“You’re too young to know who Edgar Guest was.”
“My father,” she said. “One of his guilty pleasures was bad poetry.”
“He sounds like an interesting man.”
“He was.”
“I notice you’re not an ‘I go, she goes, I’m like, he’s like’ person,” Sweeney said. “That’s unusual for your age. Even for a journalist.”
“That’s my father again. By the time I was ten, he’d ruined me for slang. He mocked it so well, I couldn’t say ‘awesome’ or ‘cool’ without cringing. It’s still true.”
“He died when you were young?” Brenda nodded. “That may be why we have something to say to each other,” Sweeney said.
“Because you remind me of my father?”
Sweeney waved this away. “I don’t know anything about Freud,” he said. “I just know members of the gabby classes seek out each other. Your father must be the one who got you interested in words.”
It was true. Hand in his pocket, Sweeney drank. He looked like Florida now. Laid back, at ease. But he abruptly turned from the opening. He stepped between the coffee table and couch, set his drink on the coaster, and sat. “All right, you’re wondering,” he said. “It’s none of your business, but you’re a journalist, it’s what you do. Besides, how is suicide anyone’s ‘business?’ Go ahead, ask away.”
He knows you know, Brenda thought.
“Mrs. Krause’s villa,” he said. “Rayette Peticore lives next door. She must have rolled the welcome wagon over.” Brenda nodded. “She’s a decent person,” he said. “She and Terri played golf a few times. This isn’t a very friendly place, but like every other golf community, it runs on gossip.”
Feeling relieved, Brenda got her drink. Sweeney sat back in the couch. For a long moment he stared up. “High hats.” He pointed to the ceiling. “You need a special pole just to change the light bulbs.”
“Or All Hands on Deck,” she said, feeling relieved and also grateful for any topic that would lead them away from Sweeney’s loss. “While you were throwing out and sorting yesterday, I drove James’s cousin to Immokalee.” Brenda told him about the keys locked in Ray Colon’s van.
“I bet it surprised him,” Sweeney said. “A female Anglo stranger offering to drive him all the way out there.”
“I explained how his cousin picked us up. James also asked a friend to show me around Naples. A realtor. She said he sends her a lot—”
“I know why Terri killed herself, but I won’t tell you.”
Sweeney was staring into his drink, rolling the glass between his palms. Brenda felt herself blush. You coward, she thought. A man starts talking about his wife’s suicide, and you change the subject.
“But I will tell you this.” Sweeney looked up. “It wasn’t because of me.” He looked back down at his drink. “There’s no reason to justify myself to you, is there?”
“None, Patrick. I’m sorry, we don’t—”
“I suppose it’s because I haven’t flown lately. I forgot how I come on to seatmates. Especially women. I do my lobbyist’s snappy-patter routine to pass the time. I think you know it means nothing.”
“Yes, I know.”
He put his glass down and looked straight at her. “I was unfaithful to my wife twice,” he said. “The first time a year after we married. A woman I knew in college, a lobbyist for some citizen’s awareness group. I just felt like doing it. I’m married but I’m not shackled, that kind of thing. Two years later, Terri and I separated for six months. To see if we made a mistake. Well, if you’re seeing if you made a mistake, that’s what you do. You ‘date’ someone else. Terri did, too. They were people we knew from work, but that ended the consumer testing. By then, we knew the real mistake would be to split up.”
He got his drink and took a sip. “After that, it was everybody’s ups and downs, but it was good,” he said. “We couldn’t conceive, so we adopted. It was good between us, I know that’s true. But sometimes ‘good’ isn’t enough.” Again, cupping his glass, Sweeney stared at the coffee table. “In the next twenty-eight years I never cheated. I had lots of opportunities, but I was happy. As far as I know, so was Terri.”
What could she say? To this good guy, this keeper, back for the first time to a house he had shared with someone who left him that way?
“There was love, then,” Brenda said. “That’s something to be grateful for.”
“Lots of it, and I am grateful,” Sweeney said. “There were times we were going through the motions, but that’s marriage. When you live together all your adult life, you have to understand that. But our marriage was not loveless, it was no deception.”
She was crying now, angry with herself but unable to stop. Sweeney reached out with his handkerchief. She took it and pressed her eyes, feeling ridiculous. She was exploiting someone else’s misery to feel sorry for herself, like a character in a Turner Classic Movie, where the man hands the crying woman his handkerchief.
But at least be honest, Brenda thought. “I’m not crying because of you,” she said, and blotted again. She sat back. “Last year I killed someone.”
Sweeney put his drink on the table. He leaned back and folded his arms. “Is that why you broke up with your guy?” he asked. “The one you told me about?”
“Yes, but not really. He wanted to take the blame. He was going to tell the local sheriff he did it, but I wouldn’t let him. I shamed him, I blackmailed him—”
As he had on the plane, Sweeney waited. A witness, a good listener.
“I said if we didn’t cover it up, everyone else would go through hell. I convinced him he was being a Boy Scout. I told him he had an obligation to the rest of us.”
“Was that true?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“No, it
