“I think it means what she has with you is too important to risk. I think you matter more to her than anyone since her father died. And you’re the same, in relation to your wife.”
Schmidt emptied his glass and got the wine. He poured into Tina’s glass, then his own. He put down the bottle. “Too important,” he said. “Then she tells me we’re through. What am I missing here?”
“Charlie, I hope you can see it. She didn’t want to be alone with you for two weeks. That’s too long to avoid facing all this. Whatever it is.”
The salads came, and they ate in silence. Brenda had known a lot of men and had told him some of it. He had known only four women before his marriage. That mattered. After two athletic connections in high school, and two more later, he had married at twenty-two. Schmidt had been faithful for the next thirty years, until Lillie died of lymphoma.
The speed of his wife’s cancer had been the only good thing: the diagnosis had come too late for chemo or radiation. That meant Lillie had not lost her pride before losing her life. For two years after, Schmidt was so lonely for her that saying anything to another woman was out of the question.
Then, on Route 2 in northern Minnesota, Brenda Contay. A flat tire, four women going fishing. Sudden attraction. Thirty-three to his fifty-four.
Schmidt again got the bottle. Tina shook her head, and he poured into his own glass. He drank and watched her eat. Because of the MS, it was not easy for her to manage her knife and fork. When she looked up from her plate, Schmidt remembered that the disease was now going after her arresting hazel eyes.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“That I want you to be all right,” he said.
“Some things can’t be fixed, and some can. I think what we’re talking about can be made right. But you have to take it on.”
They ate in silence. Tina was right: he avoided thinking of how Brenda had cut loose his boat and killed a man. When Schmidt insisted on taking the blame—he cut loose the boat, not her—Brenda had taunted him. You’ll go to jail, and Marion Ross will be there every visitor’s day— If he went to prison, she believed Marion would always see herself as responsible.
Brenda had hissed it at him, pushing his chest with both hands. Schmidt could feel it right now, the force of her hands shoving him, eyes like drills. Every Christmas, every Groundhog’s Day. My friend Marion will never be able to let it go because you had to be a Boy Scout. Schmidt had finally agreed. If they got away with it, at least there would be no trial. No lawyers. No ambitious junior prosecutor out in the sticks of northern Minnesota, looking to make a name. No sensational book.
And the truth had not come out. In the nine months since, Schmidt had become so grateful and changed, so full of reasons to live because of Brenda Contay that the whole sordid business of Kettle Falls made him feel more and more threatened.
“Charlie?” He looked up from his plate. “I think I have room for dessert,” Tina said. “Maybe a slice of that chocolate-raspberry cake, on the trolley behind you.”
Immokalee
8:15 p.m.
“In English, Ray. I keep asking you.”
Ramon Colon glanced away before drinking his Dos Equis. He lowered the bottle and shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “We don’t need him. We got a lot of people right here we can train. Our people. We don’t need some spaced-out hippie making problems.”
The two cousins were ending a long day back in Immokalee, at El Lucero. They were sitting in the cantina’s backyard at a picnic table, under loops of Christmas lights. Immokalee served as the inland home for the labor force that kept Naples looking good. It was the same below-minimum-wage labor that harvested tomatoes and other crops grown on land that wasn’t yet too valuable for agriculture, the same labor that built golf courses and high rises, and prepped new boats for men like Dale Burlson. James Rivera could now afford better, but life in Immokalee was low profile. Keeping out of trouble here was easy.
The woman who had passed earlier appeared again on the sidewalk. As she moved along Boston Avenue, she looked at him and smiled. Rivera returned the smile but looked away and drank from his Diet Coke. Keep away from alcohol, Kleinman often said. And keep it in your pants. Sex and booze are bad for the bottom line.
“Think about it,” his cousin said. “Stuckey is lazy and stupid. Look at what happen to Ivy, leaving him like that. He don’t listen. If he hear something, he don’t remember.”
“You don’t like him because he’s Anglo,” Rivera said.
“So what? You no Anglo, look at you. You got these people eating like a bird out of your hand. They love your ass, you own them.”
“Let me give you a hypothetical.” Rivera saw his cousin didn’t understand. “A typical situation. A new client calls, I make the appointment. I go to the door, the woman opens it. You’re not the person
